There’s something we all understand today: our business has to be on social media. It’s an essential way of marketing your products and connecting with customers.
Although there are so many millions of people on social media, far too many brands don’t generate the results they’re after.
Before you start pouring money into paid advertising, make sure you’re doing the most with your social media profiles. A few small adjustments in your content strategy can go a long way.
So, if you want to generate more engagement and reach more customers through social media, here are 15 social media marketing tips you can follow.
- Have a Clear Objective
- Use the Right Social Media Platforms
- Know Your Target Audience
- Go Live
- Sell Products Through Social Media
- Optimize Your Profile and Bio
- Run a Giveaway
- Be Consistent, But Experiment Too
- Post at the Right Time
- Focus on Short-Form Video Content
- Be Social
- Make Sure You Use Clear CTAs
- Post Content Designed for Each Platform
- Humanize Your Brand
- Share Your Customers’ Successes
1. Have a Clear Objective
First things first, what do you aim to achieve with social media marketing?
One of the most important factors to consider when creating your social media marketing strategy is to set a clear objective. Without this, you’ll just be posting blindly. This won’t get you the results your business needs.
So, start by establishing a clear goal, or goals, that you want to achieve with social media. This could include:
- Sending traffic to your website
- Selling products directly on social media
- Growing your audience
- Growing your mailing list
- Increasing engagement with your existing audience
- Boosting sales of certain products
And so on.
By creating a clear social media goal, you’ll be able to plan out the rest of your social media strategy a lot more carefully. Basically, this means posting the right kind of content on the right social media platforms in order to accomplish a measurable goal.
Get this right, and you’ll be able to achieve something with your social media marketing efforts. This is the first essential social media marketing tip any small business needs to know. Strangely enough, it’s something that far too many businesses get wrong.
2. Use the Right Social Media Platforms
Your business has a unique target audience. This means you need to focus on social media channels that align with this audience.
Don’t focus on too many social media channels and spread your brand too thin. Instead of maximizing your social media strategy, this will actually deplete it.
One of the most important factors for a successful marketing strategy is to use the right social media networks. These channels need to align with your target audience and your brand. They also need to work alongside your social media marketing goals.
Start by understanding your audience, what demographics you’re targeting on social media, and where this audience is most active. This should point you in the right direction for what platform to use.
At the same time, consider your brand and what message you want to convey. If you’re focused on creating a fun, young brand image, then using TikTok could be a great idea. If you’re a more serious B2B, then you’ll probably struggle to create great TikTok content.
Local businesses need to be on Facebook, Instagram is a great choice for many types of businesses, LinkedIn is ideal for B2Bs, and so on.
Each platform has its own unique audience and type of content that performs best. By understanding what social media platform best matches your brand, you’ll be able to create a more refined social media marketing strategy.
It’s far better to master one or two social media channels than to try to cover every channel without success.
Check out our guide on TikTok vs. Instagram Reels for some helpful insights into choosing the right social media platform.
3. Know Your Target Audience
As with any marketing strategy, the more you understand your audience, the more successful you will be. This is especially true when it comes to social media marketing.
One of the most important, if not the most important, social media marketing tips for small business owners is to gain a complete understanding of your target audience and their demographic. You can do this by creating a detailed customer persona, outlining their interests, pain points, and what kind of content best matches them.
For your social media strategy, this will help you achieve two things:
- Focus on the right channels (as mentioned above)
- Create the right content that has the greatest impact
You want to speak directly to your audience and ensure you’re targeting the exact kind of information they want to find out. The more relevant your content is, the more engagement you’ll attract.
Understanding your target audience will also help you with things like engaging with the right groups on social media or posting at the right times.
4. Go Live
There’s a lot you can do on your social media accounts, but one of the best use cases is to create a genuine connection with your audience or customers. Your social media profiles provide an opportunity for you to connect directly with your audience, engage with them, and reveal that there is a human behind your brand.
One of the best ways to do this is to go live.
Platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook all offer Livestream functions. This has become a popular feature for social media users.
Try experimenting with going live on social media. You can use this function to introduce yourself, show a more behind-the-scenes look into your business, offer a face behind your brand, reveal your products in action, answer questions, and more. This is a great way for any small business owner to create a stronger connection with their audience.
Live content is more exclusive, and it can make your audience feel like you’re doing something exciting and new.
