How to use social media for small business

Are you a startup or looking to find hot to use social media for small business? You came to the right place. Here I want to share with you some interesting advice and tips on how to start using social media in a business to get valuable customers and skyrocket your conversion rate.

Table of Contents

Creating a Knowledge Base

It is important to have an entry point for your customers and Facebook is exactly the social media for that purpose. If you’ve just started you will find yourself with social media pages, channels, or communities with no followers and so, of course, no activity.

This is the time to investigate other pages related to your industry and gets a knowledge database of what interests the community the most. What gets most shared and commented, what strategy of approach other businesses use to improve their social media…

Before jumping into social media. It is very important to build a different knowledge database in diverse social media as they all have different audiences.

Generates noise, make them talk about your company or your services

There is no better and more effective tool than Twitter to generate that noise, that stream of conversation, but you need to use it wisely and get to the correct audience.

This is what I suggest:

Start with the basic web interface basis Twitter to get followers and building trust.
Identify a hashtag related to your services or company that you can use in all your tweets.
Once you feel comfortable with the concept of Twitter, it’s time to look at third party tools to help you organize information, schedule tweets, key research issues, and participate in conversations. I recommend Hootsuite as your user interface and something like a Tweepi to help build a fan base.
Once you’re using third-party tools you can use TweetDeck to integrate key messages in all social platforms (there are many tools who say they can integrate your message across all social platforms, but instead of helping they generate more confusion. Our advice is that, at first, do it all in a simple manual way).

Some general tips for social media

Use the same avatar on all social platforms, having a real person picture means more trust from your audience.
Make quality tweets regularly is better than a lot of tweets in a short period of time.
If this article was related to a personal account I would not give you this approach, but because we dealing with a business account then we encourage you to use the general rule, which is that if you follow someone on Twitter, make sure they follow you as well to start building your fan community. It is usually easy when dealing with an audience interested or involved in the same or similar industry.
Join the conversations with other people – not only send messages / tweets with your own content. It is exactly like starting in a new job. You need to socialize and get to know the community.
Getting followers take time – be patient.
If people Re-Tweet your post go the extra-mile and thank them for it (some people tend to wait until the end of the week to do it and express gratitude to 5/6 people at once). This way they would probably re-tweet you again in the future.

Other Social media for small business to explore

Diversify your audience. Consider using other social platforms. Some of the other social platforms you should consider to grow your social media for small business are:

YouTube

If you don’t have a video, go ahead and create an interesting fun but short video after creating your YouTube account and upload it. Use your Facebook, Twitter and other platforms to raise awareness of your video. Remember, YouTube is the second most used search engine in the world.

SlideShare

This is also a very powerful medium for the exchange of messages or presentations. Go ahead and create and share your Powerpoint in Slideshare, It is indeed an amazing platform to get fast awareness. Slideshare also has its own social network with Facebook integration.

Currently, it is much more than a tool of labor resources. With more than 303 million active monthly users, 40% of which visit the site daily. LinkedIn is now a valuable community to expand your business. Let me give you some more details that may make you more engaged to use LinkedIn as your social media of choice for your small business

LinkedIn currently has over 610 million members.
90 million senior-level influencers and 63 million decision-makers use LinkedIn.
92% of Fortune 500 companies use LinkedIn.
57% of companies had a LinkedIn company page in 2013.
46% percent of the social media traffic to B2B company sites is from LinkedIn.
97% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn as a content distribution channel.
Only 3 million LinkedIn users share content every week.
In 2016, LinkedIn users published 130,000 posts monthly.
LinkedIn is responsible for 80% of B2B leads from social media.

Participate in communities that are related to your industry, began to participate in conversations, and build trust. Having done all that you can start your “advertisement” in these communities.

It will be very useful to try to build a good relationship with the Community Manager, as he/she is responsible for the community, and is the only one who can kick you if “you advertise” your products.

There are literally hundreds of different tools and social platforms. Do not panic! Start small; gradually creating your community of followers and most importantly, get involved in conversations with people. After all, it is with people you will build a business relationship, not with the tools.

Final thoughts

Social media is playing a big role in any digital marketing strategy of any small business today, and that trend will continue to grow in the upcoming future.

We are about to experience quite a few events that will shape the social media marketing industry. The end of the year is always the perfect time to look to the future and predict trends that will influence the social media industry’s behavior.

Facebook for example will most likely continue as the leading social media channel for marketers due to a combination of different types and configurations of ad formats, a huge active user base, and unprecedented targeting options.

On the other side, Twitter will continue to struggle as it undergoes an inevitable transformation from a traditional micro social media channel into a more news-oriented platform.

Instagram and Tiktok are the new black! … and it will continue to be a favorite among celebrities, lifestyle, clothing, and travel brands (just to name a few).

LinkedIn has been making some major UX, design, and functionality strides since 2017, going from an old-fashion boring B2B social media hub to a more attractive, easy, and cool interactive social media platform for professionals. It is quite possible it will finally become a popular choice for businesses in the upcoming couple of years, especially for B2B brands targeting certain types of groups of people. For any small businesses looking to expand and grow their business. LinkedIn needs to be your social media of choice.

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