5 Essential Social Media Tips for Small Businesses

5 Essential Tips to Build a Better Social Media Presence 

You would be hard-pressed to find any small business, not on any form of social media in the current digital age. The real question is how many of those small businesses are just existing or thriving on social media. Having a social media profile and a few posts on it will not guarantee success; even investing in the latest social media channels and marketing techniques such as TicTok and videos is not going to go to send you viral overnight. It all comes down to planning and strategy, and that is why we have written these five essential tips to build a better social media presence to help you gain more traction with your social presence.

#1 Get Visual

Humans are very visual creatures, and we like things that catch our eye and are easy to digest. The best way to attract and hold someones attention is to use visual aspects to your social media, such as videos and well-designed graphics. 

Figures suggest that engagement with posts with a visual aspect could receive as much as 35% more engagement, and the statistics for video posts are even higher. To get visual with your social media, you might think you need to have lots of fancy equipment or even an entire video production team behind you – the good news is you don’t! Visual aspects such as these all make for good visual elements to your channel and can be created using a simple graphic design tool and your mobile phone:

• Infographics
• Product images
• Team photos or videos
• Photos of customers
• Photos of events
• On-site photos

Whatever form of graphics or videos you choose to use for your social media, the essential factor is always to make sure they are on-brand. Using stock photos has its place, but only as a backstop to any original content. This is the same for any media packs you see for sale, such as “101 social media templates.” These only leave your business looking the same as the hundreds if not thousands of other companies using the same thing.

#2 Know Your Audience

Knowing your audience takes two forms:

1. Knowing who you want to attract as a customer 
2. Knowing your audience – what makes them your audience 

Breaking that down further, the two aspects of your audience are knowing who they are – sometimes referred to as your target audience, then knowing how to communicate with them. 

Knowing who you want to attract as a “perfect customer” is both simple and complex. Saying “we just want anyone that likes our products” will not help you target a specific set of people and know when and how to communicate with them. An example of this would be you only having a TicTok profile posting many videos about your new walking stick range aimed at pensioners 70+, as your audience is in all honestly unlikely to be on the platform. 

Important factors to consider:

• The age range of your ideal customer.
• Are your products gender specific?
• Are you targeting local or national customers?
• Interests of your audience.
• The times they are online using social media.

Knowing these factors will allow you to curate content specifically towards the type of customer you want to attract, which will aid engagement, number of followers and conversion rates. It will also help you decide which social media platforms you need to invest time into to gain the best results. 

#3 Seek Relationships, Not Just Followers

People buy from people, an old saying that keeps coming back in marketing circles, and it is probably one of the most underrated marketing practices. Business owners assume they need to be all corporate and blank-faced when marketing their business online. After all, it works for the big companies, right? It might work for the big companies with a prominent corporate identity and fancy marketing campaigns. Still, there is a reason people choose to use small business owners and 9/10 times; it comes down to the people within the business itself. 

The best way to communicate with your customer base is to allow your personality to shine through; this will enable you to form long-lasting business to customer relationships. These are the customers that will come back time and time again to buy your products or services. Anyone can follow your page, but the quality is the crucial factor here, your page can have hundreds of thousands of followers, but if none of them engages with your business, they are worthless. An extreme example of this is business owners who buy followers to look “bigger” or more “popular” only to find their organic reach on the platforms sinks to an all-time low. Focus on quality over quantity. 

#4 Engage With Your Followers

If you do one thing to boost your social media, it would be to engage with your audience! If someone comments – reply or like their comment! If someone asks a question-answer them. Even better than that for platforms such as Instagram and TikTok is to follow them back and engage with their content, share their posts if they are showing off your products or services (with their permission, of course!). 

Engaging with your audience not only helps you form a longer-lasting relationship with your client base, but it also helps boost your organic reach on the social platform itself – so it is a double bubble boost! 

#5 Stay Active

Stay active and stay consistent, two valuable pieces of advice when trying to get your social channels a boost. This does not mean posting every few minutes or bombard people’s feeds with lots of posts, but having a social media strategy can help. A social media strategy helps you narrow down what to post and when, such as when your pages are most active in users feeds, and helps you plan posts and get them scheduled.

The worst thing you can do for any social media profile is left it to do nothing. People will assume that your business is not active or no longer trading if the social channel is abandoned. Depending on the nature of your business, one to two posts a week can be enough to keep it active, but most companies find that 1-2 posts per day can give your business a big boost – however, this all depends on the nature of your business what it does.

Summary 

Following these essential tips to build a better social media presence will create a more substantial online presence and help boost your business. However, building an engaging and robust social following takes time and effort, so do not expect overnight results! Here at Morgan Branding, we help hundreds of small business owners get stronger and more engaging social media presences, from managing Facebook pages to creating Tiktok content and beyond – we do it all! If you are struggling with your social media or want to save time by having us help you with it, get in touch today, and we can arrange it all for you! 

Need further advice? Get in touch with us here at Morgan Branding we have a fully dedicated team ready to help you and your business get ahead online. You can get in touch via our contact page or get social with us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn! 

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