Top 13 social media strategies and tips for small businesses and entrepreneurs

Social media has a huge opportunity to be a brand awareness and sales tool for your business but social media can also be a huge challenge f...

Social media has a huge opportunity to be a brand awareness and sales tool for your business but social media can also be a huge challenge for those of us who wear multiple hats throughout the day particularly those who run small businesses or entrepreneurs.

These 13 tips and strategies are gonna help you as small businesses and entrepreneurs prioritize what's important on social media so that you can grow your accounts and drive sales starting today.

Let's get started let's kick things off with number one 

1. You have to make a commitment to social media- make social media a priority for you

Social media can be a real challenge. Start off by planning to create a strategy create goals what do you see as success with social media is it brand awareness is it sales is it somewhere in between having a plan will help you make that commitment to social media right from the beginning so starting with the plan understanding the tools are gonna help you achieve that plan and then looking outside to your peers and competitors for what's working for them is a great place to start.

 All right number two and this goes back to what I mentioned briefly in number one and that's 

2. Establishing some goals for your social media program

Everything starts and ends with goals and setting proper goals based on desired outcomes is the most important thing that you can do it's super important to develop a social media strategy that aligns with your goals so that you can determine whether your social media program is successful or not 

One creating goals it's important to be specific as possible so if you're using social media to drive brand awareness what are the metrics around that goal that will help you to define brand awareness is it likes traffic to your website engagement to social media posts or somewhere in between having specific goals based on a specific objective is the first step in creating great goals and the first step in understanding whether your social media is working and of course those are super important because if you're off the path and you're not finding success with social media goals will help you to define the next action step needed to take to get back on the path of success on social media 

 3. Remember to share who you are as a brand or a business.

Remember that social media is social people are on social media to share content with their friends connect with family members and yes of course connect with you as a brain 

But people won't want to connect with your brand unless you're sharing things that are human authentic, engaging things that speak to people on a human level which is very meta 

I know it's hard to point directly to what that means but the best I can do is to tell you to remember to share :

• Who you are what makes you unique as an entrepreneur or small business?
•  Is it your values is that your company?
•  Is it your employees is your product that makes you special?
•  Why would people want to follow you on social media?
• What would make them want to share your content with your friends?
•  What makes you unique as a company? 
• What makes you unique personality-wise?

 And also keep in mind that creating content isn't necessarily just showing how your product can benefit your users 

• It's about helping people 
• It's about providing useful relevant content time and time again so that they go to you as a trusted source of inspiration 

4. Setting time aside for social media

I know this can be the hardest thing to do finding time for social media wasn't necessarily a priority for us until we saw the power of what social media can do for our brand.

But let's take a step back the key to establishing a great social media presence is sharing great social media content and for busy business owners taking the time to create great content can easily be pushed aside which is okay 

What I encourage you to do is to take time and batch time dedicated to social media content creation find your most creative time 

• Is it Monday morning
• Is it Friday afternoons

Set aside some specific time each week even every single day occur supreme vicious to create great social media content and engage with your fans on social media because after you put out great social media content people are gonna want to talk to you they're gonna want to comment on your links they're gonna want to ask you questions about you in your business a few hours a week 20 minutes a day even will help you get ahead on social media by ensuring that you're dedicating time to it which is one of the most important factors about creating a great community speaking of a great content tip.

5. Listen to your customers rather than just simply promote.

One of the best things about social media is that it offers an open-ended community to communicate one-on-one with potential customers and current customers that type of open-ended communication is rare these days 

So social media offers that opportunity to small businesses entrepreneurs whose customer base might be smaller to start out 

So connecting one-on-one is super important when you're looking to grow your social media community when you're first starting out so what I mean by listening to your customers is what kind of questions are they asking in community forums in your product on social media are these ideas for potential blog topics social media content videos you name it taking the approach of listening to your customers rather than simply promoting your product not only gives you greater insights into your customer's preferences their fears their challenges but it also builds a loyal customer base that you can lean into later down the line.

6. Focusing your efforts.

You've probably heard the saying it's better to be on one social media network than spread thin across many wells that statement is absolutely true by focusing

Your efforts on one social media platform as opposed to two-three or four you're gonna hone your skills you're gonna learn the nuances of that channel and only until you figured out that specific channel can you start to branch out to more social media networks 

I think the biggest misconception for small businesses and entrepreneurs is the amount of time it actually takes to be successful on a social media channel takes a lot of time takes a lot of effort takes a lot of content and so by focusing your efforts on one channel you increase your likelihood of success tenfold maybe more.

7.Automating your processes

So use tools like buffer, Hootsuite to schedule your social media posts and analyze your posts but there's a lot of other processes that you can automate in the time that will help you be successful on social media 

Once you start to get the feel for what kind of content is working on social media 

For example, you can use tools like :

• Zapier I have TTT to automatically add articles that you add to your pocket account.
• Canva Animoto to quickly create graphics for videos saving you hours of time in the process 
• You can hire an intern to help you create graphics or videos or schedule social media posts there are tons of people out there who are willing and looking for great work.

Social media possibilities are endless when it comes to automation so using tools like buffer, Hootsuite was like camber Animoto zapier I have TTT hiring out work to help with the more tedious tasks are all things that businesses and entrepreneurs should be thinking about if you want to focus your time on more important tasks like running your business speaking of tools. 

8. Picking the right tools for your business 

So when thinking about tools as a small business or entrepreneur I like to break it down into five different sections of potential tools you have 

• Your collaborate tools 
• Your attractive tools 
• Your acquired tools 
• Your retained tools and 
• Your measuring tools 

Those five tools will help you be successful on a daily basis under the collaborate tools this is how you're gonna help collaborate with freelancers employees within your company.

