Small Business Social Media Tips

No longer optional

Social media is now a must for small businesses and should form part of their marketing strategy. If you are a small business and are not currently using social media as part of your marketing plan, it’s time to seriously consider it.

Small Business Social Media Tips
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The amount of people actively using social media continues to grow and this could be an untapped revenue stream for you and your business. It can be overwhelming to know where to start, here are a few of our top social media tips to consider to get you started.

It’s a fact of life that we are emotional creatures. People make emotional connections and will make business and purchase decisions based in part on their emotional reaction to a product or brand. Apple is a great example of how a brand has emotionally connected with its customer base. People buy Apple products because of how they make them feel as much as their levels of functionality.

However, most of us do not have Apple’s marketing budget and this is where using social media platforms can help to spread the word, and the love, about your business. Social media marketing can be a very effective way of getting your business and products known to a wide audience without having to spend millions! How should you be using it to effectively market your business?

Know your Market: think about your product or service and ask yourself; is there an age range that is more likely to need your product or services? Is what you do gender specific? Are you trying to market to businesses or customers? How is your target market likely to be using social media? What platforms will they using? What are their interests likely to be? Think carefully about your market before you start to ensure that your time is being used to effectively target the people that matter to you.

Be Engaging: it’s called social media so be social! Talk to the people you have connected with, these are your potential customers. Get to know them and show that you are genuine. Reply to tweets and comments and respond to any direct messages in a personal way, don’t leave it to the robots! Build your relationships by being authentic and genuine and engender trust in you and your brand. Your posts should also be interesting to your target market and not simply a succession of buy now messages, people will will very quickly disengage if that’s all you are posting.

Be Visual: people engage much more with visual content and are more likely to respond to it. Look for high quality images to help to promote your message. There is good, free software out there that will help you to create your own visual content such as Recite.com, Easerl.ly, Pikochart and Infogr.am. These can all help to create great images to position you as a person of authority within your business area.

Put the Time In: you must be prepared to put the time in on social media. There is no quick road to instant success. It takes time to build a genuine following across different platforms and then to become known, liked and trusted by them. There are tools out there like Hootsuite that will let you pre-schedule and automate content, and that’s fine if it is running alongside some real-time, genuine engagement. Don’t fall into the trap of buying 10 000 followers for only $10 because there is no value in them, they are not your customers. Make the effort and be consistent. If you do not have the time, contact us at Cyberfrog and we will be happy to discuss our social media marketing packages with you.

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