How to Improve Social Media Marketing Performance of Your Small Business
Updated: Jan 24, 2023
Photo by Hookle
It’s been a while since the need for social media marketing was even up for discussion. You need it — it’s just a fact of life.
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Are you a small or medium-sized business looking to grow an audience quickly? Or an entrepreneur on the prowl for new clients?
Today, achieving your digital marketing goals without some kind of social media presence is practically impossible. Even the biggest corporations in the world are using social media marketing to show a more “human” face.
The million-dollar question is — how do you use social media the right way as a small business
Considering all of that, the million-dollar question is — how do you use social media the right way as a small business? What does it take to outperform the competition and do more to get and keep the attention of your target audience?
We have listed a few basic but fundamental tips on how to improve the social media marketing performance of your small business.
1. Choose The Right Platforms
Photo by Hookle
Back when there were just a couple of social media platforms, things were relatively simple — and even the platforms that exist today were much more straightforward and less feature-packed.
Today, there are almost too many choices. To help you, we collected some tips on how to choose the right platforms for your small business.
To avoid being overwhelmed, keep things simple. At least in the beginning. Do some research on your audience and see where they are.
To avoid being overwhelmed, keep things simple
Teenage-focused brands will get more visibility on TikTok and YouTube, while a B2B SaaS brand will probably catch more of their target audience on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Of course, there are still a couple of “mainstream” social media platforms that are used by pretty much everyone: such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. You should focus on having a visible presence on these first, and then slowly branch out when you notice you’re ready to.
Once you've chosen platforms, read on how to set up different social platforms for your brand.
2. Follow The Right Metrics
The Internet is filled with countless self-proclaimed social media marketing gurus — all of whom have their own “secret recipe” to success on social media. You’ll read stuff so complicated that it basically starts to sound like alchemy — and it’s probably just as untrue.
In reality, you need to worry about two basic things at first: your reach and number of posts. In other words; you need to publish regularly (number of posts) and interesting content that your audience love (reach). Later on, you can expand monitoring more metrics if you feel the need for it.
If you don't publish regularly or completely forgot for a while, your audience might think your business was shut down in the worse case. Interesting content in its turn will help your posts to be more visible, or even go viral, and thus reach a lot of people.
Luckily there are tools to help. Let's talk more about it next.
3. Use The Right Tools
Photo by Hookle
You need to keep things simple — that’s the only way to avoid becoming overwhelmed with the world of social media marketing.
You need to keep things simple
There are countless tools for social media marketing and social media management that give you access to incredibly in-depth metrics and micromanagement like you wouldn’t believe.
In the long run — they can drive you crazy.
As a small business owner, you don’t have the luxury of spending every waking hour on your social media presence. That’s why you need tools that simplify things.
For instance, Hookle provides you with a simple metric, Social Score, that summarizes the most important info about your social media marketing and social media presence — how much you’re posting, how many people you’re reaching, and how many are interacting with your brand online.
Essentially, that’s all you need to know. And all of this is compiled into a single 0-100 social score that you can quickly glance at all times and see how you’re doing overall.
Hookle might also be a good fit if you're running a small social media agency as you can manage clients' social channels at the same time. And offer clients the opportunity to see the results of your work independently using their own Hookle app. This gets really easy with the above mentioned score feature. Thus, include Hookle as part of your offering for your clients - and best of all, it's completely free!
Additionally, with most of the management tools you can also schedule posts. Thus you save mental energy and time once your channels are kept active automatically. We have evaluated bunch of social media marketing tools to help you to choose from.
4. Use Call To Action Buttons
Call-to-action buttons such as “Share this”, “Leave a comment”, or “Learn more” tell your audience what to do next after reading your posts on social media. These buttons encourage your audience to engage.
Call-to-action buttons such as “Share this”, or “Leave a comment” tell your audience what to do next
Remember also to add social media buttons to your website and Google Business Profile so that your audience can easily navigate to your social profiles.
5. Tell Inspirational Stories
Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
At the end of the day, marketing is all about stories — so make sure that the stories you create for your brand inspire your target audience.
Get creative and put yourself in the league!
One of the best ways to do this is to publish behind-the-scenes stuff that makes your company more relatable. Get creative and put yourself in the league!
6. Create Your Brand’s Story
While every individual piece of content you post on social media matters, it needs to combine into a beautiful mosaic that’s more than the sum of its parts. Everything you post needs to be part of an overall narrative you’re promoting — your brand’s story.
7. Make The Most Of Videos
These days, videos are the most engaging type of marketing content you can post on social media. People prefer live videos and other kinds of footage to spending more time and effort on reading a blog or a lengthy Facebook post.
So, create interviews, stream brand events, product presentations, and any other kind of video footage that brings instant value to your target audience.
8. Use Beautiful Images
Photo by Héctor J. Rivas on Unsplash
After videos, images are the second-best form of social media marketing content. With the short attention spans of the average Internet user, relying on easy-to-digest visual content is a surer bet than even the most well-written blog posts.
Pictures are simply better at capturing people’s attention than just words — so use creative and beautiful imagery in all of your social media content.
There are also many image galleries that you can utilize free pictures for your posts online. You can try for example Unsplash, Pixabay or Pexels. Here is also a great article of how to use Unsplash images to engage your followers together with social media marketing tool Hookle.
Also take advantage of carousel posts (multi-image posts). With carousels, you can create beautiful stories with a few pictures about the process of making delicious salmon soup, for example.
Conclusion
Probably one of the best takeaways in this article is to simplify your workflows. Start improving by small and simple steps, such as the use of call to actions, videos, and carousels.
Streamline your social media marketing processes with tools that simplify monitoring of your performance and help you automate routines. For example, instead of publishing randomly you can easily plan and schedule posts to be published automatically with the management tools mentioned above.
Instead of publishing randomly you can easily plan and schedule posts to be published automatically with the management tools like Hookle
After all, the most important thing is that you are regularly active on your channels consistent with the look and voice of your brand.
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