Are you eager to get connected with your target audience? Looking for the best ways to use social media for the growth of your small business? Here are some insightful steps that you can walk through and use to create an effective social media marketing campaign. Make use of this Social Media for Small Business.

Over the past few years, social media has become an integral part of small business marketing campaign. According to the latest statistics,

• Online adults using social networking sites has increased to 74%
• 81% of customers are researching online before making any big investment
• Social media accounts for around 57% of sales
• 3 out of 5 SMBs are gaining new customers via social media channels.
• Social media drives 31% of total referral traffic to a website

Every day, more than 4.5 billion Likes on Facebook, 500 million tweets on Twitter and 95 million videos and photos uploaded on Instagram are gained overall. These social media stats and facts clearly depict the small businesses, the importance of developing successful social marketing strategies to stay ahead of their competitors.

If you are pondering how to leverage social media to market your business, continue reading this guide to learn the steps necessary for developing a successful marketing strategy.

Determine the stage:

Before rushing to develop social media strategy, you need to do some researches to define your target audience and your primary goals. By knowing your target audience, their gender, age and requirements, you can easily come up with the appropriate content to share on social media channels. Once you have identified your target customers, you need to determine what you want to gain from social media strategies. Your goal should be S.M.A.R.T.– Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-oriented.

Select Your Platform:

The next step is to choose the right social media platform. As not all the social media platforms are appropriate for every business type, you should be very keen about choosing the one that works well for you. You must remember that for any small business, having a few loyal customers is more worth than having thousands of less-interactive followers.

Before choosing a social media platform for your business,

• Check whether your potential customers spend considerable time on a specific social media platform you like to choose.
• Evaluate whether that social media site works for your business
• Assess whether it can work well for the content you are likely to share.

You can conduct a market research to find out a social media platform which is being extensively used by your target audience. On the other hand, you can analyze the social media profiles of your competitors to know which platforms bring traffic and sales. You can use those platforms to drive more traffic and generate leads.

Decide when and what to post?

It is not only important to simply post contents on social media channels but should be done consistently. This helps you to gain the trust of your target audience, increase in traffic and a strong relationship. Of course, you must deliver valuable contents to establish stronger presence on social media within a short time. In addition, you should also decide on the type of posts that you want to share on social channels. You can share content in any of the following types:

• Blog Posts
• Pictures And Photos
• Humorous Posts
• Infographics
• Quick Tips
• Behind The Scenes Photos
• Quotes
• Questions
• Polls
• Promotional Material
• Fill-In-The-Blank Questions
• Short Videos

Share other peoples content:

Apart from posting your own contents, you can also share information related to your business industry. Moreover, you can also share other’s content, which is an effective way to build your knowledge and establish your authority in the industry.

Track engagements:

You can track the engagement of your target audience by creating short and trackable links. With this option, you can easily find out the links generating more clicks and links that do not. This helps you to refine the content you have shared and to recognize the type of contents that you can develop in the future.

Recommended number of updates for popular social media sites:

• Twitter- Minimum 10 tweets/day.
• Facebook – Minimum 2 posts/day
• Pinterest- Minimum 50pins/day
• Google+ – One or two posts/day
• LinkedIn – One post/day or 20 posts/month
• Instagram- One or two status updates/day

Creating social media strategy can be frustrating when you start from scratch. However, with the steps and tips described above, you can easily create successful social media strategies for your small business.

If you want professionals to create social media strategies for your business, feel free to contact Verve Innovation!