Tips in Managing Social Media Pages for Small and Medium Businesses
Over 2.95 BILLION people are using social media around the world in 2019. And this number is projected to increase to almost 3.43 BILLION in 2023.
That’s a lot of people using social media!
Breaking it down per social media platform, here is the quarter-on-quarter change in the number of active users in January 2019.
With the huge number of people using social media, no wonder businesses are all busy setting up social media accounts. Why? Because these people could be their customers!
If you are a business, and you don’t have a single social media page, then you are losing a lot of money!
According to the research made by Medium.com, consumers are more likely to make a purchase from a brand that they follow.
Setting up a social media page, whether it is on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, or other platforms, is very easy and it is FREE. However, maintaining it can be a bit difficult, especially if your goal is to make a sale.
Moreover, a lot of business owners don’t know how to maximize or even use their accounts to promote their business.
We’ve seen a lot of social media pages which are empty and look like fake accounts because no updates have been made, or no proper details have been uploaded.
This is the reason why we created this blog to help small and medium businesses to manage their social media pages to their advantage.
So if you are wondering how to promote or sell your business using social media, here are some social media tips for businesses that you need to do.
Social Media Tips For Businesses
1. Start with a social media plan (Don’t skip)
One of the important social media tips for businesses that you need to know is to start a social media plan. Before you do any selling, promoting or content publishing on your social media pages, you need to create a plan. Just like in any other situation, planning is the key to your success. As Benjamin Franklin says, “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.”
Remember there are more than a billion social media users around the world. These are not just your customers. These are also your competitors. With this high competition, you need to stand out. And having a social media plan can help you. So make sure you don’t skip this.
Here are some strategic ways on how to create a social media marketing plan:
Know your goals and objectives
Ask yourself, what do you want to achieve in using social media? Brand awareness? Increase in sales? Improve customer service? Whatever your goals are, make sure they are SMART – specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely.
Your goals should also be based on metrics that have an impact on your business. Don’t just aim for an increase in followers. Yes, you have a lot of page followers, but are you getting conversion with all those numbers? Think about it.
Know your competitor
Do research on your competitors and see how they are using social media. Don’t copy them. But instead, use them to know what’s working and what’s not for other businesses like yours.
Look for inspiration
Creating content on social media can be difficult especially if you run out of content ideas to publish. That is why aside from looking at what your competitors are doing, you also need to check out other businesses in other industries for inspiration. Again, don’t copy them. That is bad for your brand image.
Another source of inspiration that you can do is ask your followers on what type/kind of content they would love to see. Then give them exactly what they asked for. Show them what they love to see.
2. Create a social media calendar (very important)
Now that you’ve done your first phase of planning which is setting up goals, researching your competitors and looking for inspiration, it is now time to organize your content.
Having a social media calendar will make your life so much easier. With a social media calendar, you will be able to post the right content, at the right time, at the right social media channel.
There is no rule in creating a social media calendar. As long as it serves its purpose, then you are good to go. But if you want to have ideas on how to do it, you may copy our social media calendar template. We use Google Sheets in creating social media calendar as it is easy to share and collaborate within teams.
The above example is just a one-week post schedule for the month of June. If you have more content, you may create and schedule up to a month’s worth of content.
When creating your social media content, keep in mind the 80-20 rule. 80% of your content should be aimed at informing, educating or entertaining your audience. The remaining 20% should go to promoting your brand or selling your products/services.
Avoid doing 100% product promotion. If your followers keep seeing the same hard-sell posts on your page, they will easily get annoyed and unfollow you. But if you mix it with light content that gives them relevant and interesting information, then they won’t just stay as your followers but they will become fans who will share your content every now and then.
Here’s an example from @twitterbusiness on how you can mix your social media content.
3. Decide which platform is best for your business and focus on it
Another social media tips for businesses that you need to know is choosing the right social media platform for your business.
