Social Media Tips For Small Businesses

For a long time, marketing could be a costly disaster for small businesses. Spending money on a newspaper ad or billboard could be an expensive endeavor and it didn’t always guarantee results. Today, however, even the tiniest of small businesses can successfully market their companies for absolutely no cost thanks to social media.

If you want to be competitive in today’s landscape, having a strong social media presence is absolutely crucial. If you’re ready to attract new business and take your company to the next level, then follow these essential social media tips for small businesses.

Put Some Time Into Your Pages

When you’re designing a profile for your business on Twitter, Facebook or any other social media platform, you should put some actual time into your profile. Don’t rush through this part because you’re too excited to get to the actual posting. Instead, spend some actual time writing a good description for your business and choosing the right photos. The style of your social media pages should be fairly consistent across all the various platforms, as this helps you to better brand your business. Avoid jarring color schemes or artwork; while they might seem “eye-catching,” customers generally don’t like them.

Understand Keyword Marketing

Keyword marketing, also frequently known as “SEO,” is the idea of repeatedly using keywords that are relevant to your business. For example, if you run an ice cream parlor in New York, you’d want to repeat the phrase “ice cream parlor in Manhattan” more than once. By doing this, when people do internet searches for “ice cream parlor in Manhattan,” they’re more likely to find your page.

Of course, keyword marketing is complex and something that can take even professional web marketers decades to master. However, if you understand this basic principal of online marketing, you’ll be light-years ahead of other small business owners in your position.

Post Great Content

This seems like an obvious tip, but you’d be surprised at how many small business owners sabotage themselves by posting terrible content on social media. There are some key mistakes that you should be careful to avoid.

First and foremost, remember that you want to create quality posts that people will actually want to read. You don’t want to bombard your customers with links to products and services. In fact, if you do this, there’s a big chance that a lot of people will block your account, since they’ll be sick of the constant barrage of ads.

Instead, try posting articles, videos and pictures that are relevant to your business. If your company hosts its own blog, post links to new articles whenever they go live. The idea is to treat social media as a place where you have a real conversation with your customers and enrich their lives. The idea is not to simply bombard them with links until one of them accidentally clicks.

Communication Is Key

When your customers post on your Facebook page, they’re expecting to hear something back. Remember, social media isn’t just a tool where you post things for your customers to read. Rather, it’s a way to communicate and to have a real dialogue with your customers. Social media is half marketing, half customer service.

When your customers post a comment, take the time to write a sincere and helpful reply. If they post a complaint, don’t be afraid to publicly address their grievances. Customers like to do business with companies that own up to their mistakes and take steps to make it right.

Be Consistent

Social media marketing is exciting at first, but it’s easy to get burnt out by the daily grind. For this reason, a lot of small business owners end up abandoning their social media pages.

Remember, it takes time to build a meaningful audience on social media, but the only way to do it is by consistently posting and staying in communication with your customers. It’s important that you’re patient while you build up your company’s social media presence.

Social media marketing can be difficult to master, but it can make or break a business. If you follow this guide, you can use social media to attract new customers and reinvigorate the ones that you already have.

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