Social Media is EVERYTHING these days. We all communicate by it, and it influences our daily lives – often without us even realizing it!
This article will show you how to use social media to market your small business!
1. Create accounts with social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and more!
Social Media platforms make it easy for small business owners to get started. With facebook – you will need your own individual account before you start a business page. For instagram, you can create an account just for your business – you do not need a personal account to begin. Once you create a page, you will need to start getting followers.
How do you do that? A good way to begin is to ask friends and family to start following your page and liking your content.
If you already have an existing customer base, send out an email to your customers letting them know that you have social media accounts and that you would like them to follow you. You can incentivize this by offering discounts exclusive to your social media followers.
2. Post high quality content!
Once you make your social media accounts and start to have your family members, closest friends, and existing customers follow you, you have to start posting high quality content! What is high quality content, exactly? I’m glad you asked! It’s content that encourages people to learn something new, get involved in the community, or to share what they are learning about!
For example – if you own a plumbing company – you might want to post self-written articles about DIY plumbing fixes, how to avoid certain plumbing disasters, the best plumbing materials to buy, etc.. People will be more likely to engage when they are learning something interesting or are being inspired – and this will translate into the consumer putting more trust into your company. Would you rather buy from a company that posts nothing about their industry or from one that has high quality posts?
3. Create videos of your products and / or services!
Fact – People are more likely to be engaged with your posts if they are video! If you are a solo contractor or your small business only has a couple of employees, don’t worry! Smartphones have made it easy to film yourself in any situation.
If you own a printing business, film the process of something being printed – and you can post it directly to many social media platforms such as facebook, instagram, or youtube! You can even post live videos, which allow you to interact with people as they comment in real time. These are great ways to get your customers and potential customers involved in what your business is all about!
4. Create boosted posts / promote your posts to reach a larger audience.
Facebook’s algorithm has changed over the years. Now, Facebook software engineers have determined that people want to see posts from their own friends and family before they see posts from a page or business that they liked on facebook. What this means for you as a small business owners is that your posts will not be reaching all of your followers.
It is possible that you may only reach 6-7% of your followers when you post a normal post on Facebook. In order to reach all of your followers, you will have to pay! This is called post-boosting.
For example, on Facebook, you might post a link to your blog where you write about some business strategies that you came up with. Originally, when you post this, it will only reach 70 out of your 1000 followers on your page. If you want everyone who follows your page to see it, you can hit “Promote” or “boost post.”
You will then be directed to pay a small fee to have more people see your post – and you can even select the demographics of who will be seeing the post. We pay about $15-20 to boost our posts to reach all 1000 of our current followers. We often see our followers share our posts – so our organic reach (or amount of people your post reaches without paying for it) increase dramatically!
If you have a loyal following on facebook and think that people will purchase a product if they see a deal, boosting your posts may very well be worth the couple of dollars.