Social Media Marketing Guide for Small Businesses – Winning Strategies to Conquer 2023!

In the previous chapters, we have talked about more than ten social media platforms. If you are reading this guide from the start, you must have a clear understanding of the important insights, daily and

monthly user base, and how to create business accounts and pages on the most active social media websites. Moreover, you might have an idea about the audience that actively uses a certain social media website. But the question still stands. Which one is the best platform for my business? And should my business be present on every platform? This chapter is all about choosing the right platform for your business.

Since you are already busy managing multiple operations and looking after all sorts of things, as a small business, it is impossible to dedicate your time and efforts to being active on every social outlet.

Although the competition is very tough, and you don’t want to miss any potential lead on any channel, we recommend a humble start. It is always good to narrow down the options and focus on a few platforms that your audience actively uses. But how do we identify these platforms? We will share a step-by-step guide to choosing the right platform for your business.

Identify Your Audience

Choosing the right social media platform for your business starts with identifying your audience. It matters a lot that your audience is active on the social media channel where you market. For example, Facebook has the largest user base as compared to any other platform. But your audience actively uses Instagram, so all of your marketing efforts are going in vain because you need to reach your audience on their preferred platform.

You have to be as specific as possible about your audience to make a rational decision. Once you identify your audience and build their personas, it will be easier for you to select the platform on which you will be putting in your digital marketing efforts. Here, we have some questions to help you create an audience or buyer persona for your business.

• Who is your typical customer?

• How old are they? Or in which age bracket do they fall in?

• What is the gender of your customer?

• What are your customer interests other than your product and services?

• What is the annual income of your customer?

• Is the customer married?

By writing down the answers to these questions, you will easily build your customer profile. You can add more questions to this list based on your industry and services.

Consider Your Business And Its Branding

Your channel selection is highly influenced by your brand itself, its personality, visuals, branding, business type, and products and services. Highly visual brands like photographers, studios, or furniture stores should focus on channels like Instagram and Pinterest . Whereas LinkedIn tops the list for large B2B enterprises.

But choosing the right social media platform is not black and white either. Some large corporations also have a visually stunning brand presence, that’s why they market on Instagram as well. Like Apple and Google have a visually stunning Instagram presence. Similarly, creative ventures like photography are also a business, they can capture some corporate clients from their LinkedIn network. So opting for the right social media channel depends totally upon your business. You need to understand and analyze your business and its offerings on a deeper level and make sense of it to choose among the right available option(s).

Define your goals

Why do you want to be on social media? The answer to this question impacts a lot on your decision to choose the right social media platform. Before starting the marketing efforts on social media, you should define your goals. It is obvious that, as a business, your main goal is to drive more revenue, but social media isn’t all about selling. There are other creative goals for social media. Some brands use social media to develop brand awareness and strong relationships with their customers, while others use it for customer support.

Take Netflix, for instance. They're an on-demand media company, and they use the Twitter handle @Netflixhelps to tackle customer service problems. This not only eases the load on their phone lines but also lets happy customers promote their brand.

Let's say you are planning to share engaging content with your followers, Instagram is the place for you. However, if customer support is the main goal, then you should consider Facebook and Twitter. Social media work in unusual ways for brands. When you are setting your social media marketing goals, it is important to see the bigger picture rather than just focusing on sales.

Keep An Eye On Your Competitors

Now that you know your goals and audience and have a good understanding of your business, the next important step is competitor analysis. You should keep an eye on your competitors and know which platforms they are using. Some people say competitors are your best friends, and they are right to some extent. By doing extensive research and competitive analysis, you can follow a similar social media strategy as your counterparts. As a small business, it is easier to find loopholes and gaps within a competitor’s strategy and capitalize on it, rather than testing your own strategy and waiting for it to perform.

Competitive analysis will also help you to choose the right platform for your business. For example, if your competitor extensively markets on Instagram, but the marketing efforts on Facebook are very minimal, you know where to go. While you shouldn't blindly follow your counterparts, keeping an eye on them helps you make well-informed decisions in your own unique direction.

Here are some of the important insights we recommend you focus on while doing your competitive analysis.

• What platforms they’re using?

• What’s working/not working for them?

• How engaged is the audience on each channel?

Want to dig deeper? Download our social media competitive analysis template.

