Social media is one of the effective ways to grow your small business. Business owners use it for different reasons, but it’s safe to say the leads, clients, and customers you need are on one social media platform or another.
According to Statista, 3.6 billion people use social media worldwide. In the United States alone, there are approximately 112 million Instagram users. This figure is projected to hit 120 million by 2023. The question now is how do you as a business owner tap into the huge opportunity social media offers and leverage it to grow your small business?
We have Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Reddit, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc. – all have a large number of users who might be potential customers, or are currently your customers.
In this article, we’ll look at the four simple tactics you should start implementing to grow your small business using social media.
1. Connect with the right audience
The success you have using social media as a small business depends on the audience you acquire. It’s important to connect with the right audience. The right audience is people who are actually interested in your products and services.
To run an ad campaign on any of these social media platforms, ensure you narrow down and target an audience who is potentially interested in what you offer. This could be by geographic location, demographic, shared interest – or even the fact they follow a particular brand or thought leader.
You can verify your targeting by tracking their engagement with your products and services.
2. Offer quality content to solve their problem
People follow your business on different social media platforms because they trust you have a solution to their problem. Nobody wants to engage with content that isn’t useful.
Make it a priority to consider what your audience needs whenever you post content on social media platforms. This might not necessarily be about buying your products or services. It might be advice, or a suggestion or tip that would be helpful for them.
But it may include some call to action, or a prompt for them to contact you to learn more.
3. Use social media management tools
Managing multiple social media platforms can be demanding and overwhelming. Imagine posting on all of your social media platforms, monitoring reactions, and responding to every comment.
With social media management tools, almost all of your activities can be automated. You can schedule posts to all your social media platforms, analyze the engagement on your posts, and capture trending topics in your niche.
You can even access all your social media platforms in one channel, and reply to comments across all your social media platforms, which helps to create more awareness for your brand.
Generally, increased engagement leads to more sales.
4. Pick your perfect platform(s)
Not all social media platforms will work for your business. It’s important to identify the platforms that make sense for your strategy. (You’re probably better off doing a few well than doing all of them inconsistently.)
For instance, if you sell B2B, that is offer products or services to other businesses, LinkedIn might be the right choice because it’s for professionals who want to connect with other professionals.
However, if your business is visual and has beautiful graphics or images, Instagram might be a good choice for you, since it’s mainly a visual content platform.
Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Reddit can be good, too. It all depends on which works magic for you because your ideal clients are there.
Most small businesses that want to thrive now should consider leveraging social media. It’s a huge industry that’s growing by the day worldwide.
Most of your potential and current clients and customers are on these platforms. Connect with them, offer them quality content, and watch them want to do business with you.
