With the rise of the digital era, social media has become a new addition to the many channels that brands use to grow their businesses. Going digital is no longer an option but a default strategy that brands use for their businesses. People often forget that social media is a valuable asset for companies whether they’re a blue-chip, startup, or mom and pop. Social media for small businesses has proven to have a positive impact on their bottom line.
Since small businesses are more focused on community and individual customers, social media platforms connect you directly to your customers. Here’s a deep dive into how you can grow your small business through social media.
The Value of Social Media For Your Small Business
There are multiple benefits to investing in social media for small businesses. Did you know a follower from your community is more likely to convert than some random person who sees your social media ad?
- Builds a community of customers
One of the main reasons why social media skyrocketed would be its unique benefit of creating a direct conversation between brands and their customers. Compared to the traditional way of above the line advertising, social media has paved the way for genuine relationship building with customers.
More than 40% of digital consumers use social media platforms to research new products, sales, and brands? Social media is now an added touchpoint in a person’s customer journey. If you want your small business to be included in the pool of their considerations, you need to start investing in your pages. Social media allows you to nurture your relationship with your customers by interacting with them regularly.
- Reinforces Your Brand Credibility
One of the first steps that people take when they learn about a particular product nowadays would be to search for the brand’s social media accounts. If you don’t have a social media account, people will misconceive your brand as illegitimate and not credible.
Brands that are more visible online result in brand trust between them and their customers. If you are a small business with larger brands as competition, you need to remember that people already have product favorites. Suppose you want to go head to head with these household names, you need to convince your target market that you are also a credible brand. Investing in social media for small businesses is a surefire way to cement your brand’s credibility.
- Flexible Marketing Costs
Compared to traditional advertising such as TV ads, display ads, and billboard ads, social media has democratized the playing field but allowing small businesses to outdo them even with a small working budget.
Creative a business page for your brand does not cost a cent. All you need is a business name, address, and contact details. So what costs are incurred when building your social media accounts?
These costs are mostly related to your content, paid ads, and search optimizations. Many small businesses built their social media presence from scratch by researching their competition and creating their content through tools such as Canva and Crello. If you are someone who has a little bit more leeway in terms of budget, various boutique agencies have a proven track record of helping small businesses thrive in the social media landscape
Set Your Social Media Objectives
So now that we’ve established the importance of social media for small businesses, let us deep dive into how you can start growing your brand through these various platforms. As a small business, your broader objective should be to engage local followers and establish your community’s brand presence.
Below are some social media objectives that you adapt when building your social media pages.
- Increase brand awareness
Raising your brand awareness is one of the most important objectives that brands set when joining the social media bandwagon. Social media for small businesses can be tricky, especially if they’re doing it all on their own. Although the number of followers is an indicator of brand awareness, it does not necessarily mean that you have the right captured audience already in your community. Other key performance indicators of brand awareness are impressions and reach.
Brand awareness denotes that you want to make a lasting impression for your target audience. Are your customers creating a conversation around your product and brand? Are they regularly and consistently engaging with your social media content? Setting brand awareness as an objective should be long term so that you can further understand what strategies resonate with your audience.
2. Drive Traffic To Your Website
Another social media objective that you can take note of would be to drive traffic to your website. If you are looking to increase your sales and conversions through social media for small businesses, you need to set this one of your goals.
Did you know that 3 in 5 marketers leverage social media to not only distribute their content but also to drive traffic to their website? Whether your goal would be to increase sign-ups for your mailing list or sales, you must keep track of whether your social media page drives your followers to your website. If you are considering this as one of your social media objectives, keep these questions in mind:
- How many visitors are coming from your social media channels?
- What is the quality of traffic from social media?
- How long do they stay on your website?
- Which social media posts lead them to click on your website?
3. Generate Leads
Last but not least, as a small business, you want to, of course, generate leads for your sales. Generating leads and sales denotes that you want to see a positive correlation from your social media investment to your sales. Social media for small businesses has been an effective way to generate leads, primarily through Facebook lead ads and landing pages. Still, you need to make sure that you have included calls-to-action on your content. Here are some metrics to consider when tracking the effectivity of you lead ads:
- How many leads have you collected through your social media platforms?
- How many people visited your website to download gated content?