Find Your Audience

Once you are done with defining your goals and doing research, it's time to find the right audience for your business. Finding the right audience will help you prioritize the platform(s) you will be focusing on in the future. To do this, you need to have a look at the demographics. In the previous chapters, we have given you detailed insights on each of the platforms. So, you might already have an understanding of where to find your audience.

Keep in mind the platform(s) your audience actively uses. For example, young folks do have Facebook profiles, but they actively engage on Instagram and TikTok. You need to understand your audience's behavior in using each platform and then pick the right platform that clicks best for your business.

Keep The Available Resources In Mind

Getting returns from your social media marketing efforts requires sheer commitment and patience. Social media marketing is an ongoing process that runs side by side with your other marketing activities. Think of it like a garden. You have to take care of it, feed it, and give it what you want it to give back to you.

We understand your resources are limited as a small business. And we also don’t expect you to hire a full-time social media marketing team right away. If you have one person who will be working on your social media for 5-7 hours a week, it’s smarter to stick to one or a maximum of two platforms. But if you have someone working full-time, then you can handle more platforms. It's about what you can handle properly to make it grow well.

Always keep in mind that social media can really be demanding. It can easily eat up all your time and still leave you with a feeling that you are not doing enough. So before jumping on to a new social media platform, ask yourself if you have enough time and resources to manage it. If the answer is no, stick to one platform and put your best in it. But if the answer is yes, customize your content according to each platform. As people behave differently on different platforms, they expect something different from brands as well. So, avoid posting the same thing on all social media channels. It's like having different conversations with different groups of friends.

Now that you have a clear understanding of choosing the right social media channel to market your business, let’s move forward to craft a social media marketing strategy.

Just like every other marketing activity you might have done so far for your business, social media also demands a plan. It’s a place where you want to influence, engage, and convert. You cannot just make an account and get going. To succeed in a highly competitive business environment, it is necessary to have a social media marketing strategy that aligns with your goals and drives maximum ROI. In this chapter, we will break down the important elements and guide you to craft and execute a perfect social media strategy. But first, to keep you motivated, we will share some of the benefits of having a social media strategy.

Benefits Of Having A Social Media Strategy For Small Businesses

The most difficult part of social media marketing is maintaining consistency. One post can go viral, and one reel can hit a million views, but how can businesses repeat this more often? The answer is social media strategy. Having a social media marketing strategy equips businesses with tangible benefits such as:

• It gives direction to all of your social media marketing activities

• Improves brand awareness

• Allows you to track performance by giving you measurable insights

• Helps you craft personalized content

• You can easily measure brand sentiment

• Better understanding of what works for you and what doesn’t.

Before we move ahead to guide you on how to create a social media strategy for small businesses, it is better to understand the difference between social media marketing strategy and content strategy. While they both are closely linked, they serve a different purpose. Here are some of the key differences that will give you a better understanding of social media marketing strategy and content strategy.

In a nutshell, social media marketing is about using platforms to achieve business goals quicker. People often use ads and promotions in their social media marketing strategy to reach masses. However, Content strategy is about making valuable stuff that builds trust over time by talking to your audience's interests. Both of them are equally important and goes hand in hand to make communication more convenient and make people interested in your brand.

Forming A Perfect Social Media Strategy For Small Businesses

Since you have been reading this guide from the beginning, by now, you must have a clear idea that without social media components, modern-day marketing is incomplete. But crafting a perfect social media strategy can be tricky, particularly when the platforms are evolving every day with new features.

You might have heard people saying social media marketing is dead. It is impossible to get a good reach and generate qualified leads without running ads or spending a hefty amount of money. But trust us, they are far away from reality. We do agree that getting organic reach and engagement is not as easy as it was in the early days. Some tactics that businesses are still using have become outdated and become less effective. But that doesn’t mean social media marketing is dead.

Getting noticed on social media is getting tougher, you must have a strong plan. Trying to outsmart social media algorithms won't work if you share bad posts or repeated content, try to oversell, send automated private messages, or send spam. To really connect with your audience, your content should be good, varied, and genuine. We will tell you the secrets to reaching more people by using all the tools social networks provide to make your brand stand out.

Since we have already discussed some of the important points of creating a social media strategy in the previous chapters, we will start with a small recap and then move ahead.

Identify Your Audience

Social media marketing is all about talking to the people who matter – your audience. To start strong, figure out exactly who you want to talk to on social media. This helps you make content that they'll really like and connect with. To learn more about identifying your audience, refer to Chapter 3.

