Social Media for Your Small Business

With the internet still very young, many companies are still learning how to market themselves online. This can lead many companies make poor decisions, especially when it comes to social media marketing.

Many small-to-medium sized companies see the amount of people on social media everyday and see it as a gold mine. However, when you don’t go into it properly, you’ll be made a fool. Also, with it being posted online, no one will ever forget what you wrote – there may even be screenshots taken of a poor social post.

In other words, it’s incredibly important to use social media properly. Don’t be afraid to get your business on social media because there are so many benefits to using it (and so many people to see your message). You need to make sure you use it properly and that’s where we’ll come in. We’ll help you use your social media right and get the most out of it in our latest article.

What Social Media Options Are Available

Before we get started,we need to go over the different social media options you can market yourself on. The obvious ones that everyone knows about are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and SnapChat. These are the social media profiles people create and check several times per day. Without a doubt, your message will be seen by thousands every single day (depending on your budget). All of these platforms also have great targeting options so you know your message is being seen by who you choose.

On the other hand, there are more unique social media for use. Tik Tok is the all new social media being used mostly by pre-teens and teens. It’s a great way to marketing to children at a younger age and build brand loyalty. There’s also Tumblr and Pintrest that are very specialized social media profiles where you can target someone very easily.

Two huge platforms that don’t get enough attention are YoutTube and Reddit. YouTube is owned by Google so you can create your ad campaigns in Google Ads. Now that Google can force you to watch two 5-15 second ads several times per video, it’s very obvious that there’s a lot of opportunity here. With people cutting the cord on cable, many people can see this as the future of commercials. More importantly, you have greater targeting options than you ever had with cable tv.

Reddit nicknamed itself the “homepage of the internet” and with good reason. It’s one of the most visited sites online and could be a great way to advertise your company. However, you need to be extremely careful if you want to use Reddit for marketing. The regular users tend to hate advertising and will slam your post if it’s not done correctly. You need to build a relationship with the subreddit your targeting. You can’t come in as an outsider and try to advertise to the group – it will do more harm than good.

Brand Building Done With Social Media

One of the best things you can do with a social media profile is build your brand identity. Never before could you post something and have it seen by so many people. You can have a voice and presence now! Using it can have so many benefits!

Whether it’s reacting to world events (but don’t get too political or you’re asking for problems) or you’re just becoming a part of internet culture, you’ll build a culture around your brand. This will attract new customers and talent to the company.

Much like Reddit, you need to be careful when trying to appeal to the internet culture. Many people could see you being disingenuous. Some of the best examples of companies that really understand internet culture are Arby’s, Denny’s and Moon Pie.

Share Your Content with World

Writing blog content for your website is very important for SEO. However, what many people don’t realize is that it gives you plenty of content to post on your social media. In fact, you should write specific content that’s highly shareable on your social media – listicals, infographics and comparison posts.

Earlier, we mentioned YouTube as a social media. The great thing about YouTube is that it’s a profile that you can post content to and then share it across all of your other social profiles. You can even post them to your website (which we recommend that you do because video greatly helps your SEO). Essentially you’re linking all of your profiles and website together with engaging and enjoyable content.

Social Media Can Help SEO

We mentioned SEO a lot in the previous section. When posting website content on your social media profiles, you’re essentially helping your website’s SEO on several fronts.While social links aren’t beneficial to your domain authority, highly shareable content will get you many social links. While there’s nothing in the Google algorithm mentioning social links, we’ve seen that social links do tend to help your rankings.

Also, there’s a high probability that social media websites like Facebook and Twitter get crawled by search engine bots more than your website, especially if you’re a new company or have a new domain. When you post your new content on Facebook, it’s more likely to be crawled quickly. If/when you make changes to these posts, they’ll be crawled quicker and will index those changes quicker as well.

One of the more unique benefits of social media profiles is the ability to control your branded searches. You can’t control what people say on review sites such as Yelp and Glassdoor. However, you do have some control over what ranks on your branded searches. If you post often and your content gets shared on all of your social profiles, they will out rank those review websites for branded searches.

You Can Create Conversions with Social Media Marketing

Up until this point, we’ve only mentioned using social media for branding and SEO purposes, but now let’s get into the nitty-gritty. Let’s start talking about making money. You can use social media to generate conversions. However, you won’t get too many conversion from just your normal posts, you’ll need to start looking into boosted posts or ads.

Essentially, you can treat your social profiles as pay-per-click profiles by creating ads for these platforms. The benefit these profiles have over something like Google Ads is that they’re visual mediums. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn all have ad platforms built into them where you can specifically target your ads, post a budget and track your performance. You can even split test multiple ads at once or target different groups with different ads.

Interact with Your Users

As we’ve mentioned, you have an opportunity to engage with your users unlike ever before. When your customers have a problem, praise or question, you can respond to them immediately. Many people complain about the customer service they get over the phone. Having a strong customer service over social media could be a great marketing tactic and a point of differentiation.

Small Business Social Media is Important

It goes without saying that social media is incredibly important for all businesses, but especially small-to-medium sized businesses. You can use your social media to build conversions or use it as a secondary platform to support SEO and your website. Whatever you do, you’ll want to make sure you’re on all relevant social platforms.