When it comes to social media marketing for small business, you will quickly realize that it’s not something you can put off. The real question is how do you get started? How do you know if what you are doing is even working? You need a plan.
That’s where this article comes in. It walks you through the entire process of creating a social media marketing plan for your business.
Do a Social Media Audit
Before you dive into the deep end, it’s imperative that you complete a social media audit. By reviewing your current social media accounts to determine what’s working, what’s failing, and what you can improve, you’ll begin to create a foundation for your social media strategy.
As part of your audit, you’ll want to identify a number of factors:
- The social media sites that generate the most and least engagement with your brand.
- The movement of your followers on each site: Are your follower numbers increasing, decreasing, or remaining steady?
- Your capacity to provide fresh content to all your social channels.
- How much time and money you’re spending on each channel over a given period of time.
- Your rate of return for resources diverted into each social media channel, which can be determined by how much traffic they direct to your website or how frequently customers reach you through those channels.
These, among other indicators, will help you identify which channels are already performing, albeit not optimally. From here, you’ll need to choose which two or three channels to prioritize.
Looking for structure? Check out Post Control Marketing’s audit template:
Identify Your Target Audience
Just as with any marketing strategy, you want to identify your market and then target them directly in the most effective way. There are too many social media sites for most small businesses and brands to effectively market themselves on all of them. However, by understanding your demographics, and how that translates to participation on certain platforms, you can better focus your efforts.
If this is your first time thinking about your target audience, Hubspot’s MakeMyPersona can help you with the initial steps.
Choose 2-3 Social Media Platforms that best fit your Target Audience
You can’t be everything to everyone. Accept it now, before you fall too deep into the social media rabbit hole. It’s much more effective to be active on a few social media platforms—2-3 total—than to spread yourself too thin.
Pick your platforms based on where your customers hang out.
Facebook, with its 2 billion monthly active users, attracts people of all ages, income, and education levels. Specifically, it was found that Facebook attracts a majority of women (89%), 18- to 29-year-olds (88%), urban and rural dwelling (81%), users that earn less than $30,000 a year (84%), and users with some college experience (82%). Though this might seem like a very broad market, there are tools and strategies to focus your marketing on Facebook.
Facebook is at the top of many business owners’ lists for the best social media network to use. Not only does it have a lot of users (over 2 billion), making it great to build brand awareness, it’s also one of the most well-developed platforms for businesses.
Though Facebook is used by 8 out of 10 Americans, it’s thought of as being avoided by millennials because their parents are on it. The opposite is true for Twitter, as fewer millennials parents are active on the platform, so the generation is more comfortable being themselves on the network. LinkedIn is, of course, for users to put their best business foot forward, and Pinterest is for crafty moms.
Facebook has a number of features that allow businesses large and small to create engaging pages that share a lot of detailed information. It also offers retargeting options in advertising to boost engagement, the ability to link to a website within a post, and a messaging system that allows you to chat directly with customers.
Twitter is most popular for ages 18-29 (36%), those living in urban locations (26%), and those earning anywhere from $50,000-$74,999 (28%).
When it comes to business-to-business (B2B) marketing, Twitter is really powerful. The platform can connect leads with resources, notify them of new products, and much more.
It’s also a great channel for consumers looking to ask questions, raise concerns, or communicate directly with their favorite brands.
If you’re looking to use the channel, being active and timely with responses is key. If you’re not able to maintain an active presence and speedily respond to customers’ tweets, it can actually be more damaging than rewarding.
To help with this, you can install the free Twitter app on your phone to receive notifications and respond right away no matter where you are.
This channel quickly emerged as a great gathering place for professionals and is a must for B2B companies.
LinkedIn users are employees and business owners interested in making new connections in their field and consuming content related to their industry. This makes it an optimal place to share blogs and other resources that offer solutions to industry-related issues.
It should be no surprise that LinkedIn is a better platform for targeting higher-income earners, such as those in the $75,000 or more range, and those with some college experience.
Like nearly all social media platforms, Pinterest is dominated by millennials, with 36% of users aged 18-29. However, Gen-Xers are a close second, making up 34% of the users.