Define and Set Measurable Goals

A winning social media strategy demands SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) goals. To see how well you're doing and get the maximum ROI, start by figuring out what you want to achieve with your social media presence. You can have one main goal or several different ones—it's up to you! Refer to Chapter 3 to learn more about social media goals.

Befriend Your Competitors

To create a perfect social media marketing strategy, it is important to understand your competitors. You need to dive deep into your competitor’s social channels to monitor what they do and what is working for them. Cash in the opportunities your competitors are missing by forming your social media strategy around those gaps. You can check Chapter 3, where we’ve discussed how you can keep an eye on your competitors.

Optimize Your Social Media Channels

To succeed in a highly competitive social media world, it is important to optimize your profiles. Your audience should have a sound understanding of your business, location, and offerings. Optimization also helps you to get seen once you add the right keywords. You can use keyword research tools to craft a customer-centric keyword strategy. In the previous chapters, we have shared details about the importance of optimizing your social media channels. You can review Chapter 2 to see how you can optimize your social media accounts.

Plan Your Content

After getting your channels optimized and choosing the platforms for social media marketing, it's time to plan your content and approach. Planning social media content can be time-consuming. You need to do a lot of research and analysis, but here we have some planning tactics broken down into simpler steps.

Create a tone for your pages

Your tone determines how you will interact with people on the internet. Are you formal or informal? Do you want to be seen as a humorous brand or a serious business? Each platform has its own personality, too. Like some brands use humor on Twitter but are quite sober and serious on LinkedIn. So, are you going to communicate on each platform differently, or would it be the same?

Create Content Buckets

It is important to understand your Unique Selling Propositions (USPs) to create content buckets. For example, if you are a wellness brand or a gym, you can post fitness tips in one content bucket. Another content bucket can be around some diet plans and healthy recipes. If you need help with content creation or find it difficult to pull out good content, you can use content creator tools.

Create Content Calendars

It is important to post regularly on social media. As a small business, it can be hectic to keep up with trends. A content calendar can help you post in an organized way, especially if you are posting on multiple channels. There are the best times and days that can give you maximum reach and engagement on different platforms, which you can find here:

Schedule Your Posts

Post scheduling is a strategic approach to effectively manage your social media content and posting. It can be hard for small businesses to consistently post manually, especially when you are present on multiple platforms. Social media scheduling tools like Creator Studio (now Meta Business Suite) and Social Pilot allow you to do cross-platform post-scheduling. You can prepare your content ahead of time and schedule it to be automatically published at specific dates and times.

In addition to that, scheduling enables you to maintain a diverse range of content types, such as videos, images, articles, and promotions, without overwhelming your audience with too much content at once.

Consider Mobile Dominance

Over 90% of users access social media platforms with their mobile phones. To ensure a seamless experience for your audience, make sure your content is mobile-optimized and looks good on mobile screens.

Post Video Content More Often

While making your content buckets and content calendars, don’t forget to add video content to the mix. Video content receives higher engagement than other types of content. Social media platforms are increasingly favoring video content, with live videos and reels (short videos) often generating even more engagement.

Invest In Community Management

Social media is a great tool to build a community around your brand. Communities are fantastic things as they drive more engagement and awareness of your brand. An active community plays an important part in your social media strategy as it can also create brand advocates, ultimately drawing in new customers to your business. But these communities need to be managed. You need to nurture it and then grow it. Here are some important tips for effective community management.

Understand The Algorithm

As previously discussed, the social media algorithm determines the content users will see. Understanding how algorithms work (e.g., Facebook's News Feed Algorithm or Instagram's algorithm ) can help you create content that gets more visibility.

Engagement Timing Matters

The first 30 minutes after posting are crucial for engagement. Higher engagement during this window signals to the platform that your content is valuable and relevant, potentially boosting its visibility.

Be Responsive

Being responsive is a key element for social media community management. You need to get back to your customers as quickly as possible. For example, if a person is asking for the price of a certain product, respond to them immediately and be helpful. Ensure your responses are positive, even if the customers complain about certain things. This will help create a positive experience and contribute to avoiding social media crisis. Some Social media platforms allow you to send auto-generated responses as well. Optimize your messaging apps for better results.

