8 Social Media Tips for Your Small Business

Whether you are selling a service or a product, as a business, you must know that social media is where your customers and potential customers are. So it is common sense that you as a seller have to be there. More importantly, you have to be there in the right way. Diving headfirst into the world on pins, likes, followers, snaps and tweets is overwhelming when you don’t know what you are there for. Or worse, when you don’t know how to operate these mediums to your advantage. So, in this case you definitely need some social media tips for your business that will help you in understanding these statistics and the results generated.

A social media presence of your brand can act as your brand’s marketing department, public resources department, and much more if you what you are getting into.

1. Limit Your Platforms

The first tip for social media that you need is to limit your platforms. There are a lot of social media sites that are out there which everyone seems to be using. Plus, there are many more that you have never used or even heard of before. Being active on social media as a brand doesn’t mean that you have to have an account on every social media site you come across.

The best strategy is to choose a select few (two or three) and master them, rather than dawdling through all of them. To pick out the select few first you need to figure out where your business’ audience already is.

One way is to survey your mailing list, another way to do this is by signing your website up with google analytics and a third way to do so is by looking on which social networks your biggest competitors and influencers in your niche are.

After you have narrowed down your social media targets, it will be much easier for you to focus on your content without having to worry too much about your reach.

2. Plan Everything

Nowadays everything you do is done on the internet. If a customer has to ask you a question, they would much rather post it on your social account rather than picking up the phone and calling you. And if you are too slow to respond to customer queries, it will definitely make you look bad.

Although it is a reality that as a small business owner, social media can suck up a lot of your time, the way around it is to pick one day of the week on which you schedule all your posts for the next week. Then if you get any questions or feedback, you can check it daily and respond to it. The best thing is now while replying to the customers you won’t have to worry about your future posts. Schedulers like buffer and Hootsuite let you sync up all your accounts in one place to schedule and plan your posts in advance.

3. Curate Content

Scheduling a week’s worth of posts may seem like a daunting task if you are worried where you’re going to get all the content from. Don’t worry because you don’t have to do it all alone and by yourself.

There’s a great chance that you probably see a lot of share-worthy content related to your niche on a regular basis. So what you can do is share a few of those relevant posts from other pages with appropriate attributes to the other pages. There may also be some content which is very high quality and can be beneficial for if it was on your page, and there is no harm in sharing that content as long as you are giving credit where it is due.

Sharing other people’s work is not just a useful way for you to get the content that you require on your feeds but it is also a very nice gesture if done properly. It is likely that they will notice and perhaps even return the favor.

4. Be Pretty

Remember those old days where you could share and use boring or low-quality content on your social feed and still get a great engagement? Yes, that’s right, no days like that ever existed.

But still now with the rise of HD graphics, people expect everything to be pretty and that includes your social feeds too. Overly simple and old-fashioned designs don’t work now and people now expect pages that they are associated with to be prettier than ever. Your brand social media feed represents your brand image and that image should be share-worthy. By following these social media tips you can expect to increase your ranking.

5. Write Killer Captions

As much beneficial and crucial it is for you to upload good quality content, a nice and striking caption can take your content to another level. Review the following tips for good captions:

a. Tell a Little Story

You could introduce your new product with a “This is our so-and-so product and it does this-and-that” Or you can share a funny backstory behind the making of that product. Which one do you think is going to make a lasting impression?

b. Watch out for Repetitive Info

With a caption you don’t have much space and even if you do, you want to make short and simple – something that sticks. Avoid using the same word more than once and be concise. This one of the social media tips that is ngelected by businesses and as a result a negative impact is seen.

c. Always Proofread

Read your caption slowly and out loud before you confirm anything. This technique will help you see if it sounds good or not. Also check for typos and any errors that you might have made.

d. Have Fun With Captions

While you generally want to avoid clichés, you can tweak them a bit to make them relevant for your purpose. Doing that you just enter yourself into a whole new world of caption writing.

6. Harness Hashtags

Hashtags, formerly known as the “pound” symbol have rebranded themselves and are now included in A-list characters.

Using hashtags(#) correctly and effectively can help your business reach a much wider audience than your current following. Social media site are emphasizing more and more on hashtags these days. For example, Instagram now lets users follow hashtags instead of users.

Using hashtags for your field can help potential customers find you when they’re not even looking for you. Instagram is the best platform for utilizing hashtags. Check some of the important things that you should know while using hashtags on Instagram.

7. Know — and Engage — your Audience

One of the tips for social media usage is to engage your audience. Figuring out your business demographics is an important part of your online strategy. You need to understand your audience and have specific details about your customers.

A good way to engage with your audience is to keep them up to date with your development progress. You can also tease your audience by creating suspense for new products before you unveil it to them. If you are hosting any events, highlight the participating individuals weeks before the actual event.

You could also host online contests or giveaways to encourage engagement and to build rapport with your customers. With these social media tips you can get the maximum advantage.

8. Keep a Social Eye on Competitors

Looking at your competitors is a great way to spark creativity. Go through the feed of other popular accounts from your field and analyze what kind of posts perform the best. See what hashtags they are using and what kind of posts are generating a lot of engagement.

You can also interact with influencers in your field and collaborate with them for new posts. And there’s no rule which states that you can not like your competitors’ posts or follow them. Just because they’re your rivals, it doesn’t mean that you can’t be friends. This is one of the basic tips of business.

These are some of the prominent social media tips that you can use for increasing the ranking and visibility of your business.