Social Media Tips for Small Business

As I sit to write this post, I realize I have so much information to get down and I could probably be here for 5 hours, so I will do my best to keep this short and to the point. If you’re a small business owner, it can be difficult navigating where to start with your social media efforts if you are trying to do it all yourself. Here are some tips to help you get started.

Decide Which Platforms Suit Your Business

Not all businesses are good for all platforms. The main ones being Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest and Snapchat, a lot of these platforms have adopted aspects from each other (ie. Instagram & Facebook stories from Snapchat) and your business does not need to be on all of them. If your business is highly visual, Instagram and Pinterest are probably a great place to start. It’s smart for almost all types of business to be on Facebook, as many people go to facebook before anything else to check things like hours, reviews and contact info.

If you have started your profiles on all platforms, it would be worth your time to conduct a social media audit and see where your efforts are best spent.

Strategy

Once you know which platforms you want to focus on, think about how you want to visually portray your brand. Quality is king, so make sure your photos are high quality beautiful images. Images & videos will almost always illicit higher engagement than a text post on ALL platforms. Take a look at your competitors and see what they’re doing, and research hashtags in your community and use those on your photos for instagram.

Measure Your Results

It isn’t worth spending your time strategizing and posting if you’re not looking at the results you’ve achieved. With business accounts comes analytics that show all your impressions, engagement, and click through rates.

Quantity

People don’t love to be bombarded by images of your products or feel like they’re being sold something on every single post you make. They DO love seeing beind-the-scenes stuff and seeing the personality behind your brand. Being active on social media also shows your business is thriving - if you’ve ever come across a company that hasn’t posted anything in over a year on any platform, you feel like that company is probably closed, even if they aren’t.

Posting once a day on Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest would be an active account. Several times

a day on twitter, because of it’s brevity, and generally on weekdays for Linkedin is my rule of thumb.

With that being said, if you don’t have something fantastic, or something that you’re proud of, it’s okay not to post for a few days. Better to have something of higher quality than more posts.

If you’re the type of person who doesn’t want to monitor your social media on the daily, but wants to make sure your posting everyday, I suggest using a tool like Hootsuite or Buffer. I personally use Hootsuite, which I prefer over Buffer. If you have just your business accounts, you can set up a free account and schedule your posts a month at a time if you wish. It takes a bit of the worry away, making sure your posts are being done for you.

Thanks for reading. Feel free to reach out to @ruruandbars on any social media platform if you have any questions, I’d be happy to answer them ☺️