Anders Hjorth is the author of four digital marketing insights reports and the founder of Innovell, a Digital Marketing consultancy researching trends in digital marketing. As a pioneer in SEO, one of the first Google Advertising Professionals, and the co-founder of several agencies, he has broad and long-running experience across SEO, paid search, social media, and content marketing. Anders was COO for GroupM Search across EMEA. Anders is also an active member of various awards juries and advisory boards including the Paid Search Association.
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Whether you’re just starting out or are already on top of your business’s social media activities, there is value to find in this list of expert social media tips for small businesses.
Social media has revolutionized human relations and transformed the way we communicate. It has created a new type of celebrity thanks to the power of personal branding.
And businesses are increasingly realizing how direct person-to-person relations via digital channels can be beneficial to their sales and marketing.
To master this new type of business communication, most companies could use a bit of social media advice and some digital marketing tips. So, we’ve gathered a collection of social media tips for business in this article.
They’re easy to understand, easy to execute, and should prove valuable for any small business social media marketing operation.
Whereas social media marketing has become an advanced marketing discipline where experts compete for excellence and for outstanding results, it’s also a playground where any business -- big or small -- can make a difference for itself.
The following social media marketing tips can be implemented by practically any business. (Take special note of Nos. 4 and 8, which are our favorite social media tips on this list.)
One of the great benefits of social media is the access to market data it provides. Social media platforms are data-driven platforms designed to tailor advertising to their users. In the process, they provide access to some of that data to businesses.
As a business owner, you’ll get access to the social media metrics you need to steer your business, but you’ll also get insights into your audience that you can use for a social media audit or for defining your target market.
While running your social media activity, you’re constantly learning more about your audience. However, you can gather audience insights for a marketing plan in a more structured way.
There are so many communication opportunities via social media marketing that you can easily spread your efforts too thin. By choosing one primary social network where you concentrate your efforts, you’ll get the biggest return on investment.
Other networks can be part of your small business social media strategy as secondary networks that you utilize in a more opportunistic way.
Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to pick one social media network and stick with it. Here’s one approach.
Google has a challenge. Its advertisers were brought up with search marketing but were not necessarily educated on how to use Google's other great advertising channel: YouTube.
Google therefore created a conceptual framework for working with YouTube. This framework helps define the role of video content, which by nature is more expensive to produce and distribute.
Whether you plan to use video or not, the YouTube strategy playbook -- which uses the three Hs of “hero,” “hub,” and “help” -- can be of great use when planning social media activity for your business.
Creating a mix of content with the three Hs is very focused on the hero content, or the driving elements of your business’s storyline that you want your broadest audience to see. Let's look at what you need to do to establish your content mix with this in mind.
If you’ve followed our second tip, you may be wondering how to best utilize your secondary social networks. You may also be overwhelmed by the thought of needing to publish content to your social networks multiple times a week.
This is why content repurposing is an important strategy. A publication has a limited life span on social media, and in order to generate a return on your investment in a piece of content, you need to maximize its usage.
The initial version of your content should be optimized for your primary social network. Subsequent versions can be formatted to suit other networks, perhaps using a more visual angle, fitting a new social trend, a different perspective, or simply different text.
Inbound marketing is an approach by which you create and publish content that will drive interested users closer to your offering.
It’s a structured process using planning, scoring, and automation to manage long customer interaction processes. It’s a great approach to marketing for small business, especially in the B2B space.
Inbound marketing is about using content to drive users to your offering without reaching out to them with advertising.
Users can be strongly influenced by social media but may not be used to buying products there. There is, however, a rising trend of social commerce on social networks like Instagram and Pinterest.
Facebook also recently launched its Page shops, adding e-commerce functionality to business pages on its platform.
Social commerce is a shortcut from social media to e-commerce. It can be an interesting opportunity for companies with strong social media activity and the possibility to sell online.
When you first consider content for your social media marketing plan, you might think about articles and images.
But video content has become accessible to small businesses now that platforms like the Facebook Live Producer empower you to create professional-looking live video content. You might even want to make video your hero content, as we saw in tip No. 3.
All you need is a smartphone with a good camera to start producing live video. We also recommend adding a good-quality microphone or headset.
Running social media activities is about efficiently using resources. The best way to organize any social media activity is to plan ahead and automate as much as possible.
There are a number of simple social tools to help with automation that each perform specific tasks, or it can be done using a more complete social media software suite that covers all of your automation needs.
If you’ve built your content mix using tip No. 4, you may have started using a content calendar as the nervous system of your social media strategy. Now, all you need to do is connect your primary and secondary social networks to your content via automation.
Social media automation tools will help your business automate the implementation of your content strategy. In the tips above, we’ve mentioned various tasks for which these tools are useful: in implementing a content calendar, automating publications, and planning ahead.
Let’s look at a few tools that work in different ways.
The core functionality of Later is to build a visual content calendar and schedule image posts to Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Later’s visual overview of the calendar is one of the best we’ve seen.
The content calendar view of Later is visual and well adapted to planning Instagram posts. Image source: Author
MeetEdgar is great for getting the most out of your content. It’s the content repurposing, recycling, and automation champion.
A unique feature of MeetEdgar is the automatic creation of post variations submitted for approval. Image source: Author
Sprout Social is one the best and most complete social media management tools covering the entire spectrum of automation, management, research, and reporting functionalities for your social media activity.
Sprout Social provides a wide variety of reporting options, including content performance across the social media channels you are using. Image source: Author
Most social media activity only pays off in the medium to long run, which can be frustrating to businesses looking for quick wins or a rapid return on their investment.
But some of the above tips are sure to generate value for your business even in the short run as they can help you focus on what’s essential and what tasks are the best use of your time.
Focus your efforts, optimize your content output, plan ahead, and automate where you can in order to get the most out of your small business’s social media strategy.