Social Media has given business owners and entrepreneurs the opportunity to connect with their customers, develop a brand, and grow their business. As the owner of a local business, you already know that building your social community is a must if you want to be successful in your local market.
Cultivating relationships with your customers and fans can provide you with two big benefits:
- A customer base that seeks out your products or services
- Access to advocates within your community that are willing to help you reach new customers
To get those benefits, you need to dedicate time and resources to social media marketing. You’ll spend time developing content for your social accounts and making sure that posts are timely, engaging and reflect your brand’s voice
To develop a successful social media strategy for your business, you’ll need to understand what social media really is, as well as how it works. Here are a few important social media tips for your local business to help you get started.
Set Clear Objectives
Before you start using social media as part of your business strategy, it is important to first ask yourself why you want to be active on social media. Your goal could be to engage with your existing customers, increase your audience, provide customer service, generate some new leads, or boost sales.
You could also consider it as a means to boost traffic to your site or gain useful insights and helpful criticism. Regardless of the reasons, you must ensure that you set clear goals in order to develop a strategy around those goals.
For instance, the strategy you’ll adopt for increasing your audience will differ from the one you will adopt for improving customer service.
Select The Appropriate Platforms
It is a common misconception that social media is free. The number of people you reach depends on which platform you select.
Here are some things to consider before setting up social media accounts for your business:
- What is your current reach?
- How many followers do you have?
This tells you how many people will see your content on the platform. Which platforms are your target audience using? Where are they spending their time?
Make an effort to conduct research to find out where your target audience is and the kind of content they are consuming. For example, local businesses can appeal to potential customers by featuring local events and businesses, or speaking about the community that they live in
- What content will you share?
- Will it be the same across all platforms or do you have unique content for each platform?
The number of people who engage with your content depends on a number of factors, including your current reach, the type of content and the nitty-gritties of each social network. As you may already know, not all social media platforms are created equal.
Craft A Sound Strategy
Once you have a clear picture of what you want to achieve and the channels through which you intend to use, you can create a strategy to help you accomplish your goals. Start by identifying the right individuals to work in your social media team and defining each person’s roles and responsibilities. This will help to ensure every person in the team knows what is expected of them.
It is also important to determine the number of times you will be posting on each platform that you choose to utilize. Lastly, create a content calendar to help you ensure that you post frequently and consistently.
Besides these activities, here are a few simple tips that can help you to create a successful social media strategy.
1. You must experiment
The one common trend that we see in social media marketing success stories is experimentation. You have to try different things and see what works best for your business. The more you experiment, the better you’ll get at using social media to grow your business.
If you want recommendations on what to do with your social media marketing, look no further than your competitors. Take a page from their playbook and try it out for yourself. You’ll either see a significant spike in sales or a total flop that leads you down the path of enlightenment.
Find out what works for them, try it out for yourself – then tweak as needed.
2. Never skip posting
When posting on social media, always try to do it regularly. If you keep missing posts, people will soon forget about your brand and the excitement over your products will disappear. Posting consistently is the most important thing you can do for your social media, but more isn’t always better. Prostrategix, a digital marketing agency in NYC says it can be tempting to post every minor update, every new product or service, or even every sale or promotion you run. That makes sense if you’re a retailer and you want to boost sales through posts.
However, if you’re a B2B company your audience is most interested in hearing from you when they have a need for your products or services and most interested in seeing general updates when they’re not actively looking for information. If you post too frequently, without providing value, they’re going to tune out your posts rather than tune in.
3. Mentions are important
With Instagram moving toward a more chronological timeline, and the growing popularity of Stories, there’s no better time to get creative with your content.
Mentions are still very important, but don’t be afraid to get creative by mixing up your messages between text-based posts and image posts or videos and other media types.If you are looking for ways to get noticed on social media in a more effective manner, today’s tip is all about creativity.
According to the Sprout Social report “2018 Social Media Marketing Trends” content is the most important marketing campaign when it comes to social media. In fact, 67 percent of marketers surveyed said the number of posts they produce would grow in 2018. And what do they expect from these posts? “More engaging content” was top priority.
[See related post: How To Increase Social Media Mentions Of Your Business?]
Final words
Regardless of the size of your business, social media tools can help you to better interact with your audiences, reach new prospective clients, and build brand awareness. In case the potential of social media seems too overwhelming, it’s best to start small and scale up gradually as you learn the ropes.
[Main Photo by ELEVATE from Pexels; Unsplash, Photo by Photo Boards]
Dennis is a freelance writer since 2015, specializing in tech and lifestyle topics. Dan has written for Business.com,WePromote,Allthingschritsmas, and many others. Dan has a background in PR/marketing and writing so his writing touches upon those areas from time to time