Tools like 

• Slack 
• Google Dropbox 
• Paper Trello 

are all great project management tools that will help you collaborate on things or ideas that you think will be successful on social media under the attract stage this is where you get to implement a lot of fun tools that will help you attract customers both on social media and another marketing efforts as well 

 Tools like 

• WordPress to help you write blog posts or manage your website 
• MailChimp to send emails 
• Buffer to send social media posts like I said before 
• Canva Animoto to help you create videos and graphics.

The acquire stage is where you start to see more robust tools in the acquisition stage of your customer journey so 

CRM Tools like 

• HubSpot Salesforce Marketo 
• MailChimp to send email drip campaigns 
• Buffer to continue to send out your social media posts then, 

of course, you have your retain tools and these could be things like 

• NPS scoring surveys type form to help you send out customer surveys offer to continually send out social media 
• Mailchimp to send automated emails to your customers based on specific actions. 

You can also use advertising platforms like 

• Facebook 
• Twitter 
• Linkedin 
• Pinterest 

to help remarket to customers who have been on your website and then of course 

Measurement stage of tools this is where you implement things like:

•  Adobe Analytics 
• Google Analytics 

lots of options out there to measure how you're doing on social media and to help like I said before direct those steps of actions towards the things that are gonna work in the future.

9.Creating a Social Media Calendar 

Having a comprehensive overview of everything you want to send out to social media within the next few months even within the year is irreplaceable for brands and businesses looking to be successful on social media 

A good social media calendar consists of :

• Major company events 
• Major company product releases and 
• Major holidays within whatever country or even the world that you want to celebrate as a company.

A great social media strategy means posting consistently and what better way to do that than to hold yourself accountable through a Content calendar 

Create a unique calendar,

•  It can be an Excel spreadsheet
•  It could be a Google Doc 

it doesn't matter how you do or whatever calendar service that you prefer 

• Create a map whatever the event is put it in your social media calendar.
• Create a small mini-marketing plan around that event.

and make sure to have all the messaging set up so that is a small business when you go to post you're all set to go your calendars ready to go and you have a great social media posting strategy already in place.

10. Remembering that passion helps to create amazing social media content 

I find that the biggest challenge for me on social media is creating great content on a consistent basis as a small business or entrepreneur it can be incredibly time consuming and difficult to find the topics that are gonna work over and over again on social media.

So what I suggest you do as a business owner or as an entrepreneur is picked a topic that you love to talk about 

Now this topic can be semi-related to your brand it doesn't have to be specific about your product or your brand it can be in the sphere of your industry 

The more passionate you are about a specific topic the easier and more fun it will be to actually go out and find content or create original around that topic and don't forget,

"the more passionate you are about a topic the more passionate your fans are gonna be to"

They can tell they know when you love a subject or not and when you have a passion for something. 
I guarantee you that your audience will share that same passion with you. 

11. Learning from the best will be their first to admit that 

• we don't have a ton of resources 
• we don't have a lot of time to commit to creating great content 
• we just don't have what bigger better brands have in terms of social media resources 

so the best thing you can do as a business leader is to 

• Follow peers and competitors both inside and outside your industry.
• you can follow them by creating Twitter lists or using the Facebook pages to watch tool to set up a list of brands that you know.
• Post consistently great content then once you have a list of great brands or influencers in your industry.

Check back once in a while what are they posting about 

• are they using videos
•  are they using photos 
• are they using text-only updates 
• what kind of things are they talking about 

subjects types of content having a deep deep understanding of the trends and the things that are working in your industry will do wonders for your social media content and not only that watching others within your industry will spark ideas like you can't understand until you've actually been there and seen content in its wonderful creative process.

so get out there create a list of great brands in your industry and follow them on a weekly basis. 

12. Don't forget that engagement drives growth on social media 

Whether you have a company of a hundred or just one engagement on social media is one of the most important factors you can use to drive the growth of your channels over time. 

we talked about it earlier  but engagement really is the key in the core to every social media strategy in other words when you create great content you're going to get more engagement from the audience it's a byproduct of great content so it's a commitment you have to make upfront and understand 

from the very beginning if you have people who are regularly engaging with your content you'll activate them as strong loyal users by

• responding to them 
• answering their questions 
• helping them to share your content even further you might even think about
•  creating some sort of referral program that rewards people who share your content 
• you might also start a Facebook group or a slack community that gets your power users on social media into the same place so that they can share ideas 
• talk to each other 
• learn from each other and really spread the message about your brand 
• it really only takes about 15 minutes a day to be successful with engagement and persistency will pay off in brand loyalty and power users on social media

13. Don't try to be all things to all people.

One of the very first questions you have to ask yourself on getting started social media strategy is 

"what are you"? all about make it very clear from the get-go what you are all about on social media being all things to all people across all social media networks is just simply unsustainable so having a clear specific and concise topic that you are an expert and are passionate about on social media will help drive a more niche audience that will interact with your content on a higher level, 

it also gives your audience a reason to come back time and time again if they come to your social media profile and never have any idea of what to expect of you in terms of content the chances of them coming back are very slim,

 

but if they know they can go to you for great content on a specific topic then they are much more likely to interact with your content on a daily basis because they know what they're gonna get 

it's like starting a business and trying to sell your product to every single person it just doesn't work but if you start in a niche industry and you sell a very specific product to a very specific use that product has a much greater chance of success focusing on a very specific topic 

• the one that you are passionate about 
• one that you can speak as an expert on 

will tremendously help and your chances of success on social media in the long run. 

I hope you got something of use in these13 strategies for small businesses and entrepreneurs.

So I'll catch you guys in the next blog.

Bye.