Social Media has become a crucial part of how businesses market their brand and communicate with their audiences. In addition to building brand loyalty and fostering relationships with customers, Social marketing also poses many other benefits for business use such as brand awareness with new prospects, increased site traffic and yes, even opportunities and sales.

If you’re a small business owner and new to the world of social media, it’s not too late to take advantage of the benefits these channels offer. Here are a few tips to help you get started on the right path with a successful social marketing program.

1. Identify your audiences, choose your social media channel(s): Many small business owners are limited on time and resource so picking the right social media networks for your business is key. Think about who your target audiences are and where they may be engaging – do some research. You’d be surprised how many statistics are out there on social media audience demographics. For instance, if your company is B2B, LinkedIn or Twitter can be a great channel to reach other business professionals and share resources with one another. Do some competitive research to see what networks your competition is on too and where they are getting the most social engagement.
2. Set up and optimize your social media pages: Once you decide on your social media presence you will need to set up your pages and optimize the profile content. Use your logo as a profile image, and the same profile name and handle across all of the social media pages you set up – usually your business name if it’s available – to help audiences find you easily. Make sure you complete all page information on each respective social page you create to give audiences insight into what your business does and include links to your business website too. This linking is good for search engine optimization (SEO) which is the process of increasing your site’s visibility in search engine results organically – helping your audiences find you. If you’re new to SEO, check out this awesome resource from Search Engine Land to learn some best practices. Don’t forget, you can also add social media icons to your website to direct your site visitors to your social channels so they can engage with your business too.
3. Develop a strategy, implement it and be consistent: When building a social media strategy, think back to the audiences you want to target. Make a list of the people you want to network with and reach out to – remember social media is a two-way communication channel. Then you need to think about what kind of content would interest your audiences? Develop a social media calendar full of content and engage with your audiences’ content too. You can leverage content you’re creating for your website for additional traffic and cross-promotion. For instance, if you’re a B2C company in the retail industry, you may have opted for Pinterest or Instagram for your social media presence as those networks lend themselves to visual content. You can use those networks to share images of your latest products or fashion trends. You can also promote long-form content like your company’s blogs or testimonials across social media to give your audiences more insight into your business and drive traffic to your website. Remember, you may not see results right away, but stay patient and be consistent with your approach. Social marketing takes commitment!
4. Measure results, analyze, and make insights actionable: The last piece of the pie is measurement. You’ll never know if your social marketing strategy is successful unless you collect data on your progress and analyze the results. Many social networking sites offer built-in analytics for free (such as Facebook insights) that provides engagement and clicks data on your posts so you can tell top performing content from least performing content, audience demographics such as age and location, and more. You can also look at Google Analytics data to see if where your social referrals are coming from and what pages they visit on your website. Analyze the data and make insights actionable by tweaking your strategy overtime based on what’s most successful in terms of performance.

These are just some quick tips and tricks to get you going, but there are many free social media resources out there if you want to learn more. For instance, check out this “Getting Started With Social Media: A Resource Guide” by Social Media Examiner that summarizes resources across many of the major social networking channels as well as media content and blogs. Or Moz’s “The Beginner’s Guide to Social Media” which goes into detail on the value of social media, metrics to measure, best practices and more.

I hope these insights help you, feel free to leave a comment with ideas for future topics or questions.

Best of luck on your social media journey!