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Social Media Marketing Strategy Tips

Amy Gilpin
Feb 23, 2018
2 min read

Social media marketing is an important aspect of any business marketing strategy, but it may be even more so for home-based and small businesses. With more and more people using social media and the internet in general to inform their shopping decisions, it is essential that small businesses have an active presence.

Here are a few things you can do to get social media marketing working for your business:

1. Understand what you want to achieve with your social marketing. Create goals that are attainable. If you are new to using social media marketing, start with one channel and build on it as your business grows.

2. Know your social media audience. Understand your audience demographics and use social media platforms that you know they use. For example, Facebook pages provide an Insight feature that helps you monitor who is actively engaging with your page.

3. Determine which metrics are your most important. While likes and follows are important to monitor and help build engaging content, you also need to consider the reach, number of clicks, engagement, sentiment, and organic vs. paid likes.

4. Know what your competitors are doing. Understand what social media platforms they are using. Do a Google search by keywords, phrases and industry terms to see what and who shows up. Exclude the big corporate stores. You aren’t trying to compete with them. Instead, focus on other small businesses that provide similar products and services.

5. Build Engaging Social Media Content. This content needs to fit your brand’s identity and avoid reaching out to your unpopular demographics without a complete strategy in place. Keep in mind that about 46% of users say they un-follow brands that have too many promotional messages and about 41% of users say they un-follow a brand that shares too much irrelevant content.

6. Engage with your audience. Social media platforms are a form of networking. The main purpose is to be a space to discuss topics and share content. Be available to answer questions after you share a post. Always respond to inquiries, answer messages, and respond to comments.

7. Track your efforts and find ways to improve. Take advantage of insight features provided by the social networking platform, but consider tracking on your own as well to put things into perspective. Engagement doesn’t ensure revenue, but it helps build lasting relationships.