So Why Should Small Business Be Using Social Media?
We were recently asked by one of our clients, “What more can we do on social media to go from good to great?” It was like the clouds had parted! This client had initially committed to a very small social media budget because she wasn’t quite sure the efforts would be helpful to the company’s bottom line. Her original goal with social was solely to improve brand awareness.
After two months of plugging away at the social media game on behalf of this client, she began to get it. We’d met all of our original goals ahead of schedule, increased the following and people were even mentioning the pages to her on a regular basis. It was then that this CEO began to realize the benefit that social media can have to a company’s bottom line. And it was then that we had her buy-in to take the company’s social media presence from good to great.
“It was then that this CEO began to realize the benefit that social media can have to a company’s bottom line. And it was then that we had her buy-in to take the company’s social media presence from good to great.”
Below we’ve repeated the 3 recommendations we gave our client in order to take their business to the next level on social media.
1. ADVERTISING
We advise our clients to start off committing $50 per month to advertising on social. Most clients say, “Only $50? Yes! I’m in.” The benefits of advertising on social are huge. Take Facebook for instance, Facebook delivers content into user’s Newsfeeds based on the user’s interests and activity. So, if a user has not interacted with your company’s content (even if they follow you), it’s probable that your content won’t even appear in their Newsfeed at all. It takes a little monetary investment to ensure the content appears in their feed. If your company’s content is interesting to them and they interact, then your content is more likely to appear for them in the future. The key here is to make sure you’re promoting content that is useful and relevant to your audience. If you’re simply talking about how awesome your business is (which I’m sure it is!), it’s probable that your post won’t get a lot of engagement. Instead, focus how your audiences’ lives will benefit by using your product or service.
2. CONTENT MARKETING
One of the main goals of every social media site should be to send followers back to the company’s website. For websites that aren’t updated often, social media marketers can simply run out of things to say. In order to keep the audience’s attention with fresh web content, it’s important to content market by creating and curating content that is relevant to the audience. One of the best examples of this is a company blog. A blog allows you to quickly post fresh content that we, as social media marketers, can push out to the audience on social, bringing your social audience back to your website. Blogging can also do wonders for your SEO ranking, leading to your business landing higher in Google searches.
3. COMMITTING THE APPROPRIATE BUDGET
We have created a very efficient system for planning, posting and analyzing social media efforts for our clients. Therefore, we are able to spend a very reasonable amount of time per week on a client’s social media efforts. In this story, the client had initially committed to much less than what we consider reasonable. In this conversation with our client, we were able to get a quick commitment to a bigger budget in order to increase outreach, implement new campaigns, and manage social advertising. It’s important for social media marketers to find the most efficient process for managing social. If not, you can get lost in the clutter and the hours will waste away.
This article by Nicole Reisberg was originally published on LinkedIn Pulse.
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