Social media has taken over the business world in such a way that you can easily tell the businesses that are serious about it from the ones that are not.
Simply, if they have a social media profile, they want to be competitive in today’s market. If they don’t, they are not interested in building up their brand and their business.
But making it on social media can be time-consuming and exhausting. Time happens to be one of the many things that small business owners do not have a lot of. Therefore, they need to find streamlined, efficient ways to utilize social media channels for their business’s benefits.
To that end, we’ll look at five of the best ways to boost your social media presence so that you can get qualified, loyal customers.
Set Social Media Goals
The most important thing you need to do as a small business owner is set up the goals that you want to achieve with your social media profiles.
What do you hope to achieve there, primarily: to build up awareness or to drive customers to your website? The end goal should always be more customers and more money, and you can achieve that with both building up your brand and creating compelling content that drives customers to your site.
If you do not set goals, you’ll just end up spinning your wheels. It happens a lot that small businesses burn out too quickly because they do not have strategic steps to achieve their goals, which they didn’t set.
Be Honest and Personable
Social media is not a channel for traditional marketing—and by this we mean that you shouldn’t go on there with the same type of message that you would on a billboard. People on social media want to meet with other people, not companies and marketing departments.
One way to achieve that is to be direct, clear and personable in your communications and your posts. You can get as personal as you’d like, although it’s best to remain professional.
Either way, you should be able to put forth a real, human brand (starting by using a picture not logo as your profile). This will draw more customers to you and help increase your social media presence.
Be Consistent
Although there are many ways for small businesses to succeed at social media, consistency is key. Your social followers want to be certain that you and your brand are stable, and it is important therefore to have an editorial calendar to be consistent in your posting schedule. It is also important that you be consistent in your message and branding. If you have struck a humorous tone, follow that throughout. Similarly, if you are always professionally polite, do not veer off into sharp political commentary.
Get a Social Media Manager
At the point when social media becomes too much to handle (sometimes taking up to 21 hours for just 2 social media platforms), you might want to consider appointing a Social Media Manager (SMM).
Your SMM should be able to take over with your social media goals and drastically improve your presence. SMMs are great at finding new avenues and types of content that will provide great benefits to your brand.
The SMM will also be able to provide a succinct analysis of analytics related to social media and find ways to improve different aspects. Most importantly, it means that you’ll be able to focus on the other parts of your business.
Automate
If you do not have the resources to appoint an SMM, there are still many online resources and apps available to help you manage your social media presence.
These apps and services will be able to post chosen content to your platforms, track all comments and social mentions, and then analyze and measure your performance. They can send out tweets automatically and even post simultaneously to different platforms.
Two of the most popular are Buffer and Hootsuite, although there is a wide variety available.
With these tried-and-true social media tips, you should be able to drastically increase your social media presence.
Uwe Dreissigacker is CEO of InvoiceBerry, an online invoicing software for small businesses and freelancers. He’s been running online businesses since his teenage years and is passionate about technology, startups, small business, marketing and traveling. He also writes about these topics for the InvoiceBerry blog.
