by Jeremy Haney
Social media can initially seem very overwhelming to the small business owner, particularly if it's not something that you regularly navigate in your personal life. From a distance, it might just seem like a swamp of idle chatter, crude jokes and questionably accurate news stories. There's much more going on with social media from a business perspective, however -- and it's especially vital for small businesses to get in there and learn how to navigate this world.
Marketing is a continual issue for most small businesses; usually it's because they simply don't have either the funds or the time to do it properly. Social media provides the most outsized impact possible among the very low-cost advertising options. Not only that, but it also provides a means of gathering actionable customer information that's unparalleled by any traditional marketing avenues.
The downside? It does take more time, and a bit of specialized knowledge. And if you wade in without really knowing what you're doing, you can end up wasting a significant amount of that time with nothing to show for it. This post will help you to launch a social media campaign with no prior experience required.
A rookie mistake that many businesses make is to simply open accounts on every popular social media service, assuming that more = better. Each account you'll open is a time expense in terms of maintaining it, however, and users you accumulate will start leaving in droves as soon as the regular updates stop.
It's important to be aware of the demographic makeup of the various social media services, and assess whether that's a group that you are attempting to reach. For example, according to statistics collected by Pew Research, the user base of Pinterest skews very much female, and the average Tumblr user is under the age of 24. Facebook and YouTube are solid bets for any business, since they have very large and diverse user bases, but once you get beyond those two you'll want to start looking much more closely at demographic information and how it lines up with your customer profiles.
Once you've settled on the social media services that are the best fit for you, it's time to look at how to make them all work together as one cohesive whole. Simply running each as a discrete entity, or copy-and-pasting the same posts and material to every account, is not a winning strategy. You want there to be synergy between your different accounts, and you also want to keep your brand voice consistent between them.
For the sake of consistency, it's best to have one person managing the various accounts and primarily responsible for updates. Depending on your resources, this may be a DIY job, or a second duty for one of your existing employees. If the means are available, however, it is often a wise investment to hire a social media manager. It is possible to find remote freelancers who can do this on a part-time basis.
On each social media account, be sure to have a bar of icons for your other different accounts prominently visible somewhere on the main page. Also consider having feeds from one account display on another; for example, you can have your new tweets automatically show up in a feed on your Facebook page.
If you're doing a number of different social media accounts and feel like all of these different updates are getting too unruly, look into a centralized social media management platform. Some popular example that are free-to-use include ContentStudio, Metricool and Social Champ, but there are many different options. Basically, this is a cloud-based service that securely stores your login information for all your other accounts, and gives you one simple interface from which to do all your updates on your various social media sites.
It's very important to remember that social media users look at it more as an opportunity to have an ongoing conversation with your business, rather than a traditional one-way passive consumption platform. Best practice for social media marketing is generally regarded as leaving the actual marketing out of it initially.
You ideally want to build a rapport with customers before introducing offers. You can start with general posts about what your business is up to lately, or about things going on in the neighborhood. Liking and commenting on the posts of your visitors also not only helps to build a bond with them but increases your visibility through their channels as well.
In addition to having a regularly updated social media presence, it's important to have a strong brand voice, logo and graphical presentation.
Social media is sometimes touted as "free advertising", but that isn't quite true. It requires a significant time commitment at the very least, but it can also deliver incredible results.