Social media platforms are not created equally. LinkedIn is created for professional connection and networking. Twitter is created for short-form content. Instagram is created for photo and video sharing. YouTube is for video sharing alone. Facebook is for connecting with people and sharing various content.
This means you don’t necessarily need to create accounts on all social media platforms. You just need to find what platform your customers are using or spending their time with as well as identifying your business goals.
For example, one of our clients is selling solar PV systems locally. Since most of its customers are business owners and homeowners aged 24 to 50, Facebook is enough social media platform to sell its products. Moreover, based on the competitor’s analysis that we made, their competitors are also spending a lot of time using Facebook in promoting their product.
On the other hand, if you are selling professional consulting services, you may want to focus your time on using LinkedIn as more professionals are spending their time on this platform and connecting with other professionals.
Knowing the right social media platform for your business will help you reach your customer and create better and relevant content for them.
It will also save you a lot of time in thinking of content to post on different platforms and creating your social media calendar.
On the other hand, there is nothing wrong in setting up pages on all types of social media, just make sure you don’t leave them to rot.
4. Share visuals and videos whenever you can
Visuals and videos are a very powerful element in content creation for social media. If you want to get engagement and good conversion results, you need to invest in photos and videos and not just plain old text. Text content can be easily ignored. But visuals are not. Just take a look at this study by socialmediatoday.com.
Moreover, according to Facebook, live videos get six times the engagement versus any other type of content.
And for Twitter, graphics and videos get more shares than those with text-based posts.
We know that creating visuals and videos can be really hard. Fortunately, we have Canva. Canva is a design tool for non-designer. They have a wide variety of design templates in creating social media content that is free to use.
For videos, we have Biteable and WeVideo. Biteable is also easy to use. They have templates that you can use to create videos. WeVideo, on the other hand, is a bit flexible in editing scenes. Both of these video editing tools are free.
5. Focus on quality, not quantity
While frequent posting gets a lot of engagement, reach and exposure, neglecting the quality of your content can harm your business. When it comes to being successful in using social media, you need to offer value.
If you just pitch and sell, there is little motivation for people to follow you since you are just feeding them about yourself. Remember, you need to use social media to build relationships with your customers. Be honest with them and always post great relevant content.
Like for example this post we did for Savvi Accounting and Shared Services. During the lockdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, many have lost their jobs and businesses. So we shared some ways on how they can get financial help from the government. The post gathered an organic reach of over 5,822 and has 782 engagements. Wow, that’s a lot of numbers for a single free post!
So the rule of thumb and one of the best social media tips for businesses that we often give is to ALWAYS OFFER VALUE.
6. Post at the right time
Having quality content can give you good engagement results, but if you post it on the right time and day, your reach and engagement will further increase.
This is the reason why you need to experiment every now and then which is the best time and day to post to maximize your result.
To help our clients, we created our own experiment on Facebook. You can check it out to get started in finding out what is the best time and day to post based on your business type.
7. Use the right tools
One of the many problems of business owners is that they don’t have the time to manage their social media pages. But you don’t have to look after your social media page every now and then. There are tools that you can use to automate the process. And most of these are free.
For example, once you create your social media calendar, you can schedule your post so it auto-publishes itself based on the time and date you have set.
Facebook has its own auto-scheduling post tool. You just need to go to your page’s publishing tools.
You can auto-schedule content for Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn using scheduling tools like Hootsuite and Sprout Social.
With these tools, you can also track mentions, tags, comments, engagements, reach, and other metrics of your social media pages.
Moreover, you can schedule content on the best time and day to get the best reach and engagement.
Just to use the right social media tools to manage your pages more effectively.
8. Be human
Social media is created to connect to people and build relationships. It is bad enough that other people are using it to create fake accounts that harm people. So make sure to be human when using it. One way to do that is to respond to people’s inquiries on your page. Avoid using auto-generated or bot-chat.
