👉 10 Tips for Social Media Marketing for Small Business Owners

            If you’re like most small business owners, you want to get started with social media marketing ASAP, but you don’t know where to start and if it will work for your business. Don’t worry – we’ve got you covered! Here are 10 social media marketing tips that will help you be successful with social media marketing, so you can reap the benefits of growing your brand and increasing sales.

1) Outline your goals

Social Media Marketing for Small Business Owners

            So you’ve got a Facebook page and an Instagram profile, but do you know what you want to get out of them? Are your social media platforms just somewhere to dump photos, or are they being used as effective marketing tools? Take some time to outline your social media goals. If you don’t know where you want to go, how will you find your way there? Does increasing web traffic or boosting search rankings top your list? Or do you want followers so that people can become fans of your brand? By knowing exactly what it is that you want from social media marketing, small business owners can set goals and make them happen.

2) Define your target audience

            The first thing to consider when planning your social media marketing strategy is your target audience. After all, you want to make sure you’re reaching and engaging with people who will actually be interested in your products or services. Determine whether you want to focus on B2B (business-to-business) or B2C (business-to-consumer) customers, depending on what your company does. After that, start thinking about how your target audience prefers to interact with brands and each other: Facebook? Twitter? LinkedIn?

3) Create high-quality content

Social Media Marketing for Small Business Owners

            While there are dozens of marketing channels and tactics, creating high-quality content is an important social media marketing strategy for small businesses. Your goal should be to publish quality content that your audience finds valuable. When possible, you can also repurpose some of your content across multiple channels—but don’t go overboard with it or you might overwhelm your audience. You’ll want to make sure that all of your social media posts are consistent with one another and with your brand, but they don’t have to be identical to one another. For example, each platform has its own personality so it may make sense to post videos on YouTube while sharing written content on LinkedIn and Instagram.

4) Use Instagram and Pinterest

            Marketers at small businesses have been leveraging social media marketing examples like Instagram and Pinterest for years. You should, too. Both sites are great resources for visually compelling content. If you’re looking to step up your small business’s visuals, these platforms offer inspiration to help you create engaging imagery that you can post to your company’s social media accounts. And because they’re visual, they’ll be more likely to get a positive response from users than a text-based post will! Are you finding it difficult to measure your small business’s reach on social media?

5) Give your customers exclusive access to content

Social Media Marketing for Small Business Owners

            If you’re looking to attract new customers, giving your current ones exclusive access to behind-the-scenes content is a great way to incentivize them. For example, take shoe retailer ShoeDazzle's Facebook page. The company frequently posts pictures and videos of its latest products and often asks fans to share photos of themselves wearing these products on social media. In exchange, ShoeDazzle offers prizes for their most creative customers. This gives their customers an incentive to share cool content with friends and followers - which helps spread the word about these products even more effectively than ShoeDazzle's marketing team could on its own.

6) Make sure your profiles are complete

            Before you get started with your social media marketing campaign, it’s important to take a moment to make sure your social media profiles are complete. Whether you want them to be or not, users judge businesses by their profiles. For example, if someone is following your profile on Twitter but can’t find a picture of your company, he or she may assume that your company isn’t professional and move on to another company. Or say you have a Facebook page with an About Us section that doesn’t say anything about what you do; potential customers might read that and click away.

7) Work on building trust early on

Social Media Marketing for Small Business Owners

            Social media marketing is all about building trust with your customer base. If you don’t have it, you’re going to have a hard time succeeding on social media. So, work on building trust early and often when you first start out with social media marketing. One of our favorite ways to do that is by offering tips and advice, which can go a long way towards establishing that bond. You could write an e-book or put together some downloadable guides, but if we were in your shoes we’d also look into getting involved in social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn. Building a presence on these sites can be great for customer outreach—and interacting with customers directly is always a good idea!

8) Try cross-promotion efforts

            Cross-promotion efforts don’t have to be time-consuming. In fact, cross-promotion can be as simple as including links on your social media pages to point your followers in another direction. The key is to work with other people or businesses who are in related fields. For example, if you sell dresses online, one thing you could do is include links in your posts and tweets to related items like lingerie or shoes that complement each outfit. This helps build awareness of your business without requiring a lot of extra effort on your part.

9) Monitor everything and respond quickly

Social Media Marketing for Small Business Owners

            With so many social media platforms, it can be hard to stay on top of your social media marketing. Luckily, there are a ton of tools out there that will help you monitor everything from Facebook to LinkedIn and quickly respond to people who mention your business. Social networks aren’t just places where customers look for recommendations—they’re also places where customers hang out when they need customer service or have questions about products and services. A quick response could make all the difference in turning a one-time customer into a repeat client. Just remember: if you’re going to use social media monitoring tools, be sure you’re not creating an even bigger time suck by constantly checking them!

10) Keep it up!

            One of the most important social media marketing tips for small businesses is to be consistent with your posting and engagement. Don’t just randomly post when you can—schedule time every week to do some kind of content creation and scheduling. Even if it’s a quick comment on someone else’s Facebook post, you need to find ways to stay active on all platforms you participate in. Social media success comes down to one simple thing: relationships. If people don’t know or like your business, they aren’t going to interact with you—and they certainly won’t want your product or service! If a casual connection doesn't lead to a sale or build trust, then it's not working as social media marketing tools should.