Social media can be a powerful tool for small businesses, but it can also be a source of stress.
Figuring out which platforms to use, what content to share, and when to post on social media can be overwhelming.
In this guide I’ll show you quick 7 social media strategies you can implement today to help your small business succeed in the digital space!
#1: Find accounts in a similar niche
There are millions of accounts on Instagram, so no matter how small your niche might be there is guaranteed to be lots of accounts just like yours.
What use is this? Simple, you can identify and find your audience!
Instead of finding ways for your audience to find you, there are quick ways to get yourself in front of them. For example, a common tactic is to find big accounts in your niche, go to their last 3 posts and find people who are consistently commenting and engaging with those accounts. Then simply follow and engage with them on their account!
But beware; don’t be a spammer. No one likes spammers. Take care and have intent when interacting with your new audience, they don’t want to feel like a bot just followed them and is trying to get them to follow back.
We also highly recommend checking out an article by our friends over on Alliance Virtual Offices! They dove deep into 4 tips to grow your social media following, and point #1 work perfectly alongside finding your niche audience!
#2: Target smaller hashtags
If you aren’t using hashtags on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn or even Facebook… you should! They are a quick, painless and potentially very effective way of gaining traction on your social media accounts.
But many people make the mistake of simply using as many big hashtags as possible, each with millions of posts on them. Those hashtags are too crowded, and your chances of getting noticed in them are nil.
Instead, tackle smaller, more precise hashtags. A common method is to use long tailed hashtags, those being much longer and precise, for example, using #digitalmarketerslondon rather than #digitalmarketing.
#3: Utilise newest features
When Instagram introduced stories, we saw a huge influx of engagement and reach from stories. When they then introduced IGTV, we saw an influx of engagement and reach from IGTV. And most recently, we have seen a huge reach and increase in following when reels are utilised.
For a good reason! When a company introduces new features they will push it as much as possible. With reels, Instagram dedicated huge portions of the explore page just to reel content which showed engagement and impressions that pages haven’t seen before.
This is why it is so crucial to hop on new features and trends as quickly as possible. It isn’t too late to change your content around the newest features to keep your social accounts relevant, and as high in the algorithms as possible!
#4: Post frequently
Consistency is key for all social media algorithms. They want to push accounts that post high quality, consistent content day in day out to encourage their users to stay on the app longer.
But you need to strike a balance. Don’t post once a day, every day of the week if your posts carry no value and are low quality. You need to find a way to post as much as possible, consistently at the same time same days, and content that is engaging and gets your audience excited.
Something we see being a huge success is memes. They are relevant, funny and engaging to your audience and are a fantastic content to put up. Another great piece of content we see time and time again are value driven carousels. We hopped on this trend ourselves, and have seen some great results in driving traffic to our social channels.
If you make the content interesting, engaging and worth saving, you will get a huge amount of success with this method! Out of all these social media strategies, this is one that we have seen the most consistent growth with, so we highly recommend trying it out.
#5: Engage in a conversation
One thing we see commonly with middle sized pages with around 10,000 followers, or 5,000 Facebook likes, is the lack of interactions. Smaller businesses and accounts with fewer followings have the advantage of not being swarmed with comments and questions every minute of the day, so you should be utilising this advantage!
Algorithms love interactions. If someone comments, make sure to respond, encourage conversation by asking a questions or expanding on their comment. Avoid using two or three word responses as these are usually ignored as low quality comments and don’t achieve anything.
If you aren’t getting many comments, there is an easy way to change that! Ask questions in your post, post polls on your stories, engage in other account conversations and be generally a good social media user. You will quickly see your following and engagement sky rocket!
#6: Paid advertising
Time and time again, we see small businesses shy away and ignore the idea of paid advertising. Many of them took free advertisement credits, spent some money to boost a post, and see no results. From then on they swear to never use online advertising again as it brought them no results.
However, Facebook and Instagram ads for example can be the most time efficient way of increasing social media presence. For example, we dedicated just £10 a week on social media advertising budget for content on a clients Instagram account which alone helped them gain 1,000 followers in a month. From that, one of these followers converted to a client who pays £200 a month for their service!
It’s easy to do it wrong, but when done right paid advertising can save you a lot of time and effort. Make sure to have some great content and well optimised accounts first, create an engaging and interesting advert and push it. We promise you will see the results!
#7: Invite your friends
Now it might seem obvious… but its something that people also shy away from, either from embarrassment or just don’t want to bother their friends. Yet this is one of the best social media strategies!
Truth is, your friends will always be the best followers you can have. They are the most likely to engage, like, comment and share your content organically and regularly; something that all algorithms favour massively.
And you don’t need to ask for much! Simply sharing your pages, or messaging friends asking to like and support your socials will help you get some consistently engaging audience that will help you climb the social media ranks easily!
Conclusion
We hope this article gave you some great tips for utilising social media to aid your small business. From strategies that improve engagement, to tactics to increase your following, we went deep into all the details to make sure your social media strategies work!
What do you think? Which of these strategies have you implemented? Which have you never used before? Let us know in the comments below!