Social Media for Small Business – Why Have an Online Presence?

In today’s digital landscape, having an online presence is vital for small businesses to thrive. 

Social media platforms are a powerful and cost-effective tool for small businesses to connect with customers, build brand awareness, and drive sales. Discover the benefits of social media for small businesses and get guidance on how to build a social media marketing strategy tailored to your small business needs. With Metricool, effectively manage your social media strategy and grow your brand.

The Benefits of Social Media for Small Businesses

With over 84% of US adults using social media, social media is a valuable tool for businesses to reach their target audience, increase brand awareness, and drive conversions. 

The benefits of social media for small businesses include:

• Targeted Marketing: Social media allows businesses to target specific demographics, interests, and behaviors, enabling them to reach their ideal audience more effectively.
• Cost-Effective: Unlike traditional forms of advertising, social media platforms offer a range of free and low-cost tools to help businesses build their brand and engage with customers.
• Amplify Brand Voice: Consistently posting high-quality content that reflects a brand’s personality and tone helps businesses build a strong brand identity that resonates with their target audience.
• Engage with Customers: Businesses can build trust and rapport with their customers by responding to comments, questions, and messages, leading to increased customer satisfaction and retention.
• Build a Loyal Community: By creating high-quality content and encouraging user-generated content (UGC), businesses can develop a sense of belonging with their customers who share a passion for their brand, increasing loyalty with their target audience.
• Drive Conversions: Social media provides various ways to reach potential customers, including targeted ads and influencer partnerships. And encourages them to take desired actions, such as making a purchase or signing up for a service.

How to Build a Small Business Social Media Strategy

In order to not waste precious time, energy, or resources as a small business, it’s important to build a social media strategy. By following these eight steps below, you’ll be able to grow and refine your online presence.

1. Define your goals

When it comes to building a social media strategy for your small business, setting clear goals is the foundation to success. 

To get started; define specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals for your social media marketing efforts. This will help you stay focused and ensure you’re tracking the right metrics. As you set your social media goals, make sure they align with your overall business objectives. 

For example, if you want to boost brand awareness by 10% year-over-year for the next five years, you might track metrics like social media account growth or the number of impressions your content gets.

2. Identify your target audience 

Understanding your target audience is a key piece to developing a social media strategy as a small business. 

Here are some things to analyze when identifying your small business’s target audience: 

• Demographics: Identify age range, location, gender, income, and occupation.
• Interests: Understand hobbies, values, and pain points.
• Behaviors: Analyze online behavior and purchase behavior.
• Online Activity: Identify accounts followed, types of posts enjoyed, and what they value.

Craft content that genuinely connects with your audience by understanding their demographics, interests, behaviors, and pain points. Then, share that content on the platforms where they are most active. Additionally, design engagement strategies that align with their online behavior and preferences to foster meaningful interactions.

3. Analyze your competitors 

To gain a competitive edge, analyze your competitors’ social media presence, content, and engagement strategies to identify gaps and opportunities for differentiation. This involves studying their strengths and weaknesses to refine your own strategy for your small business. 

Here’s how to perform a competitor analysis in six steps: 

1. Identify Competitors: Identify businesses that offer similar products or services, as well as those that target the same audience.
2. Assess Social Media Presence: Evaluate your competitors’ content, posting frequency, and engagement levels, to understand their overall social media strategy and identify areas for improvement.
3. Analyze Content: Study the types of content your competitors are posting, including the format, tone, and frequency. Consider how you can adapt these strategies to your own content.
4. Engagement Strategies: Analyze how your competitors engage with their audience, including their response times, comment replies, and use of hashtags, to identify what they do well and what they could improve on. 
5. Learn from Successes and Failures: Study your competitors’ successes and failures to refine your own strategy. Identify what works well for them and what doesn’t, and consider how you can apply these lessons to your own content and engagement strategies.
6. Refine Your Strategy: Based on your analysis, refine your own social media strategy. Don’t only use similar content strategies, but differentiate yourself from your competitors with unique content.

4. Choose the right social media platforms 

To make the most of social media, small businesses need to focus on the right platforms that align with their target audience and business strategy. With limited resources, it’s important to prioritize the platforms that will have the greatest impact.

Here are some tips for choosing which social media platforms to focus on for your small business: 

• Instagram is ideal for showcasing products/services through high-quality visuals, making it perfect for visually-driven businesses.
• Facebook is suitable for sharing longer-form content and is a versatile platform for various purposes like updates and promotions.
• Twitter is perfect for sharing real-time news and quickly engaging with audiences, ideal for businesses that need to respond rapidly to current events.
• TikTok is an excellent choice for connecting with younger Gen Z audiences through short-form engaging videos.
• Pinterest is great for visually-oriented industries like fashion and home decor, as it focuses on sharing and saving images/videos.
• LinkedIn is valuable for establishing thought leadership by connecting with professionals and sharing industry insights.

