Estimated Reading Time 6 minutes

Firstly, what is an SME or Small to Medium Enterprise? According to Government sources, these are companies who employ up to 250 people. It constitutes 99% of UK businesses.

41% of small businesses depend on Social Media to generate revenue, and 44% said that they depend on it to generate brand awareness. Keeping this in mind, here are three things that small businesses need to do to enhance and maintain their Social media strategy.

1. Choose Platforms That Play To Your Strengths

You need to be able to identify where you will have the biggest impact.

Will you be able to serve up a lot of rich, visual content? If so, then the likes of Instagram and Snapchat will be very beneficial to your business. Will you be constantly pumping out updates, offers, and services information? Maybe go down a Facebook or Twitter route, find where your audience is and then you can plan how to best engage with them. However, do not feel like you need a presence on every social channel possible, yes it might look good on paper that you have 5 different social media accounts, but there’s nothing worse than going on a company’s social profile to see they haven’t been active on it for 6 months, this can be more detrimental to your business than positive, be careful not to fall into this trap!

2. Audience Engagement

3 out of 4 customers say that they check social media channels before buying into a service or product, so it is important to have relevant and engaging content.

One of the reasons social media has become so important for businesses is it offers a two-way conversation, it’s no longer the marketer just shouting a message at the consumer in the hope there’ll buy into their product.

Your social channels also act as a customer feedback tool. This can be used to make more informed decisions behind the scenes. As well as this you can build strong relationships with your customers and develop this into your own online community. If done correctly, this positive relationship between you and the customer can work wonders for their long-term spending potential.

3. The Soft Sell

Stripping away all the added benefits mentioned above, many businesses see Social Media as a selling tool. Though this may be the overall objective, if done blatantly, it very rarely works and there are for more effective direct channels to choose from. Also a blatant social sell can also put many potential buyers off who may be looking at evaluating a product or service before committing to a purchase of contacting the company. As in life, we are far more likely to be positive about a company based on a peer recommendation compared to hard sell advertisement.

The key is in planning and setting out goals and objectives along the way. Social Media is part of the marketing mix and as such, need to work along the sales funnel in tandem with your other marketing activity.

To find out more about how Digital Clarity can help you or your small business succeed in a crowded digital landscape contact one of the team today.