Top social media tips for small businesses

I did a previous blog post on reasons why small businesses need to use social media. Now I’ve decided to give you some tips on how best you can use this medium for your business.

Social media can provide a huge amount of advantages for small businesses, including free marketing and wide reach. But what are the top tips and things you can do to make that happen? Here’s some I’ve thought of:

Useful content to showcase your knowhow

I’ve said before, when you’re posting content you should make sure it’s often useful. This is a great way to bring in followers and likes. Not only will your posts be helpful for people and encourage them to keep following you, you will be showing yourself to be the expert in your field. Posting useful articles or tips and tricks about your industry will demonstrate your knowhow. Just remember not to give away too much information!

Run a competition – air your wares

Competitions are great way to gain followers and also showcase yourself. Offer something from your business for free or for a reduced price and get people talking about your products.  This way you’re offering something great but at hardly any cost to you. On Twitter you can do a simple ‘Retweet and follow to enter’ competition to really help spread the word. But also think of more imaginative ideas that can get people engaged in your business, for example ask them to submit ideas or photos to win. I stress ‘engagement’ a lot on this blog but that’s really the aim of the game, so getting some interaction when running your competition to make them even more worthwhile.

Strategise – think about what you want to achieve

Really this is the most important point when working with social media, and needs an article all of it’s own. If you are a small business looking to get into social media, you should come up with a strategy first to figure out what you want to achieve and how.

Some basic questions you should be asking yourself before you even approach social platforms are ‘what do I want social media to do for my business, what goals do I want to achieve, and what message do I want to get across’. Think about which social sites will be best for you, you don’t need to use them all; Facebook may not appeal to your target market and posting pictures of paperwork on Pinterest are not likely to be very popular… Strategy is the key here, think about what you want, and get a social media expert to help you formalise this.

Put your personality out there

The great thing as I’ve said before about social media is its ability to give a human voice to your business. For small businesses this is an extremely valuable tool. It sets you apart from the larger faceless corporations. Use social media to enhance the human side of your business by putting your personality into your tweets and posts. Start a blog and show people the ‘behind the scenes’ workings of your business, tweet about your day, keep things funny and engaging. All of these things will endear customers to your business, it will make them want to interact with you online and hopefully convert to full paying customers.

Again any more tips for small businesses using social media – use the comments box below to give your own!

What should I post on social media??

Social media is a great platform for companies and individuals to get their message out there and gain followers, Likes and potential customers. But what to say? Of course if you are a business it’s a given that you should promote yourself, however, simply advertising your products is not going to gain you followers. There are certain etiquettes, tips and tricks to making your posts or tweets something that people actually want to read. Here’s a few of them:

 

Be funny

Never underestimate the power of humour. It goes a long way, and will definitely bring in new followers and people who want to hear from you. If you are a company, often your posts will have the boring banality of promoting your products, add in some humour too, mix things up, and you should see your following grow.

You can use funny or well placed hashtags if you are on Twitter, for example: ‘Gone over a deadline for an article on social media #Fail. Managed to misspell ‘social media’ in said article. #EPICFAIL’ (That actually happened). Or if you’re on Facebook humorous photos uploaded by you or funny memes you’ve found on the web never go amiss.

Humour is tricky – not everyone’s a comedian, I know I’m not by a long shot. Plus if you’re running a company you need to strike that balance between humour and professionalism. Test out your funny posts on others, even get some advice. But DO use humour, it will definitely engage and bring in likes and followers.

 

Be helpful

You want your posts to draw in people and potential customers and keep them there, so send out messages that are actually useful or helpful. Useful posts or content can come from anywhere, just look around you; if you work in a particular business give some tips and tricks of the trade, but without giving away too much information; post some useful articles you have found in your industry that could help others; if you are a local business let people know about events that are on in your area. Not only will you be helping your followers you will also be showing off your knowhow and demonstrating your expertise in your field, giving the impression that you are the expert. Posting useful content is a very powerful tool for your business.

 

Ask questions

Social media is social for a reason, it’s a fantastic way of engaging with potentially thousands of people. So get the conversation going!  One of the best ways of doing this is by putting yourself out there and asking questions.