Though demographics are essential for developing your marketing strategy, you also need to be aware of how each social network is perceived—there are certain cliches attached to all of them.
Instagram, for example, is where users mostly post perfectly curated life videos and images. An overwhelming amount of content can be defined as coming from “basic” people posting bikini, beach, sunrise, food, or coffee pictures.
This platform is ideal for businesses that create a lot of visual content, such as restaurants, boutiques, and retailers. It’s a compelling way to showcase exactly what your business offers through pictures and video content.
Instagram is also dominated by those aged 18-29, but even more so, with this market segment making up 59% of the users. Unlike Twitter, the market segment earning less than $30,000 comprises the largest piece of the pie on Instagram at 38%.
Plus, if you use Instagram stories, you can take viewers on all sorts of journeys, whether it’s a behind-the-scenes look or store update.
An alternative (or addition) to Instagram is Pinterest, which also features visual content that you can “pin” to boards you create. Some of the most common industries you’ll find on this platform are beauty, fitness, home goods, food, and retailers.
Pinterest does have fewer users than larger channels like Instagram, so you might find that it’s less competitive. This can be beneficial to your business if you feel like your messaging gets lost in users’ feeds on other platforms.
Be Social and Build a Community
It’s not enough to create amazing content and share them on your social sites. It’s also imperative that you interact with your audience. A survey found that 84% of customers expect brands to respond to them within 24 hours, but 89% of social media messages to brands are ignored.
If companies are that lax in responding to direct messages, it’s frightening to think about how bad they are at replying to comments and staying social on their platforms. What’s, even more, worrying for a business that’s failing to be responsive to social media is that 54% of millennials will stop doing business with a brand with poor customer service.
It’s easy enough to set yourself apart from other brands by showing your audience and clients that you care by engaging with them on social media. Not only does this show your appreciation, but it also gives your brand a more personalized touch.
Determine the Optimal Times to Post
Posting your content at the right time can make all the difference. If you’re looking for when to post, check out a study by CoSchedule that identifies the best times to post on social media.
Though CoSchedule and other social media scheduling tools can help you determine when you should be posting, you should also sift through the analytics yourself and look for trends and patterns relevant to your specific audience.
To remain systematic, it’s best to create a content plan or calendar that identifies when posts are supposed to go out on social media accounts.
Track Your Results
Once you’ve launched your social media marketing strategy, you need to ensure that it’s meeting your goals—as well as looking for opportunities to continuously improve it. Social media trends rapidly change, making it essential for you to keep your finger on the pulse.
SMART goals are objectives that follow 5 key criteria: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. Creating these goals for your social media marketing strategies can help keep your efforts focused and effective.
Here are some questions you can answer and additional information to get you started:
Specific: Why is your small business on social media? You should have a direct and specific objective in mind for your strategies and find out which channel will help you accomplish them. Some business owners simply want a place to connect with customers, while others are more focused on increasing conversions or traffic to their website.
Measurable: What data point or metric is most valuable to your business? To tell how effective your strategies are, your goals need to be measurable. Each social media network has a number of metrics for businesses to measure their efforts. There are also tools that help track engagement and conversion metrics for you, such as Google Analytics, as well as specialized social media listening tools.
Attainable: Is your goal attainable? It’s difficult to go viral or become an overnight internet sensation, so you need goals that your business can reasonably obtain.
Relevant: Are your goals relevant to the overarching objectives of your company? Also, are your strategies pertinent to your customers? If your content isn’t relevant, users will scroll right past it.
Timely: How long will you expect to reach your goal? Choosing a timeframe for social media can be tricky because you might need time to see what tactics are working. To make sure you don’t commit to an ineffective strategy for too long, quarterly goals are a good starting point. That way you can evaluate what happened in the last quarter on a regular basis.
Conclusion
Wondering if you should go on social media? Or wondering which social networks are best for marketing? There are thousands of blogs, guides, books and courses about the benefits of social media. Because it’s important to be there. More than that, though, you need to decide how your business will be present on social media. And that’s the tricky part…