- How many of these leads converted into a sale?
- How many of your followers participated in your contests and giveaways and shared their information?
Keep these indicators in mind when setting objectives for small businesses.
Understanding Social Media Metrics
Now that you’ve taken the plunge and decided to invest in social media, you need to make sure you track certain metrics to see whether you are getting your return on investment. You must be thinking, is this really needed, if my follower is growing, isn’t that enough? No.
Social media metrics are critical because they help you understand if your social media strategies, whether done by you or your agency, are significant and contributing a positive impact on your overall business.
Keeping track of these KPIs through consistent auditing and reporting can give you the leverage to pivot quickly from an ineffective strategy to one that works well. Since social media for small businesses denotes having lesser decision-making layers, these metrics will help you pivot to the right path immediately.
Finally, these metrics are there to make you aware of your brand’s general health, how do people perceive it, are you reaching your target market, are they the right target market, and the like. Follower count, impressions, engagement percentages these are some of the key performance indicators that you need to familiarize yourself with.
We will take you through these two basic metrics to help you stay on top of your KPIs, goal setting, and campaign tracking.
- Engagement
Now, engagement is something you must already be familiar with since this is a metric you also see in personal accounts. They come in many forms, such as likes, comments, shares, and clicks. It boils down to measuring how much your audience is interacting with our account and how often. The different platforms have their own way of calling it, on Facebook its called shares, on the other hand on Twitter it is called retweets. Now, why do you need to track engagement?
Higher engagement denotes audience health, which means that your followers are actually interested in your brand. Many brands may have thousands, even millions of followers, but if they don’t interact with your content, it means either your posts do not resonate with your audience or your followers aren’t your target market.
Now let’s get into the different forms of engagement and why it’s an important part of social media for small businesses.
- Likes, comments, retweets: These metrics can stand on their own, given that social media platforms provided a summation of how many comments, likes, and retweets you get. Effectively launching social media for small businesses is a critical factor to getting a high number of likes and comments. Which you want so you can have the social proof you need to show a positive disposition towards your brand.
- Post engagement rate: This can be computed through the number of engagements divided by impressions made or reach (following). A high post engagement rate means that people who see your content find it interesting enough that they would want to interact with it.
- The account mentions: But first, what are mentions? So if you noticed, across all platforms, people can “mention” you through tagging you this way @mention. Having account mentions is an indicator of good brand awareness on social media for small businesses.
You must be wondering, do I really need to track all of this? Can I just track my likes and comments? Tracking only one metric will not give you the full story on whether your social media page is actually effective or not. By combining these various metrics, you are given the full picture which provides you with more context on how you can calibrate your social media for small business strategies. A more concrete example would be, you noticed that your post is getting a lot of comments but little to no likes. Your first impression could be that they are interacting in the comments section, but when you take a look your customers could already be creating a forum revolving around a complaint on your product.
2. Awareness
Other key performance indicators you need to track so you can leverage social media for small business are impressions and reach. These metrics are especially important if your social media platform’s goal would be to increase brand awareness and perception. But what is the difference between impressions and reach?
Post reach denotes the number of people who have seen your post since it has been uploaded. This metric is readily available in the insights or analytics section of your social media platform. Why does post reach matter?
This metric is actionable, which means that you can adjust certain factors to achieve your reach because it is mostly reliant on timing. When you check your insights, you get to see when your audience is online. There may be suggested times to post, but at the end of the day, you can adjust your posting schedule based on the day and time your post reach is highest.
Another important metric you need to take note of on social media for small businesses would be impressions. This is the number of times a post shows up in a person’s timeline or feed. This specific metric is usually for posts that are boosted.
This social media for small business guide is just the tip of the iceberg, but knowing its value, setting your objectives and understanding the metrics are the building blocks for your online success.
The social media landscapes move quickly, new goals, content trends and ways to measure success are regularly emerging. From brand awareness, setting up your page, and engaging in your community Brightminds can help you achieve goals with our data-driven and creative strategies. You may also check small business solutions philippines for tons of ideas and solutions to help your business grow on social media and other platforms. If you are interested in diving into social media for small businesses to reach out to us at Brightminds.com.ph, we’ll create an effective strategy for you that will help grow your small business.
