Goes without saying in this darn age if you’re not on social media as a small or a large business. Then you’re leaving thousands upon thousands at the table, and missing out on a huge potential audience. That literally waiting for your competitor to gobble up and make sales off them.

So I decided to help you all out there and go through 9 top tips for social media and small business!

1. Know your goal.

You need to know what your goal is that you’re wanting to achieve out of social media are you trying to make sales? Are you trying to build authority? Are you trying to build a larger audience and gain more power within your industry?

You will need to align your self with what you’re trying to achieve with social media before you even start doing it. You need to ensure you are putting out relative content that is guiding your potential audience or customers to do what you are wanting them to do.

2. Build authority through value.

So many businesses miss this out. Posting content that their audience may not even be interested in, which isn’t providing enough value. Ensuring that the content that you post or advertise is providing value to the audience, i.e teaching a recipe if your a restaurant brand or providing cooking tips.

A good place to start on this is to look at your competitor’s pages and understand what message they’re trying to convey. Once so start looking at what there not doing so you can teach your audience what there not teaching theirs!

3. Engage in conversation!

To make your audience keep on coming back, you need to ensure that they feel as if there growing alongside you and your business. Ensure that there apart of the community. So engage with them! I’m not just talking about posting status or photos, but respond to them in the comments, reply to them, let them know that you hear them, so they feel appreciated and welcomed within your community.

4. Be unique

There is a high chance that your business model is already been done before. (Unless you invented a new product). So you will be aware that there will be competitors out there. But you started your business because you have found your niche, you have found the single thing that sets you apart from everyone else out there.

This needs to be portrayed to your customers and audience. What makes you unique needs to be in your audience’s mind. So you need to ensure that what you reflect on social media reflects your uniqueness.

5. Don’t spread your self to thin.

So many do this mistake. They all go “Right we need to start social media, ima create an Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Youtube channel, LinkedIn and a Twitter”. Then they realize there totally overwhelmed with what is required just to run them all alongside their business itself.

There is just way to much work to handle. An easy way to fix this is to pick the platforms that your audience will be using the most, I.E if your a fashion brand most likely it’ll be Instagram or Youtube. You don’t have to be on all social media platforms. You need to be mindful of where your audience is hanging out. I generally recommend to start out on Facebook and Instagram, both platforms being linked together makes it really easy to simultaneously post on each with one click.

6. Post high-quality content.

It’s not a good look if your posting pixilated images or posting half ass’d content, this does not paint a good image of your brand. What you need to remember is that whatever you put out online you will be judged as a compnay.

So ask your self, do want your company to be something that is seen as of high quality, that of an authority, as somewhere of value? Then post-high quality content!! There are just no excuses anymore! If you’re struggling to understand what high-quality content is, go over to the pages of your biggest competitors out there and look the quality of the content they’re putting out, they’re clearly doing something right.

7. Don’t Buy followers

For god sake, just don’t. Fake audiences are easy to spot, It shows that an actual potential customer that could be interested in your product that you’re not legit. It’s painting the wrong image for your brand. The only paid stuff on social media you need to do is paid advertisement! you can run plenty of pages like adverts and engagement adverts to get your brand out there with real engagement.

8. Stay consistent

This ties in all the points above. It helps build trust and authority with your audience. It shows who you are and that you’re out there on a mission to serve your audience with content on a daily basis. Not with a once-off viral post.

I recommend at least try post on social media one post per day or even 5 posts per week. This isn’t too hard. There are plenty of automation tools that schedule your posts for you. Check out my other blog post here about Facebook’s auto-scheduler so you can get a whole month’s content pre-done.

9. Out source!

If you are too busy outsource your social media control and adverts, Here at Pay Design we look after social media accounts and ads for business, We can look after yours! There is also plenty of freelancers on upwork.com that can create content for you at a cost as well.

Remember all said in done, at the start, there isn’t going to be a lot of people looking at your content on social media. This can be dis hearting and painful at times. But following the steps above and staying consistent and true to your self you will build a following in no time.

If you’re struggling to keep up with your social media content and falling behind with your own business. Feel free to contact us here. For a free 15mins, we can go through your social media plan and talk about ways to stay on top of it all. Heck, we may even be able to look after it for you!