Social media marketing is no longer an optional channel for businesses. It’s an essential part of a well-rounded digital marketing strategy and growth plan.
However, with so many different platforms, ad types, techniques, and post formats, it can seem like an overwhelming endeavor.
Thankfully, there are many tips you can use to help direct your social media marketing approach and create a strategy that works for your business needs.
This blog will help you learn the best social media marketing tips for small business owners and marketing teams who are looking for some direction on their strategies.
Why Does Social Media Marketing Matter?
Social media marketing is an incredibly effective strategy for small businesses.
Social media allows you to focus on local and individual customers, creating direct messages and communication with the people most important to the success of your business.
Social media channels and platforms are a powerful tool for connecting and communicating with audiences, gathering new leads, and building your brand awareness while increasing brand loyalty.
Without a strong social media strategy, it will be hard for your small business to become a recognized name in your area or industry.
By taking time with your social media approach and investing in your social strategy, you can achieve important small business benefits.
15 Social Media Marketing Tips for Small Business Teams
Let’s take a look at some of the best social media marketing tips for small business marketing teams and owners looking to get ahead in the social media game.
1. Identify Your Social Audience
The first step to social media success is to take the time to identify who your audiences are.
This ties into understanding who your customers are and who your ideal buyers are.
When you know who you are targeting, you can focus your posts and messaging to a specific audience of ideal customers.
By identifying your social audience, you can tailor your social approach to the people who matter most.
2. Interact with Your Audience on Social
Having a successful social media strategy relies on more than just posting an article or video.
In order to build your audience and create trust with your followers, you need to interact with them on social media.
Liking posts from your followers, responding to comments, directly messaging them with deals and offers, or following people back are all ways you can engage and interact with your social media audience.
3. Build Relationships with Followers
Social media marketing allows your small business to speak directly to your customers and consumers.
Other types of marketing often depend on people coming across your messages, while social media lets you interact with followers one on one.
By building relationships over time, you can slowly build someone up for a sale rather than trying to force them to buy right away. It also helps you develop a loyal community of followers.
4. Pick the Right Channels to Target
Not every social media channel is the right one for your small business.
There are many different types of social platforms, from traditional standards like Facebook and Twitter to newer platforms for younger audiences like Snapchat and TikTok.
Knowing your audience and what platforms they spend time on will help you narrow down and find the best channels to target in your social media marketing strategy.
5. Search for New Sales and Marketing Opportunities
Social media is more than just a social platform.
Social selling allows you to connect your eCommerce store to your social media and lets followers and audiences purchase from your small business without ever needing to leave the platform.
And new ads and promoted post opportunities give you new marketing channels as well. Make sure you explore these options and see if they will work for your business goals.
6. Create a Social Content Calendar
One of the reasons that social media can seem overwhelming to small businesses is that coming up with posts each day for multiple platforms can take a lot of time and strain your creativity.
Having a social content calendar allows you to plan your social media strategy in advance, rather than trying to come up with ideas at the spur of the moment.
You can also schedule posts and let them automatically go live rather than manually trying to manage every aspect of your social media approach.
7. Use the Right Tools
There are many different supporting tools that you can use for your social efforts.
Many tools can help you gather metrics, monitor posts, plan and schedule posts, create videos and images, track your audiences, and create conversions.
With so many features out there, it’s important that you focus on what will work best for your business and pick the right tool to help you achieve those goals.
8. Find the Best Hashtags for Your Posts
Hashtags are an important part of social media.
These tags allow you to categorize and label your content and connect it to other, similar posts for a better user experience.
A hashtag strategy is an important aspect of your social media plan, so you need to take time to research the best hashtags for your industry, niche, and local area.
This will help you connect with the right audiences and support your posts.
9. Cross-Post Between Platforms
Another great social media marketing tip for small business teams is to cross-post between different social media platforms.
This will allow you to get the same message and post in front of multiple audiences on your different platforms.
It can also save you a lot of time and effort by giving you the chance to use the same post multiple times rather than getting a fresh idea for every platform.
10. Create Great Social Designs
Social media is a very visual medium.
While you can just post text, the best social media posts will have some sort of visual design element in them, often in the form of an accompanying image or video.
You want your social designs to stand out, so take time in creating the best images and graphics for your business.
You can use free platforms like Canva to help you if you don’t have an in-house designer.
11. Track and Improve Your Performance
Social media is just like every other aspect of digital marketing, and data collection and analysis is essential to moving in the right direction.
Tracking your performance will allow you to see what types of posts are working best and engaging your audience.
This gives you the chance to find room for improvement and avoid what isn’t working for your brand.
12. Join in on Trends
Social media is often overtaken by different trends.
Different challenges, memes, and jokes will become popular and trend on social platforms, so you want to be able to join in and become part of the movement.
Monitor trends and be ready to act dynamically when something comes up, even if it isn’t in your social calendar. This allows you to remain relevant and delight your audiences.
13. Explore Different Formats
If you post the same type of post on your social channels every day, it can quickly become boring or uninteresting to your audiences.
You should change up your post formats so that you are offering your followers different things each time they log on.
You can try videos over text posts, ask open-ended questions, create polls, or share infographics and GIFs to engage your audiences.
This will also help your team be more creative in their social media marketing approach.
14. Work on Quality over Quantity
While you want to be consistent in your social media marketing, you shouldn’t be more focused on getting out a certain number of posts than on the quality of your social posts.
Focus on making posts that are valuable to audiences, help you achieve your business goals, and establish your brand instead of getting out a bland or useless post just to make sure you meet your established quota.
15. Optimize Your Profiles
Your social media profile is an important aspect of your page.
You want to make sure that your followers can quickly get a snapshot of who you are, where you are, what you do, and why they should follow you.
You’ll want to include links to your eCommerce store or website and give contact information so new followers can find you.
Wrap Up
Social media marketing is an important part of your small business’s digital marketing strategy.
Without social media, it can be hard to connect directly to your audience or build awareness in your brand name.
Thankfully, with just a few social media marketing tips for small business teams, you can jumpstart your strategy and put together a social media plan that works for your needs.
Social media is just one part of a bigger digital strategy. In order to find real digital success, you need to be able to combine your social media efforts with other parts of your overall strategy and create a cohesive plan.
To learn more about your options, check out our free digital marketing kit!
There you’ll be able to examine areas of your current plan and find room for growth and opportunities for success.
