Any business can benefit from social media marketing, whether a local store, a small business or a national corporation.
When it comes to digital marketing for small businesses, you’re missing a fast, inexpensive, and effective way to reach nearly half the world’s population if you don’t use social media.
Why is social media beneficial for business?
Over 4.2 billion people are now active on social media globally.
However, social media alone does not guarantee business growth. You can increase your brand awareness, build relationships with your customers, and increase leads and sales by using social platforms.
You need a solid social media marketing strategy with an achieving attitude.
Quick takeaways for the small business:
- Nearly 92 per cent of marketers employ social media to increase their company’s sales.
- Almost 80% of salespeople who use social media are outselling those who don’t.
- There are five most important social media platforms:
- Facebook (89 per cent)
- LinkedIn (83 per cent)
- YouTube (81 per cent)
- Twitter (80 per cent)
- Instagram (56 per cent)
- B2C companies are more likely to use social media (58 per cent) than B2B businesses (46 per cent).
- Engaged customers comprise 36 per cent of a company’s primary metric, followed by a conversion rate of nearly 35%.
- You can reach new audiences by using social media with engaging content.
- You can use social media to build trust and authority and show your brand personality.
- Creating exciting content for social media distribution is crucial.
Social media users and engagement on powerful platforms grow as more than three billion people use social media every month.
Since millions of consumers access social media daily, companies can gain exposure. Businesses also face tremendous challenges because of the constantly changing environment, which is always loud and crowded.
Through this article, we understand the following:
1. The suitable social media platforms for small business
1.1 How do you select the best social media platform for your small business?
2. Benefits of social media for business
3. Social media marketing tips for small businesses
Let’s look at the possible aspect of social media, which allows you to connect with your target audience, engage customers and ultimately grow your business.
1. Social media platforms for small business: the trending platforms for 2022
What is social media marketing? In simple language, we can say that social media marketing is a form of marketing that uses social media apps as a marketing tool.
A business’s approach to social media depends on its type. According to GlobalWebIndex, individuals now have more than five social media accounts, so we can pretty much assume that there are lots of businesses taking up social media marketing for small businesses.
Social media managers for small businesses often utilise more than one social media platform to meet customers where they are. A growing number of small businesses are increasing revenues through social media marketing.
Which kind of social media platform is best for small businesses? Are you better off using multiple platforms or just one?
Let’s find out the platforms for the use of social media business marketing.
-
Facebook
Statistia.com, through their report released in 2022, states the number of active users for Facebook as of the fourth quarter of 2021 is 1.93 billion. The data gives us a tentative assumption of our business audience.
Hence, it’s no surprise for businesses to use social media. Facebook has become one of the best tactics for finding your target audience, building an email list, and gaining new customers.
Managing social media for small businesses on Facebook is relatively easy because it has a client-interface tool, it’s a great platform for staying in touch with the audience once they’ve caught your attention.
Several small businesses on the platform create private groups where customers can interact, ask questions, and personalise their experiences, we can surely measure the effectiveness of social media through Facebook.
Pros:
- Massive audience reaches
- Targeted audience
- Powerful analytics
Cons:
- Large budget is required for ads
- Seek out constant engagement
- Minimum page control
- Cases of credit card misuse
A Facebook presence is beneficial for most small businesses since it is the leading social networking site.
Facebook for small business marketing allows companies to post business hours, and website links, include “call now” buttons and allow to examine detailed analytics through weekly insights.
-
Instagram
Globally, Instagram has around 1.452 billion users in April 2022, based on its advertising audience reach numbers. According to this data, 23.4% of all people over 13 use the Instagram platform.
Small businesses taking social media marketing for the initial business stage can quickly learn to use Instagram since it has fewer features than Facebook. Also, the design of the platform is simple and clean, which makes the social media site manageable.
You can share visual content on Instagram, which makes the small business easier to relatively disclose their product in a much more creative manner.
A growing number of e-commerce segments are turning to Instagram for retail sales.
Pros:
- High-quality video/picture aspect.
- Popular among the young generation.
Cons:
- Misleading metrics
- Requires aggressive posting
- Difficult to measure the CTR (Click through rates)
Instagram is a great way to reach out to customers if you have video content or sell visually appealing products, and it is the best social media platform for social media marketing business.
Small businesses concentrating on products/goods can use Instagram to create engaging content that goes viral. However, they should remember that Instagram is primarily a visual platform.
-
LinkedIn
The total number of monthly active users on LinkedIn is nearly 310 million. Every day, the average network user spends about 7 minutes and 31 seconds on the network.
Using social networking sites such as LinkedIn is ideal for businesses conducting business-to-business (B2B) sales, a promising social media for small businesses looking for short sales and long-term client relations.
Small businesses can engage with users on LinkedIn to make valuable connections since LinkedIn is used for networking with other professionals.
LinkedIn is a good platform for establishing thought leadership in your industry due to its wide range of professional users.
Pros:
- Nearly 65 million active users.
- A great platform to promote business-related content
- is the perfect platform for networking and recruiting.
Cons:
- Not an e-commerce promotion platform.
- Best suited for freelancing service-based employment.
LinkedIn business pages help showcase your brand, but its core purpose lies in connecting you with other professionals.
Owning a LinkedIn account is like having a nice pair of dress shoes in your closet: you’ll probably only wear them occasionally, but they are still beneficial.
-
YouTube
A YouTube channel lets you uniquely connect with your users compared to any other social media platform.
Video-based platforms like YouTube are remarkable. The video-sharing platform YouTube has become more popular than Instagram for visual content creation.
In addition to being a place for entertainment, it is also where you can learn new things as at present, it has 2 billion monthly users.
You can offer video tutorials to support text-based content (like blogs) or visually display product descriptions. You can develop well-framed social media marketing strategies to reach your targeted audience.
