By: Johana M. Caba, M.A.
When you officially open your small business, your focus is on growth and success. Like everything else in life, sometimes growth and success hit a plateau. There are many things that you can do to get out of a growth plateau. One of the things that you can work on is developing a social media marketing strategy for your small business. Below, I discuss 5 tips that to help small businesses grow their following, increase their reach and get more leads. 1. Engage on Your Social Media Platforms: One of the most important things to do on Social Media is engage. You can engage with your followers and your community by commenting, liking and sharing posts from others. It is important to engage because it creates a human presence for your business. By engaging with your followers and your community, you are building relationships with others that will help your business grow through word-of-mouth on social. These relationships that you build with others can also help you generate leads for your business and get your posts to reach more people. 2. Increase Organic Reach: Your organic reach means the amount of people that see your posts without boosting posts or using ads. You can do this in a number of ways. For example, you can add relevant hashtags to your posts like #BeautySalon or #HairDresserMagic or #SocialMediaMarketing. These are community specific hashtags that will ensure your posts get grouped with other posts pertaining to the same community. This makes it easier for others to find you posts. Another tip for increasing organic engagement is to tag others. If you partnered with someone for a post, or are sharing something that relates to a specific person or brand, then tag them. By tagging the person you are making sure that they see it, like it, comment and hopefully share it with their audience. It is also important for you to understand the platform. If you are on Twitter, then more posts per day will help you me seen by your followers and found by others in your community. If you are on Instagram, then higher quality photos and content on Stories will help you be seen. It all depends on the algorithm of the platform. For 2020, Pinterest released an advertising guide detailing the full-funnel platform in which you can guide your customers from the planning stages to the purchasing stages.
3. Increasing Reach with Paid Ads: A component of both organic and paid reach is an editorial calendar. Editorial calendars help us plan out our campaigns, promote our products and services, and curate content to diversify our feeds. We use these calendars to help us plan and execute our campaigns, and we also use them to help us track our analytics. By knowing what works best with our audiences, we have an advantage when it comes to increasing our reach. With paid ads, you can target your specific audience and increase the reach of your posts. This is an easy way to reach more people for a small amount of money because you don't need that much money to reach more people when boosting posts on social media. For more help with creating an integrated marketing communication strategy to help your small business grow, download my IMC Guide for Small Business.
4. Get Leads with Call-to-Action Buttons & Ads: Like I mentioned in tip #3, ads can help you increase your reach. But, they can also help you get more leads by creating lead generation specific ads on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. You can also create ads to lead people to your landing page which can be your website homepage or product page on your website. For more information on lead generation visit this Cloudways article on everything about lead generation through social media. 5. Create Valuable Content & Be Consistent: I think that the most important component of growing your small business with social media marketing is creating valuable content and being consistent. Sometimes life gets in the way and it's hard to be consistent, but the more consistent you are with a posting schedule, the more your business will grow. You can use editorial calendars to plan your content and use scheduling platforms like Hootsuite and Buffer to schedule your posts ahead of time. By scheduling your posts you make sure that you are being consistent, you stay in the loop, and you can use curated content to give yourself more time to create valuable content. For more tips on creating strategic content read our post, 3 Best Tips for Creating Strategic Content.
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By: Johana M. Caba, M.A.
If you have ever been on Instagram or Pinterest, you know that having great photos is one of the keys to success on these platforms. Small businesses, bloggers, influencers, and just about everyone wants to have the best photos and best aesthetics for these apps. Great photos are essential to captivating your audience and getting views on your pages. These views can lead to visits to your webpage and eventually lead viewers to purchase your products. In this blog post, we will be going over the top 3 free photo editing apps that we found were the easiest to use. We will also be discussing some Instagram Stories tips to bring your stories to the next level of Instagram aesthetics.
1. Over App: The Over app does have free features and in-app purchases. For the Pro features the fee starts at $8.99 per month. The Pro version has extra features that are not available on the free version such as the ability to add shapes to your designs. In this app, you can use filters, crop your images, and use adjustments to edit your photos. The app also offers great tips for beginners and has pre-made layouts ready to use for your posts and stories. Below is a quick edit that I made using the app. First, I uploaded the photo and played with filters. Then, I cropped it to fit the image size that I was looking for and played with the adjust features including saturation, vignette and sharpen. Finally, I decided to play with the blur tool to show you guys you can use this app to blur your images when you don't want the audience immediately knowing what you are posting or if you are having a contest with a secret prize.
2. Instasize App: The Instasize App is more like a basic photo editing app without layouts or tips and tricks. It does have a paid version, Instasize Premium, for creators and a toolkit with tips and other content help for beginners and creators that sign up for the app. The creators package starts at $4.99 per month with more features than the free version. This app has basic features similar to other editing apps including the features on photos in your iPhone. Again, I was playing with filters and adjustments like saturation to edit the photo. You can also crop your image and add a grid around your image if you want to add text or anything else on the sides of your photo. Other than that, this one was not as impressive and did not have as many free features as the Over app.
3. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom: This Adobe app is a very quick and easy to use editing tool. It has a lot of free basic features similar to the other two apps. The free version does not include the healing brush and selective adjustments, but other than that it is still a very quick and easy app to use when editing photos on the spot. The paid version starts at $4.99 per month. Below is my quick edit that I made to play with the app. I followed the same process as with the other two apps.
4. Instagram Stories Tips: Everyone wants the best Instagram Stories to captivate their audiences. Whether you are a creator, a business or a blogger, you want your stories to lead your audience to your profile and hopefully your website. There are apps like Over and Canva that provide pre-made layouts for your stories which will help you in making them more aesthetically pleasing. These pre-made layouts guide you in where to put your writing and where to place your photos. Another tip for stories is to do it yourself. You can go on these apps and choose to create your own story without a pre-made layout. For DIY stories, my favorite thing to do is go on Pinterest to look at backgrounds that will fit the mood of the story. Then, I screenshot these backgrounds and upload to either Over or Canva. After you have your background, you can edit it like a regular image and then select your text style, font and curvature. You can also add borders on your photos, stickers and other elements to really make your stories pop. Sometimes, I use both apps. I use Canva to edit and design my story, but I will use Over to add the text because it makes it easier to curve your text if you want to have it in an arch. My last tip, is to use the stickers that Instagram already provides on Stories. This will also make your Stories pop and captivate your audience. Sometimes you might see filters or effects that you like on other people's Stories. When this happens, you can tap on the name of the effect and choose to try it, save it or send it. Below is a quick DIY edit that I made with Over for Stories rather than using a pre-made layout. I will also include the screenshot of the effects options on Instagram.
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