Making social media work for a small business
- Updated on: 2017-05-01
- Read original article here
If you are looking to create awareness, communicate with potential clients and improve your search engine visibility, social media marketing can help you get there. There is no investment required as you start – this could however change if your business grows and you might need to get additional resources to manage your online profiles and activity or if you decide to do some paid advertising.
Effective social media marketing improves your SEO rankings, so if you are struggling with getting your website on the top search pages, your regular online activity will help to make your website more visible. Even though there is no cost, you are investing your time and social media can be very time consuming – here are a few of our tips on how to save time and make social media work for your small business:
Not all the channels work for everyone. Think as your potential clients – consider which platforms would you prefer to use and what content would you be interested in. I would always recommend to test different campaigns via different channels and compare – learning doesn’t get better than that! You can then make your call on what you have seen and focus your efforts where you see most results. If you are not sure on which social media platforms could work for your small business, have a look at our post here.
Being able to schedule your updates in advance will save you a lot of time. Don`t forget – you still have the task of having to collect the content ready to be shared beforehand. I would suggest you set up Google Alerts on topics of interest so you get triggers regularly, but also be constantly on a lookout for interesting content your followers would like to hear about. For automating your updates, consider using simple tools such as Buffer or Hootsuite – they are great time savers and will help you analyse how your updates are doing.
Again, this comes down to testing different times and working out what works best for your audience. Use simple logic based on who your followers are and when are they most likely to have the time to see your updates. Then test different times that you think might work and see what your results tell you! You will find many statistics on times that work best – such as weekends are better than weekdays. I would suggest you test your own audience. I have seen Sundays being the most successful but you also need to remember that whilst there are more active users online, the volume is much higher too. So just do your own research and then repeat what works best.
Based on the volume of updates, schedule them so there are even gaps. Keep in touch with your followers, interact with them and join online conversations daily. The purpose of social media is to share valuable content with other users and if your followers see regular communication, they are going to be repeatedly reminded about your business and more likely to remember you when in need of your products or services.