Questions can focus on your business, for example people’s thoughts on a new product or process, (feedback like this can be particularly handy), or they can be more laid back, for example questions about what people think of a new film or current event, or fun questions such as what people like best, (like sweet vs. savoury popcorn – the latter all the way).

The point is to entice people in to engage with you, once someone has interacted with you by giving an answer to your question you can communicate with them further, get into a conversation. It’s a great way to find out about new people, gain followers, and communicate with someone who could be useful to you in future.

 

These are just some insights into the content of your posts. Do YOU have any further ideas? Feel free to list them in the comments section below.

 

 

6 reasons small businesses NEED to use social media

I’m just going to say it – social media is massively advantageous tool for small businesses – fact. I firmly believe this, and I think if you have a small to medium sized business you need to embrace social media right now if you haven’t already!

There’s a range of advantages to social media marketing, and specifically for small businesses. Social media is a platform that in many ways fits into small businesses’ ethos, workload and budgets. It’s easy enough to do if you know what you want, but has potentially huge rewards. Here’s my top 6 reasons for why you should be using social media as a marketing tool.

1. It’s Free!

It doesn’t cost anything to set up a Twitter profile or create a Facebook page for your business. Even tools that help you manage your social media output are often free, such as Hootsuite and Tweetdeck. Once you’ve set up your profiles that’s it, you’re able to write posts and messages that can reach out to potentially thousands of people.

Advertising on bill board or through TV or print publications costs money, which a lot of small businesses cannot afford. But social media has the power to reach a significant amount of people, thousands or even millions, for free! Even if you want to branch out, for example by paying someone to help manage your social accounts or upgrade social media tools, often it isn’t a lot of money, and is still far cheaper than TV or print advertisements.

2. Bring in those customers

Social media isn’t as airy fairy as some people like to think. It is a practical business tool that can bring in customers. One clear way it can do this is by converting followers or people you have engaged with through your social profiles into actual clients. Believe it or not this does happen. For example, a confectionery company I work with at the moment says that it’s social media platforms are accounting for around 30% of it’s customers. By setting up competitions that spread the word about their product, engaging with followers, inviting people to take pictures and post them on their various profiles and a specially set up web page, the company has been able to entice customers in through social media.

Gaining customers and clients is the aim of the game for businesses at the end of the day. With social media you can have a whole new avenue to help bring them in.

3. Easy business to business marketing

In the same way that you can reach out to and create a customer base through social media, you can do the same with other businesses. Platforms like LinkedIn and even Twitter are now often being used for businesses to get in touch with and communicate with each other and the ease of social media functions enables this to happen more easily.

LinkedIn allows you to build up a network of business contacts and companies who can help you with an array of business needs, such as marketing, finding that new employee, or even sending jobs or customers your way. LinkedIn Groups are another excellent feature in which you can join groups that are relevant to your sector. Here you can keep up to speed with current awareness in your industry, knowhow and articles, plus engage with useful contacts.

Twitter can help you engage with other businesses as it allows you to reach out to them and engage easily. One simple click and you are following a potentially very useful company for your business. You can then add them to a ‘list’ (find out more about this in my Twitter jargon buster), engage easily with them, or they may very well come to you, having spotted you the same way. This is another example of the ‘social’ in social media; these platforms allow you to meet and engage with people from all over, and hopefully people who will be useful for your business.

4. Get feedback on your business

One of the oldest and most useful features of social media is it’s ability to allow comments and all round easy communication between customers and companies. If you have comments open on your website your customers can comment on particular areas of your business, on Twitter they can directly engage with you in a public forum, and the same with Facebook.

This communication can be harnessed as an excellent tool for your business. You can easily get feedback about your products, whether they’re new or old, improvements you can make, comments on new things you have launched, as well as ideas or thoughts on other areas of your business.

Even if things backfire, and you get a complaint these can be extremely useful. If the criticism is in fact correct you have now been made aware of it and can fix the problem quickly. You can work to improve your processes so it doesn’t happen again. Often criticisms are misplaced and this is an ideal opportunity for you to engage with the customer, find out what has gone wrong and help them rectify it, solving their problem while looking helpful to your other customers.

