Honing Social Media for Promoting Your Small Business

Whether you've been in business for a long time or are just starting out a new endeavour, social media is a cost-effective tool that can help companies promote their products and services. For small businesses in particular, they represent an opportunity to establish credibility in an industry and form meaningful bonds with an audience. With social media, you can create content that resonates with your followers and begin building your brand. Depending on your objective, the following content tips and ideas can help you get the ball rolling on generating engaging content that your community will love!

Planning

In order to begin curating your social presence, your brand needs to tell a story. Choose a platform that best enables you to show off your brand’s personality. TikTok is a relatively new app that is rapidly growing and is great for short videos. Facebook is ideal for opening up the conversation with your audience and also serves as a platform to sell your products. Instagram is a great place to share videos and link products to a website. You can start out with a tour of your studio or workshop and post it to Youtube which allows for a longer video format. Think about the kind of content you plan on sharing, and consider which platform is best for you.

Show Your Work

When using social media for your business, try to post more than just product photos or sales flyers. Remember that part of building your online presence is to develop and properly showcase your brand identity. Give followers a more complete view of your business by posting about your team members and the important individuals in your organization. Alternatively, you can turn posts into your own episode of “How It’s Made” by showing the world your process. Whether you own a coffee shop and want to show footage of roasting coffee beans or a time-lapse of your carpet cleaning business in action, showing your followers your process is highly entertaining.

Engage with Followers

The people you interact with on social media are not merely fans of your brand, instead, look at them as prospective customers. You wouldn’t leave a client’s questions unanswered if they phoned or emailed you, therefore you should take the time to engage with your online following as much as possible. Each time someone has feedback regarding your staff, your service, or the products you offer, thank them for taking the time to provide a review. You can address commonly asked questions by going live on your Instagram or TikTok and also use this avenue to deliver news and other announcements. Don’t forget to comment/like on content posted by other small business owners as this can increase your visibility among a new audience.

All of the major social networks have different strengths, which is why it's important to choose the ones that best suit your brand and content strategy. Focus on one or two platforms and devote time to creating unique content. You can use promotional products to advertise and grow your social channels. Promo products are great to use in contests and giveaways that encourage individuals to engage with your brand online. For example, give away a piece of branded merchandise to followers that tag their friends in the comments and share your post. Social media along with promo products are great tools to use in the acquisition of new potential customers.