- Tips & Tricks
- Jan 08, 2022
How to Use Social Media For Small Business-12 Simple Tips
Just as tiny droplets of water build a mighty sea, starting your business and growing it using simple social media tools is also the same. Because in terms of profit, social media is the most cost-effective and efficient way to reach nearly half of the world’s population, and if you’re not using it, you’re missing out on the fastest way to promote your firm.
Many startups don’t pay attention to promoting their ventures on social media until they realize what a huge impact it can have. The survival of brands and the success of entrepreneurs depends on how you show your presence on social media platforms to the consumer market. Without perseverance and well-planned strategies, businesses became prey to changing social media algorithms.
There is no denying that about 4.48 million people utilize social media in some form. According to recent studies, many people spend a significant amount of time on social media. China, for example, is widely recognized as the world’s largest social media market.
You can use these platforms for:
- your brand awareness
- building solid ties with the consumer market
- generating direct leads from these platforms
We’ve gathered some of the best ideas to use social media as bait to expand your small business:
Identify the Right Platform For You
There are 8.4 per person accounts on different social platforms as per reports. How can you find the platform that your targeted consumers mostly use? The answer is simple. You have to use insights and stats that show what type of people visit each social media and what platforms your competitor is more active on.
You can also use the age group technique to select the right platform. If you are interested in selling your products to Gen Z, then Facebook and Tiktok are some of the best choices.
However, If you target baby boomers, you should go straight to Pinterest and Facebook. Make the Tiktok and Instagram secondary options to promote your business.
Some other incredible tricks are mentioned here for helping you grow your small business on social media:
Pick Out the Right Audience
You can say that the audience is the key to success in social media. If you can’t find the right audience, you can not cross the finish line. To do that, you must conduct thorough research to find the targeted audience and show them what they want to see. You can use filters available on social media to target the audience of a specific region.
Target Your Audience
“There is no one-size-fits-all way to build an audience.” — John Stuart Mill.
Do some research and make some charts to identify which platform is more likely to be used by your audience.
- Youtube: According to researchers, about 67% of people in the US use youtube. Showing your ad on youtube can be the best way to attract your audience towards you.
- Twitter: It is considered the fastest way to create awareness of your brand as about 206 million people use it daily.
- Instagram: Creating your page on Instagram can also be a great way to reach your audience. About one billion people use this platform to get recent updates.
- Facebook: It is considered to be the biggest social media platform with about 2.89 billion active users
Offer Free Perks
After finding the right audience, you must attract them by offering something as a gift, a coupon, or a discount voucher on the first purchase. For example, when someone opens a new brand, they try to attract the audience on different platforms like Instagram and many others by giving sales or offering a deal they may like.
Make Strategies
“A goal without a plan is just a wish.”― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
As most tools are free, it does not take time or money to start your business pages on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. However, starting a business without set goals takes both time and money.
To make sure all your efforts are in the same tack, i.e., promote your business, you’ve to make a strong marketing plan. Here are some of the top marketing tips:
Use Affiliate Programs
Finding an audience can be a difficult task. In that case, working with an affiliate partner can be the best way to solve this problem. Your affiliate partners will help you find traffic for your brand, and in return, you need to give them sare in your business.
Working with a blogger is the most basic example of affiliate marketing. They help your target audience by creating awareness about your brand, and in return, you pay them some commission. In simple words, they affiliate with you to promote your products with some profit shares.
Research About Your Competitors
Even if you have a small or established business, knowing about your competitors will provide many business tips and help you rank higher than them. In this way, you can provide a way for your audience to reach you easily.
Once you’ve collected all the pertinent information about strategies they use to generate traffic and the things they lack in their business plan, you can shoot your arrows to hit the right target.
You can make a comparison sheet after the market analysis. It will help you know what you lack and what to work on.
Post Regularly
To remain in touch with your targeted consumer market, you’ve to show your appearance on social media daily. The forum algorithm will favor your post if you post consistently, and more people will discover your posts.
Not only this, but it will also let your customers understand you better. You will be more likely to create an authentic relationship with your customers by heeding this plan.
Prepare a weekly posting schedule to ease your workload and simplify things. In this way, you won’t find it difficult to post regularly at the right time, and when your audience sees you regularly, it will help you stay at the top of their minds.
Grow Your Targeted Audience
You found the platform, made customized strategies, found your targeted consumers; now you have to increase the audience visiting your social media pages. You have to show your online visibility to attract more audiences.
You can use AI-based platforms like Socialbakers that provide insight into the social media platforms. They help you grow your audience. Using this platform, you can implement a customized posting approach to engage the right audience.
Another example is Unmetric which helps you analyze and assess your social media content. You can keep a hawk’s eye on competitors and the consumers.
Artificial intelligence provides tools like Talkwalker, which can retrieve images from any online forum, web, and platform in seconds. You can use its features to run marketing campaigns, get access to a targeted audience, monitor online conversations, and much more.
