If you want to stay ahead of the competition, you have to keep up with the latest social media marketing trends. But it can be difficult to find the time to sift through all of the information out there. To save you some time, we’ve put together a list of nine social media marketing tips that you can use to improve your business.
A solid social media strategy offers an incredible opportunity for businesses to:
- build brand awareness
- develop customer relationships
- and even make sales directly within social platforms.
Here are all the social media tips you need to market your business in 2022:
1. Start with a plan
Utilizing social media for business is easy to do. The tools are something we use daily in our personal lives, so we are already familiar with them.
It’s free to make a Facebook Page for your business, start posting on Instagram, or create a profile on Twitter.
So before you start throwing yourself headlong into any ol’ social space, first draw up a social media plan. Although social tools can be accessed for free, it is important to remember that time and effort must still be invested into your business. Therefore, it is crucial to develop a social media plan before venturing into any social spaces.
If you don’t have a plan, you won’t have a clear goal to work towards. This means you won’t know if your efforts are paying off.
It is important to take the time to create a social media plan to make sure that your social media efforts are supporting your specific business goals.
Here are some strategic social media tips from our guide to creating a social media marketing plan:
Set social media goals and objectives
The SMART framework is a good guide for creating goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely.
Your business goals should be based on things that will actually have an impact, like acquiring customers or increasing your conversion rate, instead of just worrying about getting more likes.
Research the competition
What social media platforms are your competitors using? What strategies are they employing? Try not to copy them directly, but learning from their example can help you speed up your own process of experimentation and success.
A competitive analysis is a research tool used to compare your business to other businesses in your industry. This analysis can help you learn what strategies are working well for others and identify areas where your business could improve.
Conduct a social media audit
If you’ve been using social media, it’s time to take a step back and see how your efforts have been going.
We have a social media audit template that is easy to use and will walk you through the process.
Get inspired
Research other businesses in your industry and see what strategies they are using that you could adapt for your own business. Also, look at businesses in unrelated industries and see if there are any ideas you could use.
Most social networks have a business section on their website that contains useful case studies.
This blog is also a great source of inspiration because it always includes lots of examples. Pay attention to your favorite brands and what makes you want to click, follow, or buy from them.
Create a social media calendar
A social media calendar can help you time your posts so that the right content is shared on the right social channels. It should also include a plan for your content mix.
If you want your content to be successful, start with the 80-20 rule. Make sure that 80% of your content is informative, educational, or entertaining for your audience. The other 20% can be used to promote your brand or sell your products.
2. Decide which platforms are right for you
Do not automatically assume that your audience spends their time on the same websites that you do.
If you’re looking to target Gen Z, you shouldn’t necessarily write Facebook off. According to data, nearly a quarter of Facebook users are aged 18-24.
Although social media might not be a top priority when selling to baby boomers, it should be considered. The top social networks for boomers are Facebook and Pinterest. Adults over the age of 65 are Facebook’s fastest growing audience segment.
Despite your initial thoughts, TikTok marketing could be a right fit for your brand. Don’t write it off – even well-established brands with an older target audience are experimenting with the platform.
This means that TikTok is still continuing to grow in popularity and is being downloaded by a lot of new users.
We have collected information on the demographics of major social media platforms to help you understand where your audience is spending their time online. However, keep in mind that this is just a general overview.
To ensure that you’re getting the most out of social media for your business, you’ll need to do some research to understand how your specific target audience spends their time online.
You don’t have to use all social media platforms to reach all audiences. You can use different channels to reach different audiences or to meet different business goals.
The average internet user has 8.4 social media accounts, so you can connect with them on different platforms according to what you want to achieve.
3. Expand your audience
Once you have a clear picture of who your audience is, you can create content that is more appealing to them. You can also look for ways to reach more people just like them through social media platforms.
For example, when people were looking for ways to fill their time at home, The Great Courses Plus switched up its Facebook advertising strategy to expand its audience quickly.
They created an extended free trial offer and advertised it to a broad audience in the United States. They then used lookalike audiences to reach new audiences in Canada, the UK, and Australia who had similarities to their best existing customers.
The audience expansion strategy resulted in more than 10 times the average monthly subscriptions.
You can reach new potential customers for your local business by using social media. For example, you can use Hootsuite geo-search streams to monitor and respond to local conversations about your business. This way, you can connect with potential customers who are already in your geographic area.
4. Understand your audience
It’s also important to make sure your posts are timely and relevant to what’s going on in the world. If you want to be successful in using social media for small businesses, you need to know your audience and post about topics that matter to them.
The best way to grow your social media presence is by posting material that is useful to your customers or clients. This will help increase reach and engagement.
Once you know who your target audience is, look into what types of accounts they follow and what kinds of posts they share and enjoy. This will give you a better idea of what they value.