Pros:
- Drives more conversion through video content.
- Promote your business brand visually.
- Compliments the remaining marketing strategy.
Cons:
- Video ranking can get complex.
- Takes a long time for production.
YouTube is an essential social media platform for businesses in the future.
Videos can get recorded in high quality on most smartphones.
The process of shooting and editing videos that meet your users’ expectations will likely take some time, but you don’t need to allot an expensive budget.
Go for the established social media networks instead of new social media platforms, for these already have a wider number of users and audiences which you can easily target and convert it to sales.
How do you select the best social media platform for your small business?
From the top 4 mentioned above, how do you select the best social media platform for your business? You can get the selection process done quickly, even if you are starting your small business or expanding it.
Here are the factors your small business needs to consider when choosing the right social media platform:
- Figure out your audience by aligning your product/ service.
- Do a competitor analysis (similar business).
- Connect the dots of your entire social media goals.
- Understand the purpose of different social media platforms.
Tips: If you want to try out social media marketing in all the channels mentioned earlier, make sure your social media marketing strategy is tailored to communicate the audience’s expectations. DO NOT publish the same content on every social media platform.
Benefits of social media for business
How businesses use social media? Although small business marketing aim to sell products to other businesses, it is built on human relationships. Social media has long been used as a tool for growing these relationships, but its significance grew last year.
By using social media for your small business, you get to enjoy the benefits of:
-
Promotes brand recognition and awareness
A business’ most crucial marketing objective is to increase brand recognition and awareness. So wondering about the importance of social media in business. One key reason for it is that consumers prefer to buy from recognisable brands.
Customers may even show a certain degree of loyalty to brands, resulting in long-term benefits for businesses. Through social media, brands can now efficiently and effectively use other additional marketing plans for small businesses.
-
Creates a buzz for your brand
Brands, products, and partners are discussed as per the framed social media marketing strategy. Get involved in conversations on social media. Show your brand has a personality.
Through this act, your customers will feel more valued and treated better if they’re not talking to a robot. Do not forget to include the customer interaction position when developing marketing strategies for small businesses.
Focus on customer reviews, polls and shoutouts to create two-way communication with the audience.
-
Analyses the interests of your target customers
For your social media marketing strategies to be effective, you must understand what your target customers are interested in. Monitoring the conversation about specific topics on social media can help you do this.
Listening to your audience is known as social listening, and you can identify trends they’re following by learning what’s important to them.
Additionally, you may gain insight into what their struggles are, which can help you create content that addresses those pain points.
-
Promotes customer loyalty
Customers are more likely to choose you if they follow you: If they follow you, they are more likely to select you versus your competitors. Moreover, they’ll increase traffic if they are loyal customers.
Is there anything better than free brand loyalty? People keep track of the brands they like. Social media followers tend to buy from these brands 90% of the time.
-
Increases traffic to your website
What is social media used for? Social media can help you direct customers to your site. You can’t solely rely on search results to drive traffic, but relying overly on search engines means losing an enormous amount.
You can diversify your inbound traffic sources by using social networks.
In addition to considering what to post and how often to post, social networks are great for driving traffic to your website. Your customer won’t appreciate you if you’re that intrusive marketer.
With 955 million users on Facebook alone, today’s digital social networks play an increasingly important role in influencing consumer preferences and purchasing decisions.
Companies like eBay and Dell have used social media marketing strategies to introduce a two-way dialogue with consumers that has traditionally been one-way.
Small businesses that built their brand presence on social media platforms today can use the frameworks to increase their sales, so social media in digital marketing is a must for every small business.
Quick social media marketing tips for small business
With these quick social media marketing tips, you can get started using social media for your small business.
-
Have a plan before you begin
In our everyday lives, we use social media, so these days, social media has become an icon for business cards, and we all have a certain level of comfort and trust with these tools.
So marketing via social media is simple. Still, you need to plan.
Create an action plan for social media in advance. You will be able to ensure that all of your social efforts support specific business goals.
A plan is necessary to have a clear understanding of your goals. If your social media marketing plan is missing, you can’t tell if your investment is paying off or ripping you.
-
Perform a competitor analysis
How do your competitors use social media?
You can learn from a competitive analysis what works and what doesn’t for other companies like yours.
The best way to reduce your learning curve is to learn from what others have already done.
-
Do a social media audit
Now is the time to evaluate your social media efforts if you already use them. Frequently check the insights and analytics to see if your business is heading on the marketing roadmaps that you have created.
If you are unsure, change the social media marketing strategy for the product and service you are selling to your audience.
-
Develop a social media schedule
You should start with 80%-20% concept. Your content should provide your audience with information, education, or entertainment 80% of the time. For the remaining 20%, sell or promote your brand.
Social media calendars help you share the right content on the proper social channels at the right time. Your content mix should get included in the calendar.
-
Foster relationships
In small businesses, social media marketing has the unique advantage of enabling direct communication with customers and followers. Instead of asking for a sale upfront, you can build relationships over time.
-
Building a 2-way trust with the consumers
It’s a good idea to participate in the engagement of your organic content or ads. It builds trust and loyalty among your followers. Social algorithms allow you to gain free exposure when fans share and like your content.
-
Establish KPIs
You should focus on the essential social media metrics. Look to data that aligns with your aims rather than vanity metrics.
Any social media strategy should be based on data, regardless of your objectives or industry.
You can easily break down the metrics based on reach, engagement, clicks and hashtag performance.
Are you ready to launch your social media marketing campaign in 2022?
An online presence consists of many moving parts.
To implement your social media marketing strategy, you can already be ahead of the game if you set actionable goals and meet each of the steps above.
Alternatively, you can find more inspiration for building out your strategies for small businesses on different websites or take help from our digital marketer team!