Get More Reviews

Reviews also play a crucial role in an effective community management strategy. To win the trust of new customers, it is important that your brand must have reviews on various platforms. While Google reviews are widely trusted by most people, there are other platforms to consider as well. You can encourage your customers to share their feedback on Facebook, too. If your customers are satisfied with the services but are reluctant to drop a review, you can incentivize them with a giveaway or a contest. Getting reviews is a slow and ongoing process, but having a good number of positive reviews around your brand helps you attract more customers. This, in turn, can elevate your brand's visibility in search results and recommendations.

Grow Your Followers

The most important part of social media strategy is getting new followers and retaining the existing ones. There’s no point in being active on social media and spending a hefty amount of money on resources if you are not getting new followers. But followers don’t grow overnight. It requires consistent effort, like everything else in the social media sphere.

The most important part of social media strategy is getting new followers and retaining the existing ones. There’s no point in being active on social media and spending a hefty amount of money on resources if you are not getting new followers. But followers don’t grow overnight. It requires consistent effort, like everything else in the social media sphere.

When you're growing organically, what you post online is super important. It's like the magnet that attracts people to you. You can do fun stuff like contests or show what's happening behind the scenes at your company. You can also tell people about one platform you're on when you're using another one, like telling your Facebook followers about your cool Instagram pictures.

With ads, you spend some money (ad budget) to reach more people. You can decide how much money you want to spend every day (ad spend). You can show your ads to a specific group of people who might like your stuff. There are tools that help you keep track of all your ad campaigns. You can also ask famous people or influencers on the internet to talk about your stuff – they can help you get noticed.

Sometimes, even micro-influencers can help a lot, especially if you're a local business like a restaurant or bar. You can also get news articles or stories written about you to get even more people interested in what you're doing online.

Get Noticed, Get Results! Reach us today for a social media strategy that works!

Get Started

Now that you have created your social media strategy, your pages must be up and running. It is necessary to keep changing and testing different things to achieve desired results. In this chapter, we will be discussing some of the social media tools to get proper insights about your digital business, and based on these insights, you can re-strategize and make changes to your existing social media strategy.

Digital marketing, especially social media, is a fast-paced world. With ever-changing algorithms and new updates coming every day, it is vital to stay ahead. This means businesses must continuously try adding new things and evolving their strategy to stay effective. Here, we have some social media monitoring and management tools that will help you analyze what’s performing the best and what requires adjustment. They also provide critical insights into your page and campaign performance, paving the way for capturing new leads and business growth. So, let's dive right in!

Devi Tool

This is one of the most underrated social media monitoring and lead-capturing tools: Devi Tool. It allows you to enter specific keywords based on your business to monitor and capture leads. Here’s the best part: Once you've signed up and added Devi's extension to your browser, you'll receive alerts whenever someone posts anything containing your chosen keywords on social media. Yes, that includes posts on Facebook groups (both public and private - you read that right, private groups, too), LinkedIn, Twitter, or Reddit. All of these posts will show up on your Devi dashboard.

For example, if you're a digital marketing agency offering social media marketing services, just add keywords like 'social media marketing,' 'best social media agency,' or 'graphic designer' to your Devi tool. Now, wait for the magic to happen. You can see who has posted anything related to your keywords. You can either view the profile of the person who posted or send them an AI-generated sales pitch. This tool also has a built-in Chat GPT, so you don’t have to worry about making too many changes in the pitch. But if you want to write it yourself to sound more personalized, you can do that as well.

While it's a paid tool, it can save you a lot of time and money. According to their website, Devi Tool can save up to 3-4 hours per day. You can also explore this tool for free, as they've included a comprehensive video tutorial on how to use it for monitoring, lead capture, and outreach.

Meta Business Suite By Facebook

As mentioned in the previous chapter, Facebook Creator Studio which has now merged with Meta Business Suite is a great tool that offers invaluable cross-platform posting and post scheduling capability. However, it extends beyond these features, serving as a comprehensive tool for monitoring and gaining insights into the performance of all your pages and posts.

For social media managers handling Facebook and Instagram for multiple brands and businesses, Meta Business suite and other business tools by Facebook streamlines content publishing across both platforms, simplifying the process at a high level. The best part? It's a free tool that brings together social media analytics, scheduling, and community management under one roof. Furthermore, it offers the ability to set up monetization tools, track earnings, run paid ads, and manage payout settings seamlessly.

