Social Media Marketing for small business
What Is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing is simply the process of obtaining traffic for your website from Social Media channels. These programs use created content that is either informative, or engaging. Theses messages can encourage readers to share it with their own social groups or with other networks such as Google Plus, YouTube, Facebook or Instagram.
Social media marketing is popular because it appeals to the emotional part of the brain, but before you begin you need to know what the most successful companies do to thrive in this market
- Value first: Focused on giving value first. From every post, care about helping your audience.
- Transparency & Authenticity: Placing public transparency as the core values, and actually putting it into action.
- Consistency: Post valuable content consistently every week.
And don’t forget its “Social” Media, be social, reply to comments and comment on other peoples posts.
Social Media Marketing for small business
There are countless articles on social media strategy, but many miss the mark because they only apply to big companies with unlimited budgets and large marketing departments. We have narrowed this page down to the strategies that any small business could achieve, with a little effort.
Types of social media campaigns for small business
1
Posts – Regular posts from your business fan page
The easiest way to connect with your audience is by posting regularly. Here are some of the easiest ideas to get valuable engagement from you posts.
- Branded image: Post a funny or inspirational image with your logo or website address on it.
- Photos or videos: Post of your or your employees doing their job or just clowning around.
- How to videos. Remember, You Tube is the 2nd most searched platform on the internet behind Google and its most searched terms is “how to”
- Questions: Pose simple, basic questions that your media circles can easily answer or use a Fill-in-the-blank post (e.g. “If I had a billion dollars I would _________”)
- Quotes: “To be or not to be” Inspiring, humorous, or motivational quotes often perform the best.
- Polls: While Facebook offers built-in polls in groups, you can always insert them manually and receive the same amount of engagement (e.g. “Which of these cars is your favorite?”)
- Statistics or data: Share new industry statistics (84% of B2B businesses use social media)
- Link to a guest post: Share (or re-share) a link to a post you contributed to another site. If you’re interested in learning how and why guest blogging should be part of your online strategy, see my article, The Ultimate Guide to Building Your Business by Guest Blogging.
- Link to an old blog post: Recycling, your best old posts will gain new engagement for minimum effort.
- Infographics: Infographic your followers would appreciate. How to make an infographic
And if you are still stuck see 100 killer ideas for social media
Best social media post ideas for increased engagement
Sponsored Posts
Sometimes the most effective SMM campaigns are the simplest ones.
A sponsored post, also known as a promoted post, is a post on a social media platform is paid by a business in order to draw a large amount of popularity. If you are posting regularly to your business fans you might notice that some generate more likes shares than others. These may be perfect to pay to go to a larger audience in your target market
3
Create an educational video about your business
Visuals are essential to educational content. Use compelling images. Infographics or even GIFS that walk people through a certain process or task can do exceptionally well on social media
Campaign ideas for small business:
- Create a time-lapse video of your product being made (like the one by major and minor below)
- Create interactive FAQs about your business and share them regularly on your favorite social networks
This simple video has over 2,500 views on Facebook! www.facebook.com/majorandminorNZ/
In Summary
Make regular posts that are of varying nature, take notice of the ones that garner the most interest and promote and recycle them. Align you business with a cause or core theme. Create videos & reach out to influences in your interest groups.
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