Social media has become one of the most effective ways for businesses to promote their brand, interact with customers, and boost the company’s presence online. With many social media platforms to choose from, it is a challenge to manage them all at once.
According to recent statistics, there are 4.76 billion people around the world who now use social media and 137 million new users have come online within the last 12 months. To put that in perspective, in 2000, there were only 413 million people online.
The internet and social media show no signs of slowing down, which means your business continues to benefit from these platforms.
In this guide, we’ll look a little closer at the growth of social media over the years and how social media is beneficial for businesses. You’ll get a handful of social media tips that will hopefully kickstart your efforts and utilize this marketing method to show off your small business in 2023.
As human beings in this digital age, we’re hungry for information. The growth of social media is shown not just by the number of users online but the sheer number of platforms in existence.
From Facebook and YouTube to Instagram, Tiktok, and Snapchat, there’s a new social media platform that seems to pop up into existence every couple of years or so. While some social media platforms have come and gone, like MySpace, Bebo, or Vine, others have survived the cut.
For businesses, it’s become an integral part of their communications with customers and prospective ones at that. As part of the Harris Poll, conducted by Sprout Social, they found 55% of consumers learn about new brands on social.
That means that as a business, it pays to spend the time, money, and effort in boosting your social media platforms. Otherwise, you may struggle to get noticed in this digital-driven environment.
Why use social media as a small business? Does it really make or break a business? Well, for some businesses, social media might not be necessary but for the majority, it’s helpful in a variety of ways. This includes:
In order to best utilize social media for your small business, we’ve put together some helpful tips to maximize your efforts. Social media management is time-consuming and using these methods of practice will help ensure every effort made is a worthwhile one.
Cross-promotion of your channels is essential because you’re likely to have a slightly different or higher following on one platform from another. In order to get your customers to remember you, it’s critical that they’re following you on all social media platforms. That way, they’re always going to see you on their feeds.
There are some useful alternatives to linktree, which is a popular platform for centralizing all of your social media links to one, easy-to-use page. Using one of these all-in-one marketing and sales platforms, allows easy access to all social media feeds for your customers to follow.
While it’s important to roll out as much content as possible each day, it pays to invest in quality content over quantity. The content you create via your social media feeds needs to be useful for your customers. Whether that’s educational or entertaining in nature, it’s beneficial to make sure the quality is there in every post you create.
The better quality the content is, the more engagement and reach you’re likely to achieve as a small business. The further it reaches, the better it’ll be for your brand’s growth as a whole.
It’s hard to stay noticed online nowadays, especially with all of the competition and noise on these social media platforms.
A lot of studies that have been conducted on social media content agree that posting once per day with a maximum of two posts per day is ideal. One study found that pages with under 10,000 fans on Facebook experienced a 50% drop in engagement per post if they posted more than once per day.
However, that’s only taking into consideration one social media platform. This is something you’ll want to do across all your social media feeds in order to promote your business and boost its online presence.
Your audience is influential to how well your business does, especially when you’re aiming to boost its online presence. With that being said, you should be using social media as a means of connecting with those potential customers and existing customers.
Engage with them via your own content in the comments section and be sure to keep up with queries or comments made via direct messaging. There’s an abundance of opportunities to interact with your customers and social media allows you to do this on a more personal level than over email, for example.
To help ensure your content reaches the right people, look at ways to optimize your content on all of the platforms. One example is through hashtags and adding these to your posts in order to reach more of your desired audience.
Other ways to optimize content could be through CTAs, using high-quality images, and video content.
As a small business, every decision and action you make is important to get right. Your social media feeds are a great opportunity to build your small business into something you never thought possible. Use these tips to make social media work productively for your small business this year.
Author Bio: Natalie Redman (LinkedIn)
Natalie is a freelance writer with two years of experience in web page copywriting for businesses across many industries. She’s also an owner of two blog websites and a Youtube content creator.
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