Social Media for Small Business

By: Johana M. Caba

Working for any job can be stressful, especially when you wear more than one hat. Smaller businesses or family owned businesses typically have fewer employees. This means that the owners and managers must take on many hats including the social media marketing hat.

We understand that social media tends to fall to the bottom of the priority list at the end of a long business day. Social media has many benefits for a small business. For example, social media can help increase awareness and attract new customers. In this article, we will be discussing what social media can do for your small business and how to begin utilizing it more strategically.
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First, let’s begin with a few statistics on the benefits of utilizing social media. In 2016, a SproutSocial study revealed that people are 57.5% more likely to purchase products from a brand that they follow on social media. Additionally, 71% of people are more likely to purchase a product after a positive social experience. Keep in mind that your customer service on social media and how you interact with customers can have a huge impact. According to a 2017 SproutSocial study, being responsive, offering promotions, providing educational content and sharing interesting visuals are the top four actions that prompt customers to purchase from brands on social media. At the end of your long business day, it is worth taking a look at the impact that social media can have on a small brand. We recommend you move social media higher on the priority list because it can truly help your small business grow.

Second, let’s discuss what you can do to help your small business be successful on social media. The first thing that you need to do is set SMART Goals. These goals are specific to your business, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-bound. By setting goals before beginning your social media plan, you will be able to measure and prove your success while also observing successful tactics that work for your business. This can also help you observe any failed tactics which can show you what does not work and can help you improve your overall strategy. 

If you don’t know where to start, create a social media audit of your competitors. You can also create a competitive analysis, but for the sake of cutting the workload let’s stick to a social media audit. With this type of audit, you can observe what social media platforms your competitors use, how often they post, their followers, their engagement and the type of content that is most successful for them. These observations can help you determine your goals, your content, your posting schedule and your key performance indicators (KPI). 

When you first begin testing the social media waters, make sure to observe your organic reach. This can help you determine what content is more effective with your target audience. Furthermore, this can help you determine when and how to promote posts in order to increase your reach. By promoting posts or running social media ads, the reach of your posts increases and awareness for your business also increases. These two factors can have a positive impact on your business which can result in the growth of your business.