Businesses spend a hefty amount of money on customer feedback and market research. With social media you are able to harness this for free!

5. Give your business a personality

All too often the companies that consumers buy their products from are faceless corporations with no-one they can directly talk to, and no personality they can identify with. Social media engagement allows you to put a human face onto your business, and in particular – your own personality.

Making your messages personal, humorous and engaging will endear customers to your business, and may just be the thing that draws them to you and away from your competitors. This idea of having a human side to your business, of reminding customers that real people are behind your products, and having  regular customers who know and trust you,  fits in extremely well to the small business model. Many smaller businesses have been doing this for years outside of social media, and it sets them apart from the large corporations. Social media is an excellent platform to show off your human side, embrace it!

6. The power to reach millions

Social media is a huge platform for your messages and to spread the word about your business. TV advertisements and billboards are all very well but less people are using these to find out about new products and services. Nowadays it is the social media and online platforms that people all over the world use to find what they’re looking for. And you are able to advertise on this channel, to millions of people, for free!

Don’t underestimate the reach of social media. Particularly if your social media campaign is done correctly, you will be able to advertise yourself to potentially a huge amount of people. Plus social media channels today have the power to harness particular groups in society, whether they are from a certain age group, geographical area, male or female.

Put it this way, my grandmother started using Facebook recently, and she’s not the first one of her age I’ve heard of that is doing this. That’s when you know that a heck of a lot of people are tuning into this medium – so why not get out there and reach them!

Time on my side – Top tips to save you time on social media marketing

One of the main challenges of social media is the amount of time it takes. Social marketing can’t be done by halves, you need to be consistently tweeting, posting, blogging and engaging. Clearly, this needs a lot of dedication and time, and for small businesses in particular it can be hard to find enough hours in the day.

Luckily there are some great tools to help lighten the load. Here’s some tips to free up some time and allow you to get on with the other important aspects of your business.

Social media dashboards and aggregate tools

There are a range of tools available to help you schedule posts and monitor your social platforms. Hootsuite and Tweetdeck social dashboards are good examples, check them out they’re free. Tools like Hootsuite allow you to arrange all your social media profiles (Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn) in one place and you can even have multiple accounts for each one. Monitor and post content to all of your platforms at the same time – in one easy click – instead of having to access each separately. Hootsuite also lets you schedule posts in bulk and quickly. If you are organised you can spend a short amount of time lining up a whole range of posts and tweets to go out through the week.

Stay mobile

Twitter, Facebook and other platforms will have apps that are available on your phone. Mobile phone apps allow you to quickly check in and monitor your platforms. Utilise them to post in short bursts throughout your day, in between those meetings, customers and commutes. Apps can also help you keep on top of any interactions by alerting you whenever you are messaged, mentioned or liked. This allows you to respond to comments and customers even while on the move, where ever you are.

The importance of strategy

One of the great advantages of a social media strategy is time saving! A good strategy can help you plan out what you want to achieve from your social efforts, and therefore what type of content you should be creating for tweets and posts.  

By understanding the point of your communications and planning them, you should be able to quickly and easily create posts, tweets and content. For example, if part of your strategy is to gain loyalty from customers, your posts should therefore be friendly and promotional. You need to think up competitions and deals, and promote why your product is best for them. Strategising means that you don’t have to waste time thinking up what to post today, instead refer to your plan and it should be obvious.

Getting by with a little help 

Lastly there are a wealth of social media marketing agencies out there who can assist you with posting and tweeting – for a fee of course. There are lots of benefits to this as not only will it save you time, but a good social media consultancy can also advise you and should be able to post useful and engaging content. For those of you who don’t want to lay out the cash there’s always a student around who would be happy to post on your behalf to gain experience for little or no money. Beware though – untrained, inexperienced students need to be vetted and briefed to ensure posts are sensible, tread carefully here. On top of this – remember that if you are considering handing over the reigns to anyone external, your personality may get lost. Ensure that it is still you or your business ethos that is being communicated.

I hope these tips help you to fit social media around your work so that both can thrive. If you know of anymore please post below in the comments!