Social Media for Small Business: A Beginner’s Guide Part 2

.... continuation from Social Media for Small Business: A Beginner’s Guide Part 1

3: Start Humbly

After determining your target audience, knowing where to effectively reach them, and optimizing your website for your social media channels, it is time for you to get social.

Keep in mind: get started today, but start humbly!

Social media necessitates a lot of time energy, which for small businesses, are valuable resources. So, always start with a doable load. As much as possible, choose a single or two social media channels to start with.

The best way to ensure consistency is to integrate social media tasks into your everyday routine. Make sure to dedicate sufficient time to reasonably deal with your social media accounts. As much as possible, update or manage them twice a day.

In your first two months, spend a minimum of 15 to 30 minutes a day on social activities. However, you can always increase the time whenever you see fit.

When sharing content, use your customer profiles to find out what information is relevant to your target customers who use that particular social network. For instance, your shared information in Twitter must be different from LinkedIn.

The key objective of your content is to help a specific group of readers. Give them easy-to-follow and valuable tips, or share information that can help them unravel a problem. Over time, people (or your followers) will view you as an expert and thought-leader in your industry.

4: Pay Attention and Be Involved

Conversations in social media are taking place all around in real time.

Hence, “social listening” is actually a very good maneuver to keep an eye on people’s thoughts about your business. Pay attention to and respond to comments even they’re negative.

Content is the most important thing in social marketing. Regrettably, searching the internet for good content that are worthy of sharing can be really time-consuming. To avoid getting stuck along the way, arrange a process where you can organize and combine quality content that gives value to your audience. If your schedule permits you, add the content to your editorial calendar so you can instantly share it when you are ready.

5: Have a Daily Plan

Once you have a stable stream of content in your pipeline, you are set to post and participate in social media.

Create a list of activities you plan to carry out every day. For instance, tweet and retweet 2-4 times on Twitter, comment on five different Facebook pages, or pin/re-pin around 5 images in Pinterest every day. If you are using LinkedIn, you could share a link and like other user’s links.

Once these daily activities are included in your “comfort zone”, then you can advance your efforts by joining groups and communities in order to direct specific demographics. Start and engage in conversations by throwing thought-provoking questions and/or posting comments to other people’s posts.

In addition, always welcome your new followers and don’t forget to thank those who share your content voluntarily.

Most importantly, be deliberate about your daily social activities. Contrary to popular belief, success is not about chance; rather, it is mainly about tactics and strategy. 

Check out the steps six to seven on how to make social media marketing work for your small business: a beginners guide part 3.