Marketing your small business on social media can be a lot of fun! But, the biggest advantage of having a social media presence is connecting with your client base and growing your business online. And to do that, you need a great social media strategy!
How do you create a social media strategy? What do you need to ensure small business success? Let’s discuss my four tried-and-true steps!
Identify Your Target Audience
The first step in creating the best social media strategy for your small business is identifying your target audience. What’s a “target audience?” The people you want to work with!
Every small business is created with a certain type of customer in mind. To identify your target audience, you’ll need to ask yourself a couple of questions:
Who would get the most use out of my products or services?
What type of people do I see myself working with?
Where are these people located?
What types of lifestyles do they lead?
By the time you’re done, you should have identified your ideal client’s general demographic, as well as their wants and needs.
Decide Which Platforms to Use
Not every small business needs to be on every social media platform. Managing even one social page takes a lot of time and effort, so I recommend only working with the platforms your target audience is already on! This will save you time and give you the best chance of finding the type of people you want to reach.
Here are some numbers that might help you decide which platforms are best for you:
Want more information on all the different social media platforms? Check out our social media breakdown!
Plan Out Your Content
You’ve identified your target audience and created your profiles. Now it’s time for the fun part — posting!
There’s nothing wrong with a little last-minute posting. But, most of your business page should be high-quality, carefully-curated posts with some well-thought-out captions. That’s where my favorite tool comes in — the content calendar!
What is a content calendar? Exactly what it sounds like. It’s a monthly calendar with the date, time, graphic or video, and caption for each post!
A content calendar is an essential part of your social media strategy. It keeps you organized, keeps your page consistent, and best of all, helps you save time running your pages.
When you already know what you’ll be posting on each profile, you have more time to focus on interacting with clients, packaging orders, and all the other work that goes into running a small business.
Check out our blog to learn how to create your own content calendar!
Set & Measure Your Goals
The key to small business success is constantly growing and adjusting your social media strategy as needed. So like with any other project, you need to set some goals and measure your success!
I find it’s best to set a goal each month, then look back on your progress before the next month starts. Did you succeed? Great! Set a new goal and start working towards it. Miss the mark? That’s okay too! Do a little digging to find out what’s working and what’s not, then adjust accordingly.
How do you check your progress? Two words — insights and analytics. All social media platforms have some kind of built-in insights for business pages, but Instagram’s are the easiest to use.
There are two ways to check your Instagram insights. You can check your whole page, or you can check a specific post. Let’s start with checking the whole page.
Open your profile and tap the menu icon in the top-right corner.
Then, tap “Insights.”
You can see three valuable pieces of information on the next page:
Reach: The number of people who saw your posts.
Engagement: The number of likes, comments, saves, and shares your posts got.
Followers: You can see your total number of followers and how much your account grew over the time you’re looking at.
By default, you’ll see your reach, engagement, and new followers for the past week. Want to adjust the range to see two weeks, a month, or longer? Just tap the box in the top-left corner!
Now, let’s go over how you can view the insights for specific posts.
Open your profile and find the post you want to see insights for. Then, press “View Insights” underneath the photo or video.
You’ll find a lot of the same information here, with one important difference: Profile Activity. This tells you how many people visited your profile, followed you, or tapped your contact button after viewing the post.
Find Social Media Success for Your Small Business!
With a social media strategy that works for your business, finding success on social media is easy. Just hang out where your target audience hangs out online, plan out some high-quality content, and don’t forget to check your progress as time goes on!
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