Getting your business in front of potential clients is at the top of every business owner’s list, and that means a solid marketing plan. Unless you want to miss millions of potential clients, having a solid social media presence should be at the very top of that plan.
But what if you don’t have a social media presence yet or don’t understand where to direct your efforts online? Keep reading for our top nine tips to step up your social game and some trending small business ideas.
1. Know Your Audience
This is one of the biggest mistakes many businesses make when promoting on social media – they simply put content out without targeting an audience.
While you don’t want to limit potential markets, social media gives you the ability to target specific locations and demographics like age and gender. If you have multiple products or services, you can use these factors to spend your marketing budget gearing ads specifically toward the people most likely to use them.
Further, once you know who your targeted audience is, use trial and error to discover what that audience actually wants to see and post more of that. Small businesses like David Alan Jewelry utilize social media to drive traffic to their site, which you should be doing too.
2. Pick Your Platforms
Instead of scattering your efforts across all the different platforms, choose several to focus on. Look into social media statistics across platforms and find the top three your targeted demographic prefers.
While you might reach a more varied audience trying to get on every platform, your overall campaigns will be weaker than if you put focused effort into just a few. This is a quality over quantity situation – less is more in this situation.
3. Create a Goal
Don’t just post haphazardly. Decide why you’re on social media and what the desired outcome is. Look at Maid Marines for example (a home cleaning company in NYC), they’re specifically focused on driving qualified traffic to their website that is ready to book cleaning sessions.
By choosing goals, you can make sure you stay on point and create content that funnels potential clients toward that desired outcome.
Common goals would be:
- Getting potential clients to go to your main website
- Targeting specific products
- Receiving more inquiries and messages
- Getting more people on an email list
4. Understand and Utilize SEO
Search engine optimization, or SEO, means creating content made to come up first in search engine results. If you clean carpets and someone in your city types “carpet cleaner” into a search engine, you want your business to come up first, right?
Utilizing proper SEO on your website and social media profiles means your business stands a better chance of being recommended to potential clients specifically looking for your service.
5. Post Regularly
Many businesses post too infrequently to be effective. If your social media posts consist of random sales and obligatory holiday posts, you’re doing it wrong.
While you need to make sure you’re only posting quality content and not just whatever happens to cross your mind, you need to also make sure you’re posting regularly.
Posting infrequently means clients will forget about you. Daily posting keeps you relevant and at the forefront of peoples’ minds when a need arises for them you can fill.
6. Plan Your Posts
Most business owners start a social media presence for their business simply by creating a profile and then posting whatever happens to come to mind. But this isn’t your personal account, where random photos and videos that catch your fancy are acceptable.
Your business presence should be uniform across all platforms and fall in line with your regular branding. Fonts, colors, and messages should be uniform. Your posts should be planned out a week to a month in advance to coordinate with deals, discounts, and ad campaigns.
Use a social planning app to plan posts ahead of time and keep your branding and message uniform and on point.
7. Respond and Interact With Your Clients
Don’t just post content and walk away. Social media gives you the unique ability to engage in real time with potential new clients. While an ad in a magazine might catch someone’s interest, you would never know and they may or may not decide to act. An ad on social media, however, allows you to take the captured interest and respond with something that might push them into that next step.
If you don’t have time yourself to respond to every comment and message, consider hiring a social media manager who can take care of your online social media presence for you. Social media engagement gives you the chance to give your business the voice of a “real person” to a client.
8. Utilize Analytics
Almost all social media platforms offer some form of audience tracking, from simple likes on posts to more sophisticated analytics. You can track individual posts, weekly and monthly statistics, and engagement rates. You’ll be able to see the demographic breakdowns and when your audience is online.
Use these analytics to get the most out of your posts.
- Post content when your audience is likely to be online
- Look into which posts do well and which don’t to create better content
- Use demographic stats to better target your paid ads
9. Stay on Top of New Trends
Don’t just learn a few things and call it good. Social media platforms each use their own algorithms to prioritize content. They also continue to evolve and put out new updates and changes to those algorithms.
Don’t assume you know it all and continue to simply use the same strategies over and over. Make time to research and learn as platforms evolve so that your business can evolve with them and stay on top of the latest social media trends.
Time to Take Your Social Media Presence to the Next Level!
Now that you know what you need to do to take your social media presence from basic to booming, it’s time to go boost those engagement rates and plan some killer content!
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