Beginner's Guide To Social Media Marketing For Small Businesses

10 steps to social media success

Social media marketing is a great tool for small businesses and one that you simply cannot ignore. The number of people interacting on social media every minute is huge, and if your business doesn't participate in this digital mega-party, you're missing out.

Obviously, the next question is how can entrepreneurs benefit from social media, and is it something that can drive business results (i.e. more traffic, sales, leads, signups), or is it just another myth?

1 - Let's get started

The first step is to move from theory to practice and start with social networks. This means 4 things:

To spend time daily working on your social media presence

Choose which social networks to use at the beginning since there are too many and it will be very difficult to do them all at the same time.

To create your business pages on those networks

To optimize the SEO of your social media profiles for higher visibility

Some things to consider:

Facebook – Everyone is on Facebook, so you really don't have a choice here. Read this for inspiration: how to get your first 10,000 followers on Facebook. Note: Since that article was written, the page now has over 45,000 fans.

Google+: Google plus is for businesses and is also owned by Google, so this is your second choice.

Pinterest: It's growing fast and can drive a lot of traffic to a website, so this is your next option as long as you have something business-related visual you can share on Pinterest.

Twitter: Millions of users, easy to maintain and a great way to interact with your customers. Along with the 3 above, this is your priority list.

LinkedIn: Mainly for professionals, more difficult to use, advertising is expensive. You can create your own LinkedIn presence, but if you're short on time, I suggest you start using LinkedIn for your personal profile, and then when you grow your company profiles on other networks, you can use LinkedIn for your business as well.

2 - Start Small

When you're ready to get started, don't rush to follow hundreds of people, post multiple times a day and check your stats every minute. Start small and keep in mind that:

Social networks don't like too much activity on newly created accounts (not normal and spam type)

All networks have a maximum number of actions (follow and unfollow) you can take per day, so the best way is to stay under their radar.

At the beginning and when you don't have a good number of followers, no one will see your posts, so don't waste time for no reason.

3 - It's a numbers game

While there are millions of people on social media channels, to start getting traffic, making sales, or having any influence, you need to have a LOT of followers on your networks. And by A LOT, I mean A LOT, and let me tell you why.

When you post a new post to your Facebook Business Page, that post will be seen by a small percentage of your followers (FB tells you how many people have seen your posts, so take a closer look to see what I mean).

Let's say you have 400 fans on your page, when you post something only 30-40 people see it and that's because FB doesn't show the posts to all your fans.

Other networks may show your posts to all of their followers, but if a person follows many other people/pages, there is little chance that they will see and interact with your posts.

So the more followers you have, the better your chances of starting to get something from social media. From my experience and without this being a definitive guide, you need at least 10,000 on FB, 1,000 on G+, 1,000 on Twitter, and 2,000 on Pinterest before seeing visits to your website or store. Of course, as I have stated, this is an empirical figure rather than a rule.

4 - Follow the people who matter

Unless you are a well-known brand, to grow your following you need to follow other people and some of them will follow you. Use these basic ways to be selective when choosing someone to follow:

Follow people who have a relationship with your business both geographically (i.e. they live in the same area) and by interest (they are directly or indirectly interested in the products or services you sell).

Follow people who have an active profile; there's no reason to follow someone on Twitter if they haven't posted anything for two months.

Follow people who have a balance between people who follow and people who follow them: You don't want to follow people who won't follow you, and you also don't want to follow accounts that only have followers and non-followers.

Follow people who have something interesting to say: Before following someone, take a look at what they share and decide if this is something your customers would like to see on their profile.

Find and follow influencers in your field - Every business area and specialty has influencers, and it's always a good idea to reach out to them and listen to what they have to say about the industry, even if they won't follow you. In the digital era, this is known as influencer marketing.

5 - Take time - make sure you have time

Social media marketing is relatively easy to do, but it is a time-consuming task. Before you begin, make sure you take the time to do it consistently and daily. I would say that a couple of hours a day is enough to start.

If that sounds like a lot, you might consider outsourcing social media to professionals or starting with fewer networks (for example, just Facebook) and then when you find the time move on to the rest.

Keep in mind, however, that if you don't take the time to work on your business pages, you'll be disappointed with the results and start to believe that social media doesn't work for business (a totally wrong assumption).

6 - Make your posts interesting

Like I said earlier, search engines and social media can only understand one thing, and that is content. This means that in addition to working to get new followers, you also need content.

If you already have a content marketing strategy, your work in social networks will be easier, but if not, you need to come up with a plan like this:

Post about your products and services, but don't overdo it: Your business page is about your business, but if you keep posting about how good your products are, you'll keep people away.

Instead, you should make your posts interesting by providing tips, advice, offers, and anything else that might entice someone to share or comment on your posts.

Don't forget that to get likes, +1's, or comments you need to have a LOT of followers. Expect this to take a long time, especially if your numbers are still low.

Check out one of the social media pages we manage for one of our clients. See the variety of messages, frequency, tone, format, etc.

7 - Time Matters

The time and date you post something on social media is very important. As mentioned above, people have a lot of posts on their timelines and if they don't see them "live", chances are they never see them.

For example, if you post something on Twitter and your followers are sleeping at that time, when they wake up they will have hundreds of messages on their timeline and therefore no chance to see your post.

To fix this, you can use tools like bufferapp to schedule your posts to reach your target audience at a time when you have the most online followers. There are also other tools and statistics on the best time to post on different social networks, but as a general rule, post in the morning (08:00 - 09:00) or in the afternoon (17:00 - 19:00). These are the times that work best for many niches.

8 - Follow up on any comments or mentions of your company.

Social media is all about communication and that means you should monitor your social media pages for feedback on your business and definitely respond to positive and negative feedback. You need to show your audience that you are reading what they have to say and that you care about their opinion.

In addition to monitoring your business pages, you should also monitor mentions of your brand across all social networks and take appropriate action. A great tool to do this is Mention (it's not free).

9 - Measure results and ROI

If you don't measure the effectiveness of social media, you won't know if it's worth it or not. What to measure?

Visits to your website from social media

Number of conversions (sales, newsletter subscriptions, etc.)

Monthly increase in followers

Monthly increase in interactions

How to measure?

Use of Google Analytics reports and statistics provided for the company's pages by the different social networks.

Note: If you're still just starting out, those numbers will most likely be close to zero, but don't be disappointed, once your number of followers increases, you'll notice that these numbers will start to increase as well.

10 - If all else fails, leave it to the professionals

Social networks work for companies and this is a fact. It is also true that every problem has a solution, so if you don't have the time or the knowledge to make social networks work for your business, leave it in the hands of professionals; we have different social media packages for every budget and need and we guarantee minimum results.

Conclusion

Social media is a great tool to promote your business online. It's the modern way to connect with your prospects, and if you want to stay on top of the latest marketing developments, you need to socialize your business.

Obtaining results is not difficult, but it is a process that requires time, patience and a lot of work. Competition is high on all networks and you need to do something special to capture the attention of users and establish your social presence.