Pro Tip:
One of the best ways to engage the audience while promoting any product is to get background-free, non-pixelated images. You can also use artificial intelligence-based background remover to polish the images for posting on Facebook, Instagram, etc. AI tools are intelligent software that adds eye-catching details to images and videos, making them visually appealing.
Followers get attracted to background-free or transparent background-containing images as they are more apparent, striking, and engaging. After seeing such attractive content, the followers will automatically be lured to your posts.
Keep An Eagle’s Eye On The Latest Trends
We, humans, love to keep up with trends. That’s why you should also keep the recent fads in your mind, whichever type of business you’re running, even if it is a small business. It will not only attract the audience but will also help you increase the number of your sales.
It will help you understand the audience and work up to their expectations which will amuse them the most. For example, if you have a clothing brand, you must know that puffed sleeves are in trend now and are attracting most of the audience.
Use Appropriate Tools
Several tools can manage social media to simplify your way to the top. Using these tools will make it easy for you to manage your account and help you grow your business with low investment and high-profit rates.
Using these tools, you can quickly generate interest in products and make customer interaction more productive, leading your small business to success. Hoot suite is considered one of the best social media tools to manage your social media network channels.
Platforms like Meetedgar also provide their services to make posting easy for you. They schedule the posts and automate the entire process.
Buffer is also offering services to enhance the post engagement and expand the audience for social media through different plans.
Use Automation
While running a business, you need time to manage it properly. Social media provides you with many tools to optimize the process of your social media optimization.
This way, you will save time and grow your business more efficiently. Social pilot, as an example, is one of the social media tools that will help you automate your posts on different social media forums.
Another example is Sproutsocial which provides automated ad posting and marketing tools to grow your targeted audience. You can simply assign the related tasks to these platforms and manage the whole process while focusing on growing your small business.
Start With Little Things, But Do Them All
When the kids start walking, they start with smaller steps before running. Likewise, you must start with small things when you own a small business. These baby steps include keeping your budget in mind and not getting overwhelmed.
Similarly, working from one platform is enough at the start, then using all social platforms without maintaining a routine. As long as you are attracting traffic sufficiently, you can quickly grow your business to a larger market by using one platform.
Focus On The Graphics
Beautiful things draw humans’ attention. It is our nature to attract unique, unpretentious, yet minimalistic things. Therefore you should not compromise with the visual of your post.
Social media provides a lot of tools for graphics. Using them will help you provide the best content to your customer. You can also use Canva, which provides different free and paid layouts to make posts for every social platform. You can play around with graphics and color schemes to generate the best version of your posts.
Another very trustworthy software is Adobe Creative Cloud which is specially designed for making impressive social media graphics.
Tools like Pablo are user-friendly and help market social media campaigns by providing post scheduling, royalty-free images, and customized layout.
Keep Track of Your Progress
After applying different statistics, you must note whether they work or not. It is essential for your business. If you don’t track your progress, you may not know if the strategy you’re using is beneficial to you or not.
If you feel like any of the strategies you used are not working, you should revamp them. It will help you know how your business evolves, what type of tweaks it needs, and how to protect your reputation online.
Organize a Competition
To sell your product, you must create awareness of it. The best way to do so is to organize fair competitions to attract a larger audience and create awareness about your product.
Rewarding your customers will not only improve your relationship but will also attract new customers. For example, if one of your customers wins a competition and gets the reward, they will tag their friend, and in this way, a single customer will bring a lot of others with them.
Use Stories
Stories are the best way to highlight your brand and increase awareness. You can also tag your customers to show your gratitude towards them. This way, you can also provide sneak peeks at your upcoming products. It will also help you get instant reviews on your products and improve your brand visibility.
Utilize Social Ecommerce Platform
Social eCommerce has become a part of many businesses these days. As per stats, the market will generate 604.5 billion USD by 2027 via a social eCommerce platform. You can use the market tool of these platforms to generate revenue through direct sales from social media platforms.
A report from eMarketer has shown the stats of people in the US who have purchased things from social platforms. According to the data obtained from this report, around 18 percent of people purchased from Facebook stores, 11 percent purchased Instagram, 3 percent from Pinterest, and 1 percent from Tiktok and Snapchat each.
Experts’ Advice
“When I hear people debate the ROI of social media? It makes me remember why so many businesses fail. Most businesses are not running marathons. They’re playing the sprint. They’re not worried about lifetime value and retention. They’re worried about short-term goals.” — Gary Vaynerchuk, CEO of VaynerMedia.
Social media is a valuable tool if used wisely. We’ve seen many small startups getting significant investments after hitting the right audience. Several celebrities are also starting their businesses by using their social impact. That’s why this is the right time to stop thinking and start investing in growing business through social media.
Comments (0)