You’ve registered social media pages for your small business. “Now what?” you ask yourself, staring blankly at your computer screen. There’s little to no content on your pages, and there are countless awkward teenagers out there with exponentially more Instagram followers than all of your business’ social media profiles combined. Yikes!
Sure, things look bleak at first, and getting started can seem overwhelming. It’s not as bad as it seems, however. There are a number of social media best practices that can be implemented that will yield results in relatively short order, and we’re here today on #TechTuesdays to guide you along toward establishing a dedicated following for your small business.
Here are our five best practices for social media:
Quality Over Quantity
Don’t fall for these available “get followers fast” schemes you may see online where you pay an anonymous individual (from who-knows-what-country) a small fee to boost your social media follower counts. Invariably, these are schemes that inflate your numbers almost exclusively with fake accounts, duplicate personas, and “bots.” This isn’t the way to proceed and can never be considered among the best practices for social media.
Instead, focus on incrementally building a quality following of real people that are within your target demographic, possess purchasing power, and may actually be interested in interacting with your page and eventually buying your products or services. Resist cutting corners!
Target Locally
A big part of building a quality audience is targeting locally. It does you no good to attempt to reach people that are unlikely to utilize your services. Instead, reach out to customers within your immediate area, such as friends and friends of friends, that are most likely to invest in your products and services. Locals may also favor your business due to a sense of kinship forged from living in close proximity.
Facebook, Twitter, and other services allow you to focus on how broad your reach is. For example, Facebook allows you to create ads that only target people of a certain age, living in a certain zip code, and that only list certain interests on their profile that you specify. It’s easy to greatly narrow your targeting to reach those most suited to your offerings. Additionally, social media services always present local business options ahead of national options, giving you a way to avoid competition with large entities.
Engage Your Audience
Make an “ask” to your established audience whenever possible. This “ask” will encourage the user and potential customer to interact with your content as opposed to simply passively viewing it and moving on. This may be anything from posting a funny image/meme, to providing an interesting piece of news, to simply asking a question such as “What’s the first thing you’re looking forward to upon getting off work on Friday?” Every like, comment, and share reaches the friends of your friends, effectively targeting new potential clients at absolutely no cost to your business.
Plan in Advance
What’s the best way to ensure you appropriately engage your audience? Plan in advance! Trying to come up with new sharable content that will inspire active responses from your audience can be difficult to do on the fly. Instead, utilize social media tools such as Hootsuite to schedule Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn posts in advance (Facebook specifically even allows scheduling natively). Planning in advance in this fashion ensures you remain consistent.
Capitalize on Social Media Trends
Being able to efficiently target and interact with your audience requires you to understand the kind of content they post themselves. Keeping up with and capitalizing upon social media trends will demonstrate to your audience that you’re no phony. After all, if your prospective customers find that you lack authentic knowledge of current online culture, they’ll begin to question what else about you — and your products/services — may be inauthentic and/or “lacking.”
#MotivationalMondays, #TransformationTuesdays, #WomanCrushWednesdays, #ThrowbackThursdays, and more are all popular social media trends. When possible, apply these trends to your business’s offerings when you post. For example, #WomanCrushWednesdays could be a photo and bio of a strong female leader inside your industry.
Demonstrate a knowledge of current events when it’s relevant to your product or service.
Finally, be visual. Use images whenever possible. Preferably, you should aim to brand all your images with a business template so that you grow brand awareness whenever your image content is shared on social media.
Conclusion
If you follow these five best practices for social media, you’ll start to gain social media traction in no time, and new followers and customers will come organically.
Another way to continue to gain traction is through the correct use of tone during customer service interactions and the generation of positive customer reviews. We’ll take a look at these factors later this month here at #TechTuesdays. Until next week!
