Social media isn’t just for looking up old high school classmates anymore. Lots of people are using it to share their unique content and promote themselves as performers and artists. And 42 percent of people turn to find their favorite small businesses, ask questions, lodge complaints, leave reviews, and interact with other customers.
Successful marketing of your business on social media can help you increase visibility for your brand, strengthen customer loyalty, and bring in new customers to your online shop or brick-and-mortar location. Here’s how you can make it happen.
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Cross-Promote Your Social Media Profiles
It’s important to determine which social media channels are best for your business. You should do target market research to determine which platforms your target audience are most likely to use. However, you’ll likely still need to maintain profiles on multiple social media platforms. Make sure to cross-promote your profiles. If you have a Facebook, an Instagram, and an X profile, for example, make sure each profile offers links to the other two.
You should also be promoting your social media profiles off social media. Put them in your email signature line. Promote them in your newsletters. You can even put up “Find us on Facebook!” signs in your brick-and-mortar store.
Schedule Posts in Advance Using a Content Calendar
When you’re using social media to promote a business, you need to come up with engaging content on a regular and consistent schedule. It helps to plan out what you want to post in advance, using a content calendar. Plan ahead and create your content ahead of time, so that you can post regularly and at the right times of day to hit usage peaks. Use a good Phoenix SEO agency if you need help creating content on a tight schedule.
Embrace Customer Service
Social media provides many opportunities to offer great customer service and build your reputation as a reliable brand. Customers often come to their favorite brands’ social media profiles to ask questions, make complaints, and leave reviews. You should be monitoring your social media profiles and engaging with customers who leave comments. Address negative reviews and complaints and invite customers to discuss their issues privately in a direct message. This shows that you have strong customer service while respecting your customers’ privacy and sparing casual viewers all the gory details.
Encourage User Posts About Your Brand
Posts about your brand can do a lot to improve visibility and bring in more traffic for your small business. Encourage customers to post on social media about the products they’ve bought using your hashtags, or to leave you reviews online. You can repost this content to your own channels to show that you’re nurturing an active online community around your brand.
Leverage Relevant Hashtags and Trends
You can capitalize on social media trends and hashtags, including awareness hashtags, to reach a wider audience on your social media platforms. If you run a restaurant, leverage food-related hashtags to reach a broader audience. If there’s a silly post trend going around that’s relevant to your audience and your customers, jump on the bandwagon and have your employees make a post of their own. These kinds of posts can help you engage with current followers as well as attract new ones.
Run Giveaways and Offer Discounts
Giveaways and discounts are common promotional tactics that work well on social media, which presents the opportunity to offer unique promotions to your followers. Giveaways or social-linked discounts can attract new followers and generate buzz about your brand online. You could even attract new customers with giveaways that showcase the quality of your products.
Work with Social Media Influencers
Social media influencers can effectively drive followers to your social media channels, and you don’t even need to work with the most popular ones. In fact, less-popular microinfluencers tend to create more engagement than macroinfluencers with follower lists in the hundreds of thousands. People are more likely to trust influencers they can identify with, so they’re more likely to take product and services recommendations from them. Collaborating with a small influencer who reaches your target audience can really give your business a boost on social media, and increase sales, too.
Do you need a new way to market your small business? It’s time you committed to building a following on social media. Social media can open up your horizons, allowing you to reach and do business with anyone in the world. You just need to put in the work to make content that will keep viewers coming back for more, and to offer the customer service your social media followers need. Then you can enjoy more sales, online and in-person.
