small business social media strategy

Social Media: How to Create an Effective Strategy for Small Business Marketing

The relevance of social media isn’t lost on most small business owners these days. With the average American spending 37 minutes on social media sites each day, the importance has never been more obvious. The problem is that many people simply don’t know how to use it in terms of effective small business marketing.

Keep reading to learn more about small business marketing and what effective social media strategies you can use to help your company grow.

Know Your Audience

Just like with any marketing campaign, you can’t expect success if you don’t know who you’re targeting. Take time to figure out who your target audience is. Are your followers going to be 19 to 30, or will be they be over 50?

How you market to them through social media will be very different.

Pick Your Social Networks

There are a dozen social media platforms out there, and you can’t invest your time in all of them unless you’ve got a social media team ready to go. So you need to pick the platforms your audience uses the most.

Use poll results and other factual data to figure out which social media platform is most used by your target demographic. What your company does or sells also matters. According to Aabaco Small Business, 64% of Twitter users and 51% of Facebook users are likely to buy from brands they follow online.

Of course, you’ll also want to have a presence on the biggest platforms like Twitter and Facebook, even if your key users are heavily leaning on others.

Use Automation Wisely

Social media might be free when you sign your company up, but the time a small business owner could invest can get out of hand quickly. That’s why it’s important to automate tasks like following people back, posting messages on Twitter and LinkedIn, re-tweeting interesting and relevant messages from other users, and responding to direct messages. With over 120,000 tweets sent per second, you don’t want to miss out on the action.

You can even use automation for simpler platforms like Instagram, where a staggering five million images are uploaded each day.