Social media isn’t just for big brands; it is a useful tool for all, especially for small businesses. When strategized and planned for accordingly, you may see a higher rate of engagement than you thought, especially if you’re focusing on building a strong community online.

A higher number of followers isn’t the best way to measure your success on social media. What’s the point in having one million followers if you’re not seeing any traction?

Perhaps you have reached the wrong audience, and they’re not interested in your content. The less your content is engaged overall, the fewer people will see it in the long run.

And really, if we’re talking platforms like TikTok or Reels, anyone or anything can take off even if the person or business has a small following.

Let’s break down the importance of social for your small biz.

Six Reasons Social Media Is Important For Small Business

1. Brand awareness
2. Lead generation
3. Social listening
4. Measurable KPI’s
5. Grow your audience
6. Engaged community

Brand Awareness With Social Media

Just as you would with a business card or media branding, showing up consistently with your branding helps your brand become recognizable.

Social Media Lead Generation

You can use social media to direct people to a landing page where you can get them into your inbound marketing funnel. When someone signs up for something like a webinar or a downloadable offer, they’re already interested. So this turns them into a warm lead, which you can nurture through your marketing funnel.

Social Listening

Listen to your audience, but also pay attention to what your competitors are doing. When you’re listening to what’s being discussed in the online space, you’ll be able to find gaps that you could fill.

Measurable Social Media KPIs

Your goals will determine your social media strategy. And those goals are made to be SMART which means we can measure them.

Social Audience Growth

Not just focusing on follower count, okay? But look at the demographics of your audience growth. Do they line up with your target persona(s)? If not, it may be time to reassess your strategy.

Social Community Engagement

The only way to grow online is to engage with others. Engage with your community, and a great way to do this is using the stories on Instagram/Facebook. You can add interactive stickers such as polls, questions/answers, sliding emoji scale etc., which can help you and your audience engage and you can get feedback all at the same time.

Small Business Social Strategy

So you’ve decided you’re going to take social media seriously this year (yay!) but now the hard work begins.

What?! Isn’t social supposed to be easy?

Even though we’re in the year 2022, there is still the huge belief that social media is easy and isn’t a full-time job. I am here to tell you that social media takes work, and you need a solid strategy behind you. You may need a whole team behind you depending on the size/scale of your business.

Sometimes you may just need to fire some freelancers to create content or manage your community for you. *insert shameless self-promo plug here*

So what kind of questions should you ask as you put your social media strategy together?

• What are your goals?

As with any strategy for your business, it should centre around what your specific goals are. Depending on your type of business, your goals will differ from other businesses.

Say you’re a boutique fitness facility, and you’re looking towards the new year where fitness goals are top of mind for people. Obviously, in the run-up to the following year, you’re going to want to see an increase in conversions where people are signing up for your services.

• How will you measure those goals?

Are you trying to drive traffic to your blog? Is there an event you are promoting and directing people to register for? Are you encouraging people to click through to your retail website? Email signups? Lead-magnets?

If you’re using a tool like Later, you can track the links in your bio. Yes, plural. I use mine to drive people to my website but also link out to my YouTube channel.

• When will you post?

Coming up with a posting schedule will take some experimentation and work, so don’t feel down right from the beginning. Not all businesses need to post every single day, and each platform is different.

On Twitter, you are likely posting multiple times per day, whereas on Instagram you may be posting 4 times per week.

• Where is your target audience hanging out on social? 

If you’re a clothing retailer you’ll likely want to be on TikTok and Instagram. If you’re a corporate event manager, you may want to focus on Twitter & Facebook.

• Which channels will you prioritize?

If you’ve done an in-depth analysis of your target audience, or buyer persona(s) this will make it easier for you to figure out where your audience likely hangs out.

If you work in conferences and events so you’re B2-B focused, you’re likely going to stick to platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn. If you’re in retail then platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, even Pinterest, are where your target audience is hanging out.

Putting your business on every platform isn’t a good idea. It leads to burnout and fatigue because you’re stretching your resources over so many platforms. Focusing on a smaller amount of platforms will help you excel with your social media strategy.

• Who will create and distribute your social content?

Do you have a team in-house? Are you contracting out to an agency or freelancer? Are you doing it yourself?

Trust me when I say this – if you work on creating social content and the copy to go with it, but you’re winging it, your audience will see that and won’t be taken as genuine. Social media isn’t a send it and hope for the best. Social is very quickly becoming the main part of sales funnels across various industries.

• How will you encourage your employees to share business content on social media?

This comes with risk if you don’t have some set guidelines in place about business content on social. Hubspot has a really great article about employee advocacy on social media, and I highly suggest going over that.

But the biggest thing is to have a set group that you trust to share and engage on behalf of the business, on their own social media platforms.

• What is your content approval process?

Content should be planned well in advance. You should have a high-level yearly overview of important company events, updates, launches etc. so you know when certain campaigns need to be in place. But to create content a year in advance that is set in stone is nearly impossible.

Trust me; if we as social media managers could set it and forget that far in advance, we’d spend a lot less time pulling our hair out.

But you also need to be on top of content approvals so that your scheduled campaigns aren’t lost/forgotten about. So if you’re going to oversee all that is prepared and planned, you need to have an agreed-upon process in place to ensure that content is approved far enough in advance that it isn’t interfering with the scheduling process.

I personally love to use AirTable so that content can be approved before scheduling content to go live.

It’s OK to pause a social media campaign for your small business

Things happen in the world and it can make your small business sound tone-deaf.

Sometimes it’s better for us to say nothing at all. It’s usually pausing campaigns for a day or two and then getting back.

Your social team will find a way to rearrange and get the campaign back on track. Missing out on a day or two isn’t much in the scheme of a large world event.

Social Media & Your Small Business – What’s Next?

Now that you’ve seen how social media can benefit your small business, it’s time to take the steps to build a proper online presence.

Assess where your target audience is online, and from there you can determine which platforms you should be on. It can be difficult to start so don’t give up if you’re not seeing results immediately.

It can easily take 6 months to start building an engaged community with social media. 

As social platforms ebb and flow, you may find that your marketing goals shift and you may need to grow on a new platform. Look at TikTok prior to Spring 2020, and look at TikTok today. Crazy different.

It is important to have someone on your team – contract or in-house – that handles your social media to start. As easy as it looks, it’s not. As your small business grows, you may need more people on your team, and again you can move that to in-house or you can keep contracting out with an agency or freelancers, like myself 😉

Be nice to your social agency, freelancers or in-house team. They work hard and it’s already difficult enough to keep up with the ever-changing landscape of social media as it is.

If it were easy, everyone would do it!