When trying to grow your small business it is important to utilise the powerful tool that is social media! This is because people nowadays spend an average of 2.5 hours a day on social media which is a huge window of opportunity for businesses to catch the eye of potential customers and therefore, grow their small business. Here are 7 simple tips you need to hear if you want to successfully market and grow your small business on social media…
- Lay out your goals
Many small business owners know that they should use social media, but it is important to be clear on what your specific goals are in order to make it happen. Using the SMART framework to create goals for your social media pages will help ensure that your aims are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely.
- Choose the right platforms for you
When choosing the right social media platforms for your brand you do not have to abandon any. Depending on what audiences you are trying to reach or what goals you are trying to meet you can use different social media channels for different purposes. To ensure you are using platforms effectively you will have to do some research of your own to understand how your audience spends their time online. For example, one third of Instagram’s users are 25 to 34 and is the most used social media platform among teenagers therefore daily stories and posts is a great way to increase engagement for your brand if this is your target audience.
- Use micro-influencers
Using influencers to grow a business is a marketing tool that many businesses are using today. However, although you might think otherwise, it isn’t just big businesses that are able to work with influencers, micro-influencers can be highly effective in establishing and growing your brand, and affordable!
- Pay attention to trends
In order to help grow your small business it is a good idea to pay attention to trends and memes. It is important to stay up to date with current trends and monitor what your audience needs. Therefore, social listening is an important tool as it can help you gather information and understand what your audience wants to hear from you.
- Quality over quantity
It is important to create quality content on a couple of key channels that you think are best for your brand and where the majority of your audience are – rather than trying to do everything. Also, make sure your posts offer value and enable you to build relationships whilst being authentic, human and honest as audiences will value this.
- Schedule content
Creating a social content calendar is incredibly useful in order to help you organise the following year of your brand, as it encourages you to be highly organised and prepare consistent content. As well as this, you can schedule social media posts in advance by using Hootsuite which allows you to plan content for upcoming days or weeks by choosing the time you want the tweet to go live. This will enable you to dedicate a block of time to create your content for social media which will then free up your time for other tasks, because a small business owner you may be doing everything on your own so this will therefore make it much more manageable.
- Track performance
In order to successfully grow your small business, it is important to track what works and what doesn’t. This will enable you to improve even further on what seems to be working and maybe spend less time on what doesn’t. Instagram has built in analytics which will help you understand the performance of your posts, help understand patterns and therefore helps you identify successes and failures of your account which when reviewed carefully, will help you improve your social media strategy.
Social media marketing for small businesses is an imperative tool in order to grow as a business in 2021. Quality, consistent content whilst always thinking about your target audience and their needs is essential to have a successful social media strategy. As you are probably just starting out, try new things! It is ok to make mistakes as you need to try many strategies at first in order to figure what works and what doesn’t. No matter how big or small your business is, social media is there for anyone to use in order to increase awareness of your brand so go on and give it a go!
Written by Millie Bateman.
If you have a business registered under 42 months within the Liverpool City Region – Enterprise Hub can support you! get in touch on enterprisehub@thewo.org.uk
