Important Tips on Running Social Media for Small Businesses

A typical checklist when starting online marketing efforts has three main branches:

  • Website creation – includes doing a domain name search, purchasing the chosen domain, web design, and on-page optimisation
  • Content creation – includes videos, blog articles, and continuous copy update
  • Social media page creation – includes opening accounts for the most popular social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram)

For this article, we will focus on the third online marketing strategy. It is not surprising to observe that some businesses cannot get social media marketing right. There is a tendency to think that how we use our personal social media accounts is the same as managing a business account, but that is obviously not the case.

Social Media Marketing involves encouraging engagement, studying analytics to know which kind of post gets more engagement, and to lead your social media followers through the conversion funnel. Here, we will show you how to maximise social media so you can run successful promotions and engage more people in your posts.

Audit your social media pages

Before doing anything else, you must first create a social media marketing plan. This should include your objectives and goals for a specific timeframe, and the various efforts that will allow you to achieve those goals. For this, it would be wise to use the popular S.M.A.R.T framework (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely).

When auditing your social media page, go beyond likes and shares; instead look into conversion rates and leads. While a strong engagement on your profile is important, it is equally important to know if the number of active engagement is proportional to the amount of conversion you are getting. Additionally, check which social media page is more popular to your audience and is delivering more value to you, then focus your efforts there.

Adapt the appropriate voice for your posts

There are two ways to attack this: determine the traits of your audience and determine the traits of your social media pages. What does this mean? People behave differently online; furthermore, we behave differently depending on the social media network we are using.

Once you have pinpointed which social media page is valuable to you, observe how the language your audience uses and the kinds of posts that get more engagement. Usually, for pages like Facebook, the audience is more open to fun posts like memes or one-line jokes. Which means that for your social media calendar, you can have more of a variety in posts in between promotions and other business related articles.

However, for pages like LinkedIn, which has a more professional air to it, you will have to refrain from posting too many fun posts. Instead, focus more on industry related posts.

Do not hesitate to pay for sponsored ads

The only reason people say sponsored ads may be expensive is if you choose to run it for a very long time. The strategy behind sponsored ads is simple: the length of time you run it should depend on the kind of post you want to promote. And this will further depend on your objective for the post.

For instance, if you are running a promotion on your page (like a 10% discount for the whole month), definitely run the whole promotion for the whole month. The great thing about Facebook is it allows you to set how much your budget should be and for how long. It will also send you a notification if you want to extend the time or customise the demographic it is targeting. However, if you are harvesting likes, you can just sponsor your best post that will run for 3 days to a week.