Social Media can be the catalyst to small business success or failure. Time and time again I speak with business owners who need assistance navigating the waters of social opinion on sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkIn. Today I want to share some advice that I recommend for all small business owners.
Time Your Posts
Your target market is on Facebook at certain times of the day depending on their demographic. You want to monitor your engagement with analytic data to make sure your posts are going out at peak times. Another way to accomplish this is through a service such as HootSuite, CoSchedule, or Buffer which analyzes your target market and schedules your posts for you. These systems make it so that you can stay on top of your social schedule as well.
Images
Everyone loves to see a cute cat picture or baby animal. Pictures draw your fans into the post and make them want to see what is going on. Always make posts with images that are eye-catching, but not fake. Make sure the image is pertinent to the information or article being provided to ensure that you are building trust with your loyal fans.
Deals and Contests
Freebies, contests, coupons and other opportunities are ways to get a lot of social engagement. Offer something that your clientele would want to take part in. This can be a free introductory offer, an engagement based raffle, or even a coupon for a free item with other purchase. The possibilities are only limited by your local, state and national laws so verify those before doing an online raffle.
Solicit Feedback and Reviews
Customers are going to leave reviews both good and bad on your Facebook page so this is your opportunity to embrace it. Ask for reviews from those who are regularly engaging with your brand online. This will have your fans leaving you more good reviews and drowning out the occasional bad review from a day of being human.
Social Ads
If a post is performing well, boost it. Boosting posts on Facebook is fairly simple to do and does not cost much. In some cases, you can boost the audience seeing your post by 2,000 people with as little as $5. If you are not comfortable with handling this on your own there are agencies that can assist with the paid advertising side to social engagement.
Provide Value
The biggest thing you can do for your brand on social media is to provide your fans, clients or customers with valuable content. Make sure your content is valuable but also the perfect length. Content is not always easy to come by, but by providing your fan base with regularly scheduled, original content you will grow trust and engagement organically.
Review Analytic Data
Data is our friend in the online space. The more you know the more you grow! Take time to review the demographics of those coming to your Facebook page and engaging. You may be surprised by some of the demographics, or you may not. The key is to stay on top of the data to ensure you know your target market and can repeat this process on a regular basis. Also, make sure you are tracking URLs that point back to your site using UTMs. We have created an easy to use UTM builder to create tracking URLs.
Have any tricks that have worked to gain engagement? We would love to hear about them below!
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