A Guide To Social Media For A Small Business

Are you a small business and unsure or overwhelmed at the thoughts of how to use social media to the benefit of your business? Well look no further than this guide with some essential tips to get your social media up and running.

Most businesses are now aware of the power and importance of social media for the success of their business. In the last 5 years, the number of social media users has doubled to roughly 4.2 billion active users. What’s more, is users are spending on average 2 and a half hours every single day on social media between all the various platforms.

That is why social media is becoming increasingly important for all businesses, and now an expectation from the customer. If used correctly, social media poses an immense opportunity to build the awareness of your brand, develop the relationships with your customer and at times even allow you make direct sales.

I think by now we are all aware of the importance of social media, so let’s move on with our guide to help your business maximise your opportunities with social media.

BEGIN WITH A PLAN

Our first tip is to always begin with a plan. Creating your social media business pages are free and majority of us are familiar with how to use them as a result of using in our day-to-day lives, but resist leaping straight in without having a plan in place. This will ensure your efforts are measurable and help support specific business goals. Below is what your social media plan should include:

• Set SMART goals and objectives (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely).
• Research the competition – it’s important not to copy your competition, but learn from what they are doing. A competitive analysis can help you discover what they are doing well and also what you could do better.
• Perform a social media audit – this is for those that are already using social media for their business. Take a step back and examine your current efforts.
• Get inspiration – Get inspired by the success of other businesses across all industries on social media and see what they are doing well to try and incorporate into your social media plan.
• Create a social media calendar – Organisation is key for all areas of business, but definitely with social media in order to post the right content at the right time on the right platform. One tip with content is to use the 80-20 rule. 80% of your social media content should be to educate, inform or entertain your followers, while the remaining 20% should be used to sell your product / service and promote your brand.

SELECT THE RIGHT SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS TO SUIT YOUR BUSINESS

Our next tip we would recommend is to decide on what platforms are right for your specific business. This will require you to do some research on your target audience to understand where they spend their time online. It’s important not to make any assumptions on this and remember you can use different platforms to target different audiences.

We may presume that Gen Z don’t use Facebook, so we can skip this if they are our target audience, however nearly a quarter of facebook users are between the ages of 18 to 24, which may surprise some people. Carrying out your research is vital.

UNDERSTAND YOUR AUDIENCE

Our next tip on this guide is about your target audience and understanding them. A good place to start is by examining data on your current customers. Social media analytics can help you delve deeper to understand more about your audience who are buying from you and also interacting with you across your platforms. Insights can help you discover the top hashtags, referral sites and many other relevant information specific to your business.

EXPAND YOUR AUDIENCE

Now that you understand your audience better, you can focus on targeting and reaching more people just like them on your social media platforms to help expand your audience. You can tailor your content to suit this target audience and engage with the right people in the right platforms.

BUILD RELATIONSHIPS

Our next tip on this guide is to build relationships with your audience. Social media allows you talk directly to your customers and followers, which means you can build and develop relationships over time. A lot of people research companies on social media to discover who your company is as a brand and what you stand for, so having the right content and engagement can help you build relationships and in turn sales. We definitely recommend engaging back with any interaction on your social media in order to build trust and loyalty and help you rise in the social algorithms. This includes responding to any messages, comments, shares, tags etc. This will all help nurture relationships and hopefully lead to ongoing sales over time.

Beyond all this there are a couple of strategies you can also use to help build relationships. These strategies include:

• Creating a facebook group
• Connecting with influencers in your niche
• Mention followers in your posts / stories
• Sharing follower’s content

PAY ATTENTION TO TRENDS

We would always recommend following all the latest trends across social media. You don’t need to act on all the latest memes or dances, but definitely there are some trends that will be relevant to your business and being aware of these can help you create appropriate content that resonates with your followers. Also, audiences are constantly evolving, so what worked last year might not necessarily work today. Keeping up with what’s relevant to them is essential. At the moment, the top 5 reasons people use social media are:

• To keep up with what’s in the news and latest events
• To view entertaining content
• To occupy themselves during spare time
• To communicate with friends
• To share their photos and videos with their own friends and followers

SELL USING SOCIAL COMMERCE

Our next tip for small business is to include social commerce in their sales channel. This is the ability to sell your product or service directly from your social media platforms. Even companies that don’t have websites can use social shopping tools to help sell their product or service.

USE A VARIETY OF FORMATS

Sticking to the one format for posts can become boring to your audience. We would always recommend switching it up and using video as well still images as well as using regular posts, stories, reels and even live video. This will help keep your material fresh with your audience and help keep them engaged.

QUALITY OVER QUANTITY

Another tip which is important to remember is that it’s more important to create quality content than having quantity. You don’t need to do it all, every single day. Your posts should offer value to your audience, so remember not to be too salesy all the time. It’s all about building the relationship which will then lead to sales, so make sure you remember to have quality, honest content.

USE THE CORRECT TOOLS

There are many tools available to help you automate or simplify your social media workload and boost your productivity. There are tools that can help you engage with your audience, analyse your performance, create eye catching visuals and schedule your posts. We would recommend using as many of these tools as possible to help make your life easier.

TRACK AND REFINE YOUR PERFORMANCE

Our final tip for you on our guide to social media for small business’ is to ensure you are keeping track of the content that works for you and doesn’t work. This allows you to fine-tune your content to help improve your performance and in turn improve your results and boost your success.

These are just some of our recommendations, but we hope this guide has given you a better understanding and some tips to optimise the use of social media for your business. Remember, no matter the size of your business, social media, if used correctly, can help connect you better with your audience, target new customers and help increase brand awareness all resulting in an increase of sales.