One standout feature of Meta Business Suite is its built-in inbox, which allows you to engage with your Facebook and Instagram audience without switching accounts on Messenger. You can efficiently communicate with your customers from this platform by utilizing Meta Business Suite. The Inbox conveniently consolidates all interactions into one place, enabling you to respond directly to comments and messages from the dashboard. It also aids in workload management by categorizing conversations as Done, Spam, Unread, or Follow-up.

In the Insights section, you can gain a comprehensive view of your performance on Facebook, categorized into four main sections: Pages, Videos, Stories, and Instant Articles. Each category offers specific dashboards, such as Audience Insights for Pages and Retention Insights for Videos. You can easily customize your view by selecting specific timeframes within each dashboard and, if needed, export the data to create a social media performance report for presentation purposes.

Meta Business Suite is indeed a versatile and vital tool for streamlining social media management and optimizing performance.

Tailwind

Here's another fantastic tool for managing Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook. Pinterest works a bit differently from other social platforms. To get more traffic and followers, you typically need to be more active and post around 3-4 pins (Pinterest Posts) every day. This can eat into your work-life balance, but not if you have a Tailwind subscription.

Tailwind lets you do everything in one place, so you might not need a separate Canva subscription. Plus, it comes with ghostwriting AI features, saving you some extra costs. However, if you already have a designer and copywriter on your team, you can easily upload your own designs.

What's more, Tailwind offers a feature that can help you excel on social media. Tailwind Communities is an internal tool where over 30,000 Tailwind members collaborate to share each other’s content and grow faster. It's particularly effective for new Pinterest accounts, helping you boost your content to people in your niche who share your interests.

Tailwind offers many features other than creating and managing content for your social media accounts. You can further explore this tool on their website.

These are just a few tools to measure and improve your page's performance. There are many tools out there, each with its unique features. But as a small business, it's essential to make a smart choice and invest in the right one.

For instance, tools like Social Pilot and Sprout Social are excellent for seamlessly managing social media and posting across different platforms. Some tools, like Hubspot and Hootsuite, even come with built-in CRM systems. You can choose a single tool that meets your needs or combine a few—it's up to you.

If investing in multiple tools isn't feasible, but you want a wide range of features to excel in the competitive market, consider hiring a trusted social media marketing agency. They have skilled social media consultants equipped with the right tools to take your social media and business to the next level. They can enhance your page performance, create engaging content, foster a vibrant community around your brand, and boost your sales. With the right social media marketing team, success is within reach.

Ready to boost engagement and grow your following?

Get Started Learn more

After reading this guide, we hope you understand how to do social media marketing for small businesses in 2023 and its importance in the current digital era. But to make it easier to recollect when you re-visit

this blog post, here’s a list of key takeaways from the social media marketing guide for small businesses that will refresh your memory.

1. There are more than 100 social media platforms on the internet, with 15 of them having more than 500 Million monthly active users. It is not necessary for you to be present at each one of them. To thrive, you need to find the platform(s) your audience prefers and put your marketing efforts into it.

2. Facebook is the largest social media marketing platform, with a monthly user base crossing 2 billion. It is the best platform for every small business as it allows many options, both paid and organic. And can contribute to making social media marketing efforts successful for you.

3. LinkedIn is the best platform to do B2B marketing and reach C-level executives.

4. It is important to optimize your pages to appear higher in search results. Add relevant keywords in your social accounts’ bios, add location to your pages, and get reviews.

5. The best social media marketing strategy can be created by keeping an eye on your competitors. Capitalize on the opportunities and platforms your competitors are missing out on to stand out and win new customers.

6. Always be consistent with your brand tone, personality, and overall branding on social media.

7. Post relevant, trending, and engaging content to get more traffic and grow your audience.

8. There are right times and days to post on social media to get maximum reach and engagement on your post. Always post on ‘Golden Hours’ to get the desired results.

9. Social media works as a great tool to build a community around your brand. An active community plays an important part in your social media strategy as it can also create brand advocates, ultimately drawing in new customers to your business.

10. Hundreds of social media tools are available for effective management, content creation, and lead generation. Small businesses can choose a single tool that meets their needs or combine a few based on their budget.

11. Small businesses should consider investing in a social media agency due to the specialized expertise and time-saving benefits they offer. By outsourcing social media management, small businesses can free up their time, access premium tools and analytics, maintain a consistent online presence, and receive measurable results, all at a cost-effective rate.