Effective Social Media Strategies for Small Businesses

Small businesses are more regularly utilising social media platforms to raise awareness of their brand.

Give it time and learn

The most important aspect of a social media strategy is investing the time as the business owner to learn which benefits each social media outlet offers your business.  Extending this to intimately understand each social media platform can have boundless positive impacts for small businesses.  Explore social media and embrace the opportunities this offers your business.  Nothing else, anywhere, offers your business the unique opportunity to speak directly to your customers on a daily basis.

Knowing your target audience and who is picking up the communication is a vital component of ensuring your message is written correctly and tailored to the relevant demographic groups.  Social media is all about your customer’s habits, so it’s worth accepting early on that you need to fit in with their needs and deliver something worthwhile for your social media message to be powerful and relevant.  Seeing your social media output through your customers’ eyes will help you best understand the impact your business is having.

Recognise the investment you will need to make into your social media output to ensure you get the most out of it.  “Investment?!” I hear you cry.  Yes, investment of time and effort to create interesting, engaging and relevant content, as well as responding to customer queries and feedback as quickly as possible.  If you’re not able to do this then social media isn’t going to work for you.

Don’t play the numbers game

Although it’s great looking at how many followers or “likes” your business may have across the varying social media platforms, ultimately these aren’t numbers which are going to significantly impact on your business.  Don’t waste time and energy going out of your way – or paying someone else – to increase numbers quickly.  Focus on the customers who have discovered and are remaining loyal to your brand, from this point growth will come naturally and you should be patient in looking to achieve these games.

The personal touch

Social media is all about interaction on a personal level.  With this in mind you need to do as much as you can to keep the personal element to your social media output.  Self-promotion takes time to write corporate sounding messages but will nevertheless achieve little.  With a small business, your network is more interested in interacting with you and learning about the person behind the growing brand – posting links may look great but in the grand scheme of things isn’t going to increase your business revenues.