The current business landscape requires a strong social media presence to build your brand into a reputable and reliable one to make yourself stand out from the pack, and increase interest for potential customers.
A recent article showed that 43% of customers search online for the physical store of a business before visiting for the first time. That's just under half, which is a massive number. This isn’t to say that only small businesses can benefit from being on social media, all companies can, but for businesses that aren’t a well-known brand, this will be crucial.
A strong social media presence doesn’t appear overnight, it requires effort and attention through consistent content creation. Smaller businesses with less staff will find it harder than bigger businesses with team members devoted to running their social media. The key for small businesses is to embrace their unique qualities and use those to move their social media presence forward. You won’t need to spend excessive amounts of money on a social media team. Just be you, and show that to the world.
Let’s dive in to some examples!
1. Pay Attention to Your Customers
The best place to start is always by paying attention to your target market. Find out what they’re talking about, find out what their pain points are, and find out if they have any questions about the industry your business is in. This is the quickest and simplest way to curate content specific to your audience.
To find answers to these questions, you can;
- Scroll through the comment sections of your social media accounts, including any brands or businesses that do what you do. (See what people want and give it to them.)
- Make use of the polls feature on social media platforms, a direct way to ask questions and receive answers from your audience.
- If you have a newsletter, you can include a more in-depth survey, but it’s best to keep it short you don’t want to overwhelm your potential customers.
- Tap into market research tools like Google Trends and AnswerThePublic to find out what things people are searching for online.
Part of your social plan should be to analyse and assess which of your posts have gained the most traffic and interactions. Which ones are garnering more likes, comments, retweets etc.? If you can pinpoint the patterns within these posts, you’ll be quicker to know what works and what doesn’t work. (An analytics tool will make this process even easier.)
Reviewing all the collected information will be an important step in the process. Take some time to see what the top-performing content on your socials has in common. Maybe your audience prefers video posts. Maybe they prefer behind the scenes pictures. Once these patterns have been identified, you can start to tailor new content to their preferences.
2. Tap Into Whats Trending and Make Use of Your Data
Staying up to date with the trending topics in your industry is key to keeping your brand name at the forefront of customers minds. Additionally, creating new content will be even easier when you know what is currently popular.
Spend some time using Twitter lists to your advantage. You can create lists and fill them with accounts related to your industry and business. If you’re ever at a loss for content, you simply scroll down the list and pluck out any gems you happen to come across.
3. Take Your Audience Behind the Scenes
Customers love to see more about how their favourite business works and the people who work hard to bring the brand to life. By showing the people behind the business, it makes your brand personable, and as a marketing tool it is extremely useful.
By showing how you develop products or the processes your business goes through adds big value over time. Use videos, stories, reels and IGTV for behind the scenes content. They don’t need to be at highly produced level of quality for a customer’s attention to be peaked.
Some ideas to work with:
- A day in the life of a team member
- Steps in development of a product/service
- Tours of the workspace (in the office and remote)
- Question sessions with team members
- Customer spotlight with the product/service
4. Keep it Simple
You can put in heaps of effort to make custom, unique content for your business, but you can also fill in the blanks by reposting content from around the web. Share some articles, photos and memes that relate to your industry and brand to save yourself time and effort while maintaining your social presence.
Putting together your social plan might seem a bit daunting at first, but it doesn’t have to be that way. If you put aside an hour of your workweek to focus on socials and content, you can build from there. Stay the course and have some fun with it!
Let us know on Twitter what works for you when it comes to building a strong social presence.
