Six Social Media Tips for Small Businesses Ready to Grow

If you haven’t fully embraced social media for your small business, it’s time to rethink your marketing strategy. As of April 2019, there were approximately 3.5 billion active social media users worldwide. That means that about 45% of the world’s population maintains at least one social media account.

Regardless of your industry, members of your target market are among those active social media users. Since reaching that market most cost-effectively is essential to growing your business, a robust social media presence is also necessary.

Getting started with social media may seem overwhelming, but there are eight strategies that you can use today to jump-start your business growth quickly.

1. Create fully branded social media profiles.

It takes a bit more time to create social media accounts that reflect the unique voice of your brand, but it’s worth the investment for four reasons:

• It’s common for consumers to check a company’s social media presence before clicking through to a website or making a purchase. A branded social media presence is most likely to convince those consumers to learn more about your products or services rather than turning to a competitor.
• Branding is essential to business growth in general, and social media will put your brand in front of your target market faster than traditional marketing strategies and with little to no financial investment.
• Your branding efforts will likely improve your website’s search engine rankings. Social users are most likely to share posts from brands that they trust. The more your social media posts are shared, the higher your domain authority should rise. Higher authority rankings typically lead to improved search engine ranking. It’s a cycle that starts with quality branding that evokes trust.
• Social media activity may boost the search engine ranking of your social accounts. Those accounts may show up in Google and other search engines along with your website. Consumers are more likely to find you online if you have more listings at the top of the search engine rankings.

A branded social media presence is essential to your overall strategy to grow your business, and it’s not difficult to achieve. Use these simple tips to turn your social profiles into branding gold immediately:

• Add a cover image that reflects your brand at first glance.
• Add cover photos that help visitors instantly identify with your brand.
• Place your logo in prominent positions, but don’t allow it to distract from the clean, crisp presentation of your profile or page.

Once you brand your social media accounts, start tracking your progress in search engine rankings. You can use a free app like Tiny Ranker or Pro Rank Tracker to save time. Keep in mind that branding should improve your rankings, but many other factors contribute to your overall ranking.

2. Use call-to-actions, giveaways, discounts, and contests to turn social media users into motivated buyers.

Are you trying to improve conversion rates for your website? Social media can help by familiarizing your target audience with your brand and driving highly targeted traffic to your site. Someone clicking from social media to your website has already decided that your products or services are worth considering.

Your call-to-action or CTA is a direct statement that tells your social media followers what you want them to do next. It should also tell your audience why they will benefit from taking that action. Place your CTA in a prominent place on your social media profiles, and it should appealingly sell for you.

With your CTA in place, organize occasional contests, giveaways or special discounts for your social media followers. Everyone loves free stuff, and social media users share posts regularly in hopes of winning a prize. They may also share posts featuring valuable discounts.

Increased engagement means increased social media exposure for your brand. If you guessed that increased exposure leads to growth for your business, you’re correct.

3. Drive traffic from your website to your social media accounts.

When learning how to grow a small business into a large company, you need the traffic to flow both ways. Give social share buttons a prominent but not distracting position on each page of your website. Use the “click to tweet” feature to allow visitors to tweet shareable quotes from your website content instantly. Encourage Pinterest shares by making all images on your site pinnable with one click.

4. Keep your content relevant to boost your brand authority.

You want social media followers to view your brand as an authority in your niche. They should trust your industry commentary and believe that you have the information or products that they need. You establish that trust by only sharing content that is accurate, timely, and relevant to your target market.

Keep in mind that the authority of your content sources will also reflect on your authority. Only use links to high-value content presented on highly ranked authority websites.

5. Create targeted content that turns social media users into excited fans.

While you’re creating that relevant and accurate content, make sure that it’s also engaging and unique. Get to know your target market and make sure that your posts are appealing enough that they want to share with their friends and followers.

You can also take your content to the next level by collaborating with social media influencers. Use platforms like Buzzweb or Grin to find the most relevant influencers for your brand. Along with targeted content, those influencers will improve the quality of leads generated from your social media accounts. That’s how you spark business growth through social media quickly.

6. Learn from your competitors.

Don’t block out your competitors and hope that your target audience finds you instead of them. Watch their social media tactics closely, noting what works well and what flops. You never want to copy those strategies, but they should give you good ideas to direct your social media campaigns.

Some apps and tools will help you quickly assess your competitors from a social media standpoint. The best programs offer free trials, so it doesn’t hurt to give them a try.

If you’re ready for your business to grow, pick one or two of these social media tips and implement them today. Do you have additional social media tips that may help other small businesses? Share your secrets below, and let’s grow together.