Another way is by posting a photo of you or your team showing people how you work or the type of culture you have in your team.
9. Optimize your page for engagement
Okay, don’t get frightened by the word “optimize”. Unlike the technical search engine optimization (SEO), social media optimization is pretty easy and simple, and anyone can do it.
With social media optimization, all you have to do is to use imagery, keywords, and fill out all information in your account.
A fully optimized social media page can help you rank better in Google.
Here are some best practices in optimizing your social media pages:
- Fill out all the information on your profile page – name, contact number, address, links, etc.
- Make sure to use relevant keywords in creating your profile. But don’t stuff them with it that it does not make sense anymore. In here, our keyword is “digital marketing in Clark”
- You also need to use relevant hashtags and keywords when sharing posts or content.
- Lastly, don’t be afraid to follow others using your page. Connect with popular accounts in your industry for additional exposure.
10. Monitor your activities
Another important social media tips for businesses that you should not skip is tracking and monitoring your activities.
Monitoring your social media page activity will help you in creating and publishing content. So make sure you check your pages weekly or monthly. Learn to experiment so you know what works for your business.
Most business owners skip this important process. That is why they keep on doing the same thing and getting the same result. If you want good results and achieve your goals, you need to continue monitoring your activity and experimenting on your social media pages.
Fortunately, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have insights and analytics pages that you can check to monitor the activity or your social media pages. This one is from LinkedIn.
10. Don’t be afraid to pay
Yes, social media is free. But if you want to reach more customers and promote your product to a wider audience, you need to spend a little.
There are many ways that you can invest in your social media.
Social media advertising
Many business owners are intimidated by advertising in social media thinking that it is expensive. Well, actually it is not if you know what to do. Advertising in social media does not mean you need to instantly spend thousands of dollars. Social media advertising, like Facebook, is very flexible and you can set your ad budget on a minimum of what you are most comfortable to spend.
If you want to know how you can maximise your money in advertising on social media, especially if you are using Facebook, you may check out our blog here.
Influencer Marketing
Aside from social media advertising, you may also want to invest in influencer marketing. You may want to reach out to a vlogger or an influencer who has a good following to promote your brand. Influencer marketing is one of the many digital marketing trends that you should check out this 2020.
Things to remember when using influencer marketing:
- Make sure the influencer upholds the vision of your brand.
- Make sure that it has a steady following. According to the study from Adweek, an influencer with around 30,000 followers had a 60% higher engagement and is 6.7 times more cost-effective than those influencers with more followers.
- Make sure their following is real and not bot-generated
- Brands are more likely to communicate with influencers than the other way around. If so, make sure to have a background check of the influencers. Some are bogus and will just milk you for money and free use of your product.
Social Media Managers/Experts
If you don’t have the time, you may hire a social media manager to do everything for you. We, at Digital Strategists, understand the need of small and medium businesses when it comes to social media management. (That’s one of the reasons we did this post, haha) That is why we help them with:
- goal setting and planning
- social media audit
- research
- competitor analysis
- social media planning
- optimization
- content creation and publication
- experiment and testing
- analysis
- reporting
- and advertising
Social media managers remove the burden from business owners in managing all their social media accounts. Without this burden, business owners can focus more on important things to grow their business.
Moreover, if you hire a social media manager, you know that an expert is taking good care of everything. It gives you the confidence that your brand/business is well taken care of online.
That is why if you need help with managing your social media pages, we, at Digital Strategists are here to help you. We have experts social media managers that will be focused on managing your pages to ensure that you get your money’s worth.
If you need help or have more questions about social media management, don’t hesitate to email us at info@dgstrategists.com or directly message us using the Messenger chat bubble below. (Don’t worry, you’ll be talking to a real human person. Promise! We don’t have chatbots. Chatbots can be really expensive and spammy. Yikes!)
Hope these social media tips for businesses help you grow and succeed.
Be social and be safe!
May you have more clients to come,
The Digital Strategists