Check out our guide to going live on TikTok for more tips on how to do this.
Image: Later
5. Sell Products Through Social Media
Social commerce is the act of selling products directly through social media platforms. If you run an online store, then making the most of social commerce is one of the best social media marketing tips you should be using.
Each social media platform offers some variation of social commerce. You can check out our complete guide to selling on social media to learn the ins and outs of each platform.
The general idea is that you can tag products in your social media posts and send your followers to a product page directly in the social media app. This enhances their buying journey and cuts out friction – helping you to increase sales directly from social media.
This strategy works best with lower-value impulse buys, although you can use it for any type of product in your online store.
Try this strategy out if you have a catalog of eCommerce products, as it’s a great way to open up new sales channels and get your social media doing more for you.
6. Optimize Your Profile and Bio
One of the most essential social media tips that far too many brands get wrong is to make the most of your profile. Beyond the content you post, you need to ensure your social media profiles are set up to help you achieve your social media marketing goals. This should include spreading brand awareness and directing traffic to your website.
To optimize your profile, ensure you include clear and consistent branding across your social media profiles. Make your profile picture easy to recognize and consistent across each channel you use.
Ensure you include important business details in your bio – like your business address, contact details, and website URL. Your bio is some of your most valuable social media real estate – so make the most of it.
Also, include a short description of what your company does, and make it clear what your social media is all about. Far too many brands don’t make it clear enough what they do, and their social profiles end up being too vague. This could confuse new potential customers.
Go back to your social media goals and ensure your profile is aligned with this. For example, if your goal is to increase website traffic, focus your bio around a link to your website, If your goal is to boost sales, add a discount code and link to a specific product page.
7. Run a Giveaway
Giveaways are one of the best marketing tactics for any brand on social media. This is because they can help you achieve many different things, like
- Increase your audience
- Boost sales
- Increase social media engagement
- Spread brand awareness
- Improve knowledge of a new product
- Gain user-generated content
And more. No matter what you sell or who your audience is, running the right kind of giveaway can help you make a big impact on social media with low effort.
Here’s how a giveaway on social media should work:
- Choose a prize – this should be aligned with what your business offers and what your target audience is interested in. The best prizes are your products or services.
- Come up with contest rules. This will include how participants can enter and how a winner will be chosen. One of the best tactics here is to get participants posting about your brand, such as through a branded hashtag challenge or a photo entry contest, This can help you gain social proof and possibly go viral.
- Use a platform like Wishpond to create a contest landing page and capture contest entrants. You can add all contest entrants to your leads database and then follow up with them via email marketing.
- Promote your contest on your social media channel.
- Choose and announce a contest winner.
- Follow up. Now you should have a full mailing list of people who entered your contest. These are people who have shown a direct interest in your brand and your product. Send them a strategic email marketing message to promote your brand and possibly generate sales. A good practice here is to send out a limited-time discount code to help you generate impulse buys.
There are many different types of contests you can run one will help you achieve something unique. Whatever the case, running a contest is a low-effort social media marketing tactic, and it can help you generate a major impact.
8. Be Consistent, But Experiment Too
One of the most prominent social media marketing tips is to be consistent. Post consistently and frequently. Stick to your social media calendar and what you know.
Yes, this is incredibly important – especially the posting constantly part. However, it’s also important to constantly experiment and try new things.
This is because social media is always changing. New updates are constantly being rolled out, and new trends are always emerging. If you are too consistent (predictable), your social media tactics will soon lose steam.
Instead, focus on trying new things. Experiment with new features, new formats, and new styles of content. See what works and what doesn’t, and optimize your strategy around this.
This is good to do on social media because your social feed will soon change. If something doesn’t work, carry on posting and forget about it. Your audience will soon forget about it too.
If you want to make a big impact and go viral, the only way you’ll get there is to experiment, try new things, and continually grow as a social media marketer.
Here are a bunch of Instagram hacks and Instagram Stories hacks that you can try if you want to add some new ideas and formats to your content strategy.
9. Post at the Right Time
One of the best ways to beat social media algorithms is to post your content at the right time.
If you post when your audience is most active, you’ll instantly increase engagement as soon as you post. This is a good sign to any social media algorithm, and it will help you get your posts even more traction.
The result is your posts spend more time in “discover” or “For You” feeds, which will help you generate more awareness, visibility, and engagement.
