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How Small Businesses Are Using And Benefitting From Social Media

Our small business prospects and clients often ask us about our expertise and use of social media to drive business results. I am a firm believer that businesses should have a strong social media presence, but I’d argue that it’s more about reputation management than it is driving direct business. The reality of social media is this… very few buyers turn to social media to research a purchase decision.

There are exceptions of course. For example, I belong to some industry groups where I ask other colleagues their impression of a company, a product, or a service. I also believe social media ads can be beneficial to small businesses with a couple of strategies:

  • Social media ads that promote products that are emotional purchases. Valentine’s Day is coming, for example, so getting gift ideas for a loved one is a great tactic to drive revenue.
  • Additionally, using ads to try and get a visitor to return to your site or a buyer to complete their abandoned shopping cart purchase is also quite effective.

How To Use Social Media For Small Business

This infographic from Post Planner, How To Use Social Media For Small Business, sums up how businesses are effectively using social media to build awareness, manage their reputation, promote their products and services, and communicate directly with potential buyers. Here are the 8 strategies that Post Planner recommends:

  1. Reputation Management – social media can help you establish a name and reputation for your small business by sharing relevant content, engaging in conversations, and leveraging marketing collateral. One critical strategy missing here is review management to collect citations, testimonials, ratings, and reviews from your current customers.
  2. Attract Potential Clients – combining strategy with creativity, using sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and other platforms enables small businesses to tell their story, share their differentiators, encourage interaction, and solve their audience’s problems.
  3. Connect With Like-Minded Business Professionals – I’m well-connected on LinkedIn and I love utilizing my network to meet thought leaders, identify partners, promote our work, as well as find prospective employees. The information I collect from the network I’ve curated is priceless.
  4. Diversify Your Marketing Efforts – Brand awareness isn’t a single-channel strategy, it requires a multi-channel strategy where your brand is everywhere your prospects are. Mixing social media with online advertising and public relations (PR) efforts will expand your business beyond traditional limitations.
  5. Repurpose Top Content – Use blog posts, past newsletters, and other marketing collateral to repurpose your content across social media. This raises awareness and sends interested followers over to your website. Some examples are spotlighting an event, providing tips via video, sharing a podcast, live streaming, or promoting an FAQ board on Pinterest.
  6. Make Your Time And Money Count – Once you know why, creating a social media strategy that’s streamlined and targeted can help you drive business. One way we ensure this is done is by automating the share of every article on social media regularly as well as offering our visitors a means to share our content as well with social media sharing buttons.
  7. Drive Traffic To Your Website / Blog – Doing keyword research and understanding the terms and phrases that your market is researching will help you develop valuable content that is consumed and shared on social media… capturing potential client attention.
  8. Use The Right Tools – Using a social media calendaring program, automated social media posts, graphic design tools like Canva for social images, and other platforms for workflow processing and automated publishing will maximize your reach without impacting your resources.

Here’s the full infographic from Post Planner.

How to Use Social Media for Small Business Infographic

Disclosure: Martech Zone is an affiliate of Post Planner and is using affiliate links in this article.

Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is CMO of OpenINSIGHTS and the founder of the Martech Zone. Douglas has helped dozens of successful MarTech startups, has assisted in the due diligence of over $5 bil in Martech acquisitions and investments, and continues to assist companies in implementing and automating their sales and marketing strategies. Douglas is an internationally recognized digital transformation and MarTech expert and speaker. Douglas is also a published author of a Dummie's guide and a business leadership book.

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