Make sure that the content you are publishing has a clear purpose and is not just generic.
If you’re curious about how to get more engagement on your posts, the answer is simple: post content that is helpful to your audience. When you provide value for your readers, they are more likely to stick around and engage with what you have to say.
Why are you loyal to certain brands? Is it because of their product, or are there other reasons?
Determine what your ideal audience expects from you and offer them something that others can’t.
5. Assess your competition
Part of a social media strategy for small businesses is to see what social media platforms your competition is using.
There are two reasons why competitor reviews are important:
- The performance of your competitors on platform-specific channels can be an indicator as to whether it’s a platform worth using for your own small business.
- Reviewing their content (good and bad) can also help influence your ideas.
This means looking at what they’re doing, what’s working, what isn’t and what you can do to improve your own strategy You shouldn’t just blindly copy what your competitor is doing in terms of content strategy. Take a close look at what they’re doing, what’s working for them, and identify areas where you can improve your own strategy.
The goal is to determine which types of content are effective, and which ones are not. This can help you understand a competitor’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as what people expect from a brand in your same industry.
You are likely aware of who your competitors are.
If you can’t find any competitors this way, try taking your most popular keywords and searching for them on a search engine. For example, if your small business is a barbershop, you might search for “barbershop [insert area name]” and see what comes up.
By conducting a search, you can learn about which social channels your competitors are using, their publishing frequency, and the type of information they share.
In the future, you will be able to see which social media platforms are most popular and what content performs the best.
6. Define your brand look and feel
The voice of your brand should be similar to the personality of your company. This is how you communicate with your customers.
How you talk about your business, products, or services to a friend can help you refine your brand’s tone of voice. Note that this may vary slightly from one platform to the next.
7. Establish KPIs and benchmarks
If you want to reach your social media marketing goals, you have to know how to measure them. This means understanding which metrics to look at, how to interpret them, and what to do with the information you get from them.
It is important to compare your current social media performance with your past performance in order to understand the results of your previous work.
You can compare future strategies to prior results to see if your performance is improving.
What are KPIs and benchmarks and how can they help you measure your social media marketing efforts?
What are your goals? And which social media platforms are you using? Depending on these factors, the most important KPIs will vary.
For example, if you’re looking to increase brand awareness, you could track your reach and impressions. If you’re looking to increase interest in a particular product, you could measure website referrals.
8. Do your research
A competitive analysis is an evaluation of your competitors to identify their strengths and weaknesses, as well as how they measure up to your own business.
This is a way of gauging your progress by seeing how you measure up to other successful people in your field. This can help you identify areas that need improvement and strategies that aren’t working well.
A social media competitive analysis of social media, in particular, will assist you in:
- First, determine who your social media competitors are.
- Learn which social media platforms they use and how they use them.
- Determine how effective their social media strategy is.
- Compare your social media results to those of your competitors.
- Recognize the social threats to your company.
- Finally, look for flaws in your own social media marketing plan.
Competitor analysis on social media can help you learn about your competitors, your small business, and your target market.
9. Focus on the right social media platforms
The most important thing to do when choosing social media platforms for your business is to start with the ones that make the most sense for your business. This will save you time and ensure that your content calendar does not get overwhelming.
Understanding how each social media platform works and what type of content to use on each is key to a successful social media strategy for small business. Here’s an overview of how to use each social media platform to your advantage:
As a visual platform, Instagram is perfect for promoting your products or services. You can engage potential customers with posts and videos that show your products or services in action.
Facebook can be used to share photos, company updates, videos, and other educational content in order to increase brand awareness and trust.
Twitter is a social media platform that allows users to send and receive short messages as well as shareable media. This makes it ideal for announcements from companies, articles or blog posts, and customer service.
TikTok
Small businesses are using TikTok to show how their products work, share behind-the-scenes, give tips, and join trending challenges.
LinkedIn can be a great help if you’re looking to expand your business network, raise brand awareness, or attract new talent.
Pinterest is a visual-based platform that can be used for “scrapbooking” or saving content by “pinning” photos or videos to a virtual bulletin board. It’s perfect for showcasing your brand’s look and feel.
YouTube
A platform that is perfect for content that is more educational and in-depth, such as styling tips, interviews, tutorials, and longer-form videos.
You do not need to post on every social media network to have a successful small business.
You will end up being less effective if you try to manage too many social media platforms.
Importance of social media for small businesses
If you have a lot of responsibilities at work, you understand what it’s like to have to do many different things.
There are many things you need to do to keep your small business running, and social media marketing is an important part of promoting your brand on social platforms.
This means that social media can be a great way for small businesses to connect with their audience, and build a loyal customer base.
Even though social media can be used for marketing, it can also create leads for your business. You can use social media to create content and resources that your target audience will find valuable. By doing this, you can also build brand affinity with your audience.