How Social Media Can Affect Small Business Owners

Over the past few years, social media has been an integral part of any business marketing plan, coupled with search engine optimization; Social media has done wonders for many brands.

Especially when it comes to reputation management and branding, social media plays a key role. However you need to be very careful with your approach, it can affect you negatively as well. Contrary to the assumption that social media is only for big brands, it can actually work wonders for small businesses as well.

Most importantly social media is free or at least cheap enough which any small business owner can afford, using social media you can communicate with your audiences in a better way.

Below are a few tips that can be effective for small business owners planning to use social media:

Start with a good strategy

Like any other traditional marketing campaign you need to work on a strategy first like cost, return, and length of the campaign.

It’s vital that you analyze all the aspects, get enough materials for different social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc.; and proper scheduling.

While working on the budget and strategy, consider if you are going to do it in-house or outsource it, with a good strategy there are many tools available in the market which can help you to manage your social media yourself.

Focus on engagement and not sales

Social media should be focused on user engagement and not sales. It’s not about posting regular updates about your company and products to Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms. Think about your audience first, updates or posts should be that which your audience love. Don’t pitch as sales. Social media requires you to think beyond just posting updates about your product, extend it to industry, hot topics, or anything where your audience loves to participate and discuss this further.

Focus on quality than quantity

Your social media campaign should be planned in a smart way, it’s not about just posting 15-20 updates a day, irrelevant postings might irritate your audience and you might be treated as a spammer. Social media is more about one-to-one communication.

Instead of many updates, a single update that your audience likes to share and comment on can be more valuable to you.

Be Responsive

By responding to the questions and comments from users in the shortest possible time you can establish a reputation of good customer service on social media. You should always respond ASAP to users whether they are posting on your Facebook wall, marking you through tweets, or commenting on your blog posts or updates.

Apart from being responsive, you need to be polite and relevant to the topic. You can use different tools for better management.

Stay away from self-promotion

Though social media is about branding you should refrain from self-promotion, and keep posting news about your company, products, etc. but this should not cross 15-20% of your total posts.

Let users talk about you. User engagement is an essential aspect.

Be spontaneous, relevant, and compact

Social media can bring you followers and further can be converted to customers. A social media campaign for a small business plugged with a good website structure, great content and good support can do wonders for your brand.

If you are outsourcing this job to any internet marketing company, check their social media profiles, they should have multiple social media profiles, check their posts, user engagement, content quality, and how that is being shared over the social media sites.

Conclusion:

Try the above tips with great content and be responsive and polite to your audience, social media can bring good branding, reputation, and traffic to your website. Set targets that can be measured and work on your plan towards your goals.

By using websites and social media, you can build awareness about your brand and thereby increase the inquiries, potential customer base, and most importantly your conversions. With the help of social media, you can reach out to customers globally and also be a part of promoting local businesses which can enhance the image of small businesses in your area or region.