5 Best Practices for Small Businesses on Social Media

There are a lot of opportunities for small businesses to market their business. Like no other time in history small businesses are offered unique opportunites to grow their business no matter what the budget. Don’t get me wrong, having a larger budget helps but what I am trying to say is there are still great avenues of advertising for companies with smaller marketing budgets. One of those avenues is social media marketing. Most small business owners understand this is a great way to attract to new business but most don’t understand the best practices of running a social media marketing campaign and don’t have the time to spend to learn. That is why I decided to go over a quick bullet list of some of the best practices when running a social media marketing campaign. This is not something that small business owners can go without but due to time and understanding many miss out on this great opportunity to grow their business. That is why you should learn the basics and begin laying out a plan that you can follow in order to use social media to grow your business. If your still not convince of the reach that you will have. Facebook alone has over 1 billion users. That is a big pie that your missing out on getting a piece of. So let’s go over some of the best practices you can use when running a social media marketing campaign that way you will be able to

1. You need to make sure that you claim all of your social media profiles and that the profiles are completely filled out and consistent. This will help you in a couple of different ways. It will help you with any type of search engine optimization campaigns you are running. You also don’t want to confuse any potential customers. If you address or phone number is different across different profiles this may confuse a potential customer.
2. Every social media platform is different and thus will have different techniques you will need to implement in order to be successful. This is an area that many small businesses make major mistakes. They don’t have the time to keep up with numerous profiles so they end up posting the same thing on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, etc. The reason that this is a mistake is because one, you may have fans on both platforms and it becomes redundant. Secondly, Twitter is not the same as Facebook which is not the same as Google Plus meaning you should have a separate plan for both. This leads us right into number 3.
3. You shouldn’t over extend yourself. Just because a social media platform exists doesn’t mean that your business should have a page. So many small business owners go and create a profile on every single social media site that they can find then ignore it. What does this accomplish? Absolutely nothing! Make sure you only sign up for as many social media accounts as you can handle and make sure they are relevant to your business. Not all businesses should have a Pintrest page for example.
4. Once you get all your profiles setup it is time to begin promoting them. Just because you have a profile doesn’t mean that everyone that is interested in what you have to offer will come a running. You will want to promote your social media pages on your website, in publications, etc. One thing I strongly suggest is that you put money aside to use things like Facebook’s pay per click and promote a post. Twitter and other social media platforms offer similar tools.
5. As you begin to gain a following on social media make sure that you are responsive to your constituents. Social media gives you a unique opportunity to interact with your online customers so it is extremely important that take full advantage of this opportunity. If someone came in your store you wouldn’t just respond to a couple people, you would respond to everyone so the same goes for the online world.

These are just some of the practices you can follow in order to run a successful social media campaign. Every business is different and has a different target audience so you will need to customize your social media marketing campaign to fit your personality and business. Remember customer service is extremely imortant for a small business and social media gives you the opportunity to show how great of customer service your business offers but on the flipside it can also scare your potential customers away from you as well.