6 Ways Your Small Business Can Gain a Larger Social Media Presence

Gain a larger social media presence

Every business wants to get noticed, especially on social media. With social media being one of the largest marketing tools out there, your business should be doing all it can to get noticed. Here are just six great ways that your small business can gain a larger social media presence, meaning more traffic to your website and more custom.

Form a Project Plan

Before improving your strategy, you need to come up with a great project plan. This means choosing the right network (see below), assigning the best staff members to the right roles and using software that will ensure the project runs smoothly. Having a project manager that works solely on improving your online presence and running a social media or digital marketing project will allow you to measure progress and work towards common goals. Using the best project management tools will allow you and your team to communicate and track your project through one platform for ultimate team collaboration.

Choosing the Right Platform

Each social media website has a different use and attracts a different audience. This is something you need to be aware of when choosing which platform is best for your needs and audience. You can concentrate on using just one but using a few will lead to a larger online presence. As a small business, you should sway towards the most popular of the social media sites. This means Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Facebook allows you to build relationships with customers, Instagram is fantastic for visual content, Twitter allows your business to take part in relevant discussions, interesting topics, and is also how a lot of customers communicate with businesses. LinkedIn is the most professional site and builds authority in the business world.

Use the Right Tools

Hiring a social media expert can help you in posting the right content and choosing the right tools. There are many great social media business tools out there that can post content for you and allow you to respond more quickly to messages. There are also tools within social media platforms such as Facebook that can show you which posts are getting the most reactions, how your likes and follows fluctuate, and many other statistics. This can help you understand what is working well for you and when it is best to post.

Engage Your Audience

What you post is very important, but you also need to follow on from this. You should be actively engaging with your audience at all times if you want to gain a larger following. There are several ways that your business can engage better with its social media audience including:

  • Addressing criticisms or complaints
  • Commenting on other relevant posts
  • Starting conversations
  • Answering questions
  • Showing appreciation, such as thanking customers for purchasing or commenting

Don’t Be Over Promotional

Whilst social media is your platform to promote and advertise your business, if you are too over promotional you will find that your social media presence will not increase. Social media is there to find and actively engage new and old customers. Small businesses often become too over promotional, looking at selling their products and services when instead they should be fun and engaging. In fact, businesses are recommended to only post 20% promotional content.

Remain Constant

Once you begin to grow your online presence through social media, you need to be constant to keep this up. Social media is accessed daily by most customers and so you can easily be forgotten if you don’t remain constant. This depends on the social media platform. As a general rule, posting around five times on Facebook or LinkedIn is enough to get yourself noticed whilst with Twitter, the more Tweets, the better.

These six tips can aid you in building a larger social media presence for your small business. Good luck and happy posting!

About April Heavens- Woodcock

Author: April Heavens–Woodcock , is the Chief Buzz Officer Touching Clients a Digital Marketing Firm that specializes in strategic online marketing development for businesses. She is passionate about helping businesses grow their bottom line with effective tools. She speaks regularly on social media, email marketing, and marketing around the East Coast.