5. Create a content calendar 

To maximize your social media impact, create a calendar that showcases a diverse range of content. This should include a mix of informative posts that educate your audience, promotional content that drives sales, and engaging videos that capture their attention. Experiment with different content types, such as images, videos, articles, and reposts, and formats like carousel posts, reels, polls, stories, and live videos to keep your audience engaged and interested.

Make sure to mark important events on your calendar, such as holidays, product launches, sales, and company news, so you can plan content around them. However, remember to also incorporate evergreen content that remains relevant and valuable over time. Organize your content around specific themes or topics to maintain consistency and build a loyal audience. By doing so, you’ll create a community around your brand that looks forward to your posts and shares them with others.

6. Post regularly & consistently

Consistency is key when it comes to social media. Figure out the best posting schedule for your platforms and audience. Most social media algorithms prioritize accounts that post regularly, helping their content reach more people.

Determine the best posting frequency for your specific platforms and audience. This may take some trial and error, but aim to post consistently at least a few times per week. Tools like Metricool can help streamline the process by allowing you to schedule and automatically publish your posts in advance, saving you time in the long run.

7. Engage with your community

Building a strong online presence requires more than just posting content – it’s about interacting with your audience and fostering a sense of community. Encourage engagement through interactive content such as polls, quizzes, or contests, which can help increase participation and make your content more memorable. Ask questions of your audience to hear their thoughts and opinions, as this helps create a sense of ownership and belonging.

Share user-generated content (UGC) to engage your community. Collaborating with relevant influencers or complementary brands can help strengthen your online presence by exposing your content to a wider audience.

Respond to comments, messages, and reviews in a timely and personalized manner to establish trust and foster a sense of community. Address each interaction with a personal touch, using the commenter’s name and acknowledging their specific concerns. This is particularly important for small businesses, where personal connections can make a significant difference in building loyalty and trust with your audience.

8. Analyze & refine

Once you have been actively posting content and engaging with your audience on social media for your small business, it’s important to regularly analyze your performance and refine your strategy based on the data. 

With your social media strategy goals and overall business objectives in mind, track and analyze key metrics like:

• Reach and impressions
• Engagement rates
• Click-through rates
• Conversions
• Best performing content
• Optimal posting times

Regularly review your analytics to identify patterns and areas where you can improve your social media strategy. 

Ask yourself questions like:

• Which content formats (short-form video, carousel posts, static images, Stories, etc.) generated the highest engagement?
• What times have you posted that reached the largest number of users?
• Which hashtags and keywords are most popular in your industry?
• What common threads do your best-performing content share?

Based on your analysis, make adjustments to your social media strategy. Continually test new approaches and monitor the results in your analytics. Over time, you’ll be able to refine your strategy to maximize the impact of your social media efforts for your small business.

Online Marketing for Your Small Business with Metricool

Metricool is the perfect solution to streamline your online efforts and take your small business to new heights. It’s the all-in-one social media management tool for beginners to social media strategy, and experts alike, from the smallest business to the largest enterprise. 

By connecting your website and social media accounts in one easy-to-use dashboard, Metricool empowers you to develop a winning online marketing strategy.

Here’s how Metricool is here for your small business: 

• Social Media Accounts: Metricool is authorized by all the major social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitch, YouTube, and Google. Manage your presence across multiple channels from a single platform.
• Create and Plan Content: Metricool’s content creation and planning tools make it easy to keep your social media accounts active and engaging. Take advantage of Metricool’s auto-publish feature to post your content at the optimal times, for maximum engagement from your audience.
• Ad Campaigns: If you’re ready to explore paid advertising for your small business, Metricool has got you covered. Create, track, and manage ad campaigns for Meta (Facebook and Instagram), Google, and TikTok, all from within the platform.
• Analytics: View and track the most important engagement and account growth metrics, audience demographics, and competitor information for all your connected social media accounts. Stay informed and make data-driven decisions to optimize your marketing efforts.
• Inbox: Managing multiple social media accounts can be overwhelming, but Metricool’s unified inbox makes it easy. Get all your messages, comments, and mentions from all your social media accounts in one organized place, so you never miss an important interaction.
• SmartLinks: Metricool’s SmartLinks feature allows you to make the most of your link-in-bio space. Create an attractive links page to drive traffic to other pages or your website, and track where your audience is going to gain valuable insights.
• AI Social Media Assistant: Save time by crafting optimized copy for your social media with Metricool’s AI text generator. Curate your content to your brand, audience, and platform with just a few clicks.

Gretchen Oestreicher , 01 July 2024