The best way to establish when to post is to understand your audience and use your business profile’s analytics platform.
Check our guides on the best time to post on TikTok for more information.
10. Focus on Short-Form Video Content
In case you’ve been living under a rock, short-form video content is everything on social media right now. Reels and TikTok have taken over, and it’s only getting more popular.
As a small business, posting video content lets you generate more interest and engagement. Videos are the most engaging form of social media content, and they can help you grab interest and do more for your brand. They’re a great way to show off your fun side, reveal your products in action, and get more people interested in what you do.
Short-form videos like Reels and TikToks also make it easier to get seen by a lot of people. Thanks to the unique algorithms of these video formats, you can use them to reach more people. This is important for spreading brand awareness.
11. Be Social
Don’t forget the social part of social media.
Your role in marketing your business on social media is not just to post and promote content. You’re there to make your brand available to your audience, to engage with your customers, provide feedback, respond to reviews and comments, and provide a point where people can connect with your brand.
In fact, 80% of people expect brands on social media to interact with their customers in meaningful ways.
To do this, make sure you spend time actively engaging on social media and not just posting.
Follow other accounts in your niche, respond to all comments on your pages, ask your audience for feedback, generate reviews, comment on other social posts, and more. The more engaged you are, the more visible and trustworthy your social media profile will be.
12. Make Sure You Use Clear CTAs
Although it seems obvious, one of the most common mistakes small businesses make with social media is that they don’t include enough clear CTA at the end of their posts.
Your social media posts should have clear goals and strategies. This means you’ll want your audience to do something – which is what you achieve through a CTA.
Whether it’s to follow a link, enter a contest, leave a comment, share your post, or more, leave a clear CTA to help you generate more engagement and action from your social media posts.
If you just post with captions that don’t encourage action, you can’t expect your followers to ever engage with your brand.
Ensure you incorporate a single, clear CTA in each post to make it easy for people you understand what they need to do.
Image: Yoast
13. Post Content Designed for Each Platform
As we’ve already established, each social media platform is unique and has a unique audience. This means different formats of content work best on each platform.
You can post the same general content idea across your different social channels (such as promoting a blog post or a sale), but make sure you customize each post for each platform. Far too many businesses simply rehash the same images and messaging across their channels.
This lacks personalization and will lack impact.
So, spend time crafting unique messages and posts for each channel. You can repurpose the same content across your entire social media arsenal. Just make sure each post is properly optimized for the channel it’s on.
14. Humanize Your Brand
Despite what some influencers might have you believe, being authentic is key to social media success. If you want to perform well on social media, then try to humanize your brand.
Include a human in your social media presence. This could be the same person who appears in all your reels or a variety of recognizable people. Make your social media copy sound like it was written by a human and not a marketing machine.
Stick to your brand values, be true to what you believe in, and have fun with social media. The more human and authentic you are, the more people will trust and enjoy your brand’s content.
This is especially true for platforms like TikTok or Reels, where authentic, raw content generally performs better than overly edited, high-production content.
You want your audience to feel like they can have a genuine connection with your brand on social media. Humanizing your social media content can help you generate this.
15. Share Your Customers’ Successes
Social proof and user-generated content are incredibly powerful on social media.
People have a much easier time trusting messages from real people than from brands. By sharing things like reviews, testimonials, and customer success stories on social media, you’ll be able to develop a lot more trust in your brand.
When users on social media mention you or post about your product, be sure to repost or share this content. This is an excellent way to generate more meaningful brand awareness on social media.
Again, running a contest or giveaway is one of the best ways to generate this kind of UGC.
Summary
These 15 social media marketing tips for small businesses won’t cost you anything, and they don’t require any specialist knowledge or tools. Get them right though, and they can make a major difference to your social media strategy.
The important thing about winning on social media is just to be active, understand your audience, and be fully engaged on whatever channel you choose. As long as you have clear goals and are constantly engaging on social media and sharing the right kind of content with your audience, you should start to see success.
Looking for more social media tips, tricks, and hacks your business can use? Check out our guides below.
- 30 Instagram Hacks and Features You Didn’t Know Existed
- How to Go Viral On TikTok – 15 Hacks to Get 1 Million Views [+Viral TikTok Video Formula
- 19 Instagram New Features That You Need to Know About
- How to Develop an Awesome Content Marketing Plan in 10 Steps
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