3 Tips for Small Business Social Media Strategy
Strategy… not everyone’s favourite word, or activity! I get it. It’s vague, ambiguous, implies results and can be daunting. When you break it down though, it really isn’t. Having a strategy, whether that’s a 20-page Powerpoint Presentation, or an A3 piece of paper full of colour and bullet points, more often than not, is the best investment of your time for your business.
Personally, I like to work analogue. Give me a pen and piece of paper any day. I find it much more creative, giving me space to think and the freedom to suggest.
However you prefer to conjure up your business plans, here are some tips to get you started with your social media strategy.
Take it back to the beginning
It can be easy to go all guns blazing into what you think you should do, posting what you want to post about. In actual fact, where you need to start is with your audience.
Who is your audience?
Who do you want your audience to be?
Why would those people be following your account
What is it they would want to see from you?
Don’t force it
If you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything at all. Bambi-style!
Once you have a strategy in place you can feel obliged to stick to a strict regime, forcing content from nothing. Generally, there is always something you can post about, but if you’re having to force it, your post will fall on deaf ears, or blind eyes perhaps.
I would always recommend planning ahead where scheduling is concerned. It just makes your life so much easier.
Having a catalogue of posts styles you plan to share can help to support your content; being able to pick and pluck particular content themes from a bank of posts will mean you’re never short of relevant, interesting images. Some themes I would suggest may be:
Products/Services in action
Knowledge/Industry insight
Team
Promotional
Reviews/Testimonials
Offers and Competitions
Quality over Quantity
There are an abundance of social media platforms available; various features, differing target audiences, alternative objectives etc. Although it would be fabulous to have an outstanding presence on each and every one of them, it’s just not plausible. It’s much better to have great activity levels and offerings on one or two than to have lacklustre accounts on all.
I would suggest choosing 2, maybe 3 depending on your budget and/or time allocated to your social media marketing.
As a rule of thumb, Facebook is a good all-rounder, you can use it as a website/point of reference for your prospective customers, give information, showcase product and/or services, allow reviews, and so on and so on.
Instagram is fantastic if you are a product-based service in my opinion as you have great content possibilities, whereas service-based businesses sometimes struggle to conjure up a constant influx of imagery. Instagram is a very visual platform therefore your images are everything, if you don’t have great photos it can be difficult to appeal. So, if Instagram is your platform of choice, make sure you commit to taking photos at every opportunity to make sure you’ve got some great content to promote.
Twitter is great for interaction and communities. If you’re somebody who is happy to engage, reply, post questions (and answers) on a regular basis, Twitter will be an ideal, and fun, platform for you.
There’s also TikTok and YouTube for video content, Pinterest for shopping and creative inspiration, and LinkedIn for professional networking, amongst others.
Try these tips and let me know how you get on! Any questions? Fire away!
See how Flossy Notes can assist you in your business goals here: www.flossynotes.com
