Five Social Media tips for small business online success

About 65% of customers follow and like the pages of businesses, organizations, brands and companies on various social media networks? What does this mean for your business?

Staying active on social media platforms can help to give your business a strong online presence. Also, it helps to boosts your businesses popularity and can also help you to build a loyal audience from scratch.

Five Tips to Make the Best of Social Media As an Entrepreneur

There are several ways and methods you can use social media to promote and improve the overall appearance of your business. In order to help you to do channel your efforts, we have identified five techniques you can use to increase the social and online presence of your business.

1. Begin With a Plan

First of all, you need to have a plan because most of your efforts in building a social media presence for your business will be channelled into creating content for the platforms you plan on using.

For example, you can plan on using video posts for Facebook, Infographics and hashtags on Twitter and photos on Instagram.

Your plan should cover methods on how you intend to create the content and the interval in posting the content.

If you want to attract an engaging audience on social media networks, you have to be strategic and tactical in your approach and this is why you need to plan carefully.

While creating a plan, carefully think about your mission statement and the goals you intend to achieve. For example, is your goal to boost your business visibility and identity online? Get traffic to your website? Offer support to customers? Boost customer engagement and conversion?

As you formulate your plan, you will want to figure out your audience, the best tools and platforms to get them, your budget and how often you would keep them engaged with new contents.

You can consider asking yourself the following set of questions:

• How do I get content ideas?
• What is the interval for posting content?
• What social media networks do I use?
• Which social media platforms can I get my audience and customers?
• What can I offer to potential customers to keep them away from patronizing my competitors?

After thinking about the questions above, you can consider going through the following facts as you form your plan:

• Facebook is the most popular and commonly social media platform in the world.
• After Facebook, the next popular social media networks that improve business social presence is LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest.
• Every social media platform has a specific attraction for its users. For instance, LinkedIn is a lively platform for businesses, corporations and professionals while Instagram consumes visual content such as photos and videos.

Social media experts recommend businesses to concentrate on two or three social media platforms to post content regularly. If you are regular in posting content, your audience and customer base will increase.

If you select more than three, you may not be consistent in posting contents on all platforms. It is advised that you hire a social media manager to assist in posting content regularly to keep your customers and audience engaged.

2. Be Proactive

If you want to build a successful social media presence online, your objective should be to post fresh and new content which should interest your audience.

Interesting and informative posts are contents that people tend to like, comment and share after they must have gone through them.

If you are finding it difficult to come up with content ideas, pay attention to your competitors and find out what they are doing?

Find out how your competitors keep their audience engaged with their content and check if the content is getting shared by people or getting comments from the audience.

Also, on your own, you can make research and figure out the strategy that would work well for you.

Bear it in mind that you can like, retweet or share previous posts to spark your audience and keep them engaged. You don’t necessarily need to post new content to resonate with your audience..

3. Use Compelling Photos and Videos When Possible

Also, people can get bored to read long lines of text, you can keep your audience engaged on social media by uploading images and videos when necessary.

Here are some of the discoveries made by Hubspot:

• Tweets with images received more than 150% retweets than tweets without images.
• Pictures with faces on Instagram get 30% more Likes than images without faces.
• On Facebook, posts with pictures get 2.3X more engagement than posts without pictures.

It is a good idea to think about the videos and pictures that would fit into your content. For instance, if you are into a retail business, you can consider uploading images of your products/goods, coupled with the location and some beautiful pictures of your staff flocked around the product.

If you offer services and digital products, you can make tutorial and how-to videos to make your audience know about the service, how to use them and the benefits of the service.

4. Always Be Active

A recent study showed that over 32% of social media users who have tried to reach out to a brand on social media expect to get a swift response within 30 minutes. Also, over 42% of social media users expect a response in a time frame of 60 minutes.

Although, it is almost impossible for you to give fast responses to all social media users who contact you, however, quick response to comments, queries and questions go a long way in showing these customers how you care about them.

Thank customers for leaving positive reviews in comments, answer questions and address negative posts and clarify them to put things right.

5. Present Your Values

Social media is a great platform for you to tell your business values, mission and vision to the world. Also, with social media, you can build a group or community to exhibit your values and reveal your personality.

If you want to resonate and connect well with your audience, you have to be unique in coming up with original content for your audience to consume.

Some platforms may provide with tools to offer promotions to your customers, however, it is important for you to build a bridge with your customers and make them trust you before recommending your products to them.

If you are pushing them to get your products, you may not generate money or make sales because you don’t have a relationship with them. Therefore, make it a priority to rapport with your audience.

If you are yet to understand how social media marketing for business works, all you need to do is to stick with a few networks, make a plan, share and create informative and interacting content, respond to messages and comments from customers. In doing this, you will be using the platform to build your business.