Take Advantage of Social Media for Your Small Business

Social media is a powerful platform for today’s small businesses looking to connect with their audience, customers, clients, and prospects.

Simply put, social media is online communication that allows you to interact with your customers and share information in real time. This can help you reach your customers, create online networks, and sell/promote your products and services. Social media can help your business do the following:

–Attract customers, obtain customer feedback, and build customer loyalty

–Exchange ideas to improve the way you do business

–Recruit skilled staff via job networking sites

–Increase traffic to your website and improve its search engine ranking

–Increase your market reach, including international markets

–Conduct market research and reduce marketing costs

–Increase revenue by building customer networks and advertising

–Develop your brand

–Keep a watchful eye on your competitors

–Improve customer loyalty and employee engagement

And because social media is a free tool, business owners should take full advantage of social media platforms. Here’s how:

Be selective: There are numerous social media platforms—including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube and Pinterest—with more evolving each year.

Keep in mind that you do not need to be active on every single one. Instead, consider quality over quantity. Choose the social media sites that are best for your particular business and your needs. Pick the ones that are most relevant for your customers/audience and focus your efforts on these.

For example, many small businesses choose Facebook because it is popular and commonly used by adults. In addition, its social media ads and reviews are frequently used by today’s businesses. Twitter is also popular due to its easy-to-use platform and simple set up.

Develop a strategy: Create a social media strategy and write it down in order to hold your business accountable. This strategy should include a basic company mission statement, content plan, and specific goals. In addition, develop a powerful statement on why people would follow you on social media, what kind of content you plan on creating and posting, and what you hope to achieve.

Post, post and post: To engage your followers, always post fresh, new content. The key is to keep your followers coming back again and again. Content should include information about your business, trends in the field, community stories, blog posts about your business and audience, advice and tips, and interesting photos about products and events. Always be authentic with the content you post. This will increase your audience’s support and loyalty.

Read more here to learn other creative ways to use social media for your small business.

It is also important to promote your posts to ensure your audience actually sees your social content. Ads, or promoted posts, are a good way to do this. Paying a small amount of money to give your content a boost is a good investment and can guarantee followers will see your content in their feeds.

Build a detailed social media calendar: This calendar will help you organize your content to ensure you are posting the best possible information, as well as posting at appropriate times.

For example, if you are planning to offer a Valentine’s Day promotion, be sure to organize your content during the month leading up to the holiday. Adhering to this social media calendar will help keep your marketing efforts in line with a February 14^th posting date.

Impress potential customers: People often rely on social media and online review sites to get a good grasp of who a company is and how they operate. Keeping in line with maintaining your brand’s respected reputation is a great opportunity to impress potential customers with how you’ve handled other, typically unrelated customer interactions.

Just like marketers, consumers are using social media as a tool to help them make better purchases and decisions in general.

On average, people take into account 10 reviews of a local business before making a purchasing decision. This gives potential customers the chance to see that businesses truly care about their customers – even after they’ve made the sale that is important to them and their business’s success.

Act like a researcher: You should always have your eyes on your competitors—and this includes their social media efforts. Find inspiration in the success of others and gather useful tips from the social networks of other small businesses. Exploring and researching other company’s social media strategies allows you to learn from others and improve your own marketing tactics.

Be active and engaged: An important part of social media is engagement. Listen to customers and interact with them via conversations and comments on posts. Publish the content of others, reply to questions and comments, say thank you for positive comments and address negative feedback.

Use this conversation to gauge what type of content customers want and do not want. This will help you customize your social media postings in the future and achieve success. There is no question that social media can be an extremely useful tool when it comes to marketing one’s business. And because building a strong social media platform doesn’t require a great deal of time or money, it’s a clear win-win for any business.  

Many small business owners also started their businesses with no concrete plan on how to utilize social media for their business needs. But understanding and carefully strategizing the platform over the years has helped their business increase advertising efforts for free and be on the radar. You and your business can stand a chance for sure! Whenever you’re ready to start your business, your friends at Nevada Corporate Headquarters will help you form your Nevada LLC.