The Complete Guide to Social Media for Small Business | Sprout Social

Social media tips for small business

Alright, up to now we’ve figured out why social media is valuable for your small business, how to set goals that will have an impact on your bottom line, and how to track those goals with social media analytics.

Now let’s get into some of the more tactical stuff. Here are tips for smaller organizations ramping up their social media marketing.

1. Identify your social audience

Most marketers will tell you the first step in creating a successful campaign is getting to know your audience, and the same rings true for social media.

Though you may have an understanding of who your audience is there is social data you can pull to verify your understanding.

Get a better understanding of who your social audience is by using data from social networks or a third-party social media tool. Below is a look at my personal audience demographics from Twitter.

Twitter’s analytics report

To access this data go to your Twitter page, click on your icon in the top right corner, click “Analytics” and go to the tab “Audiences”.

This is a plethora of data that can help you identify who and where your audience is so you can create content you know they’ll enjoy.

2. Build relationships with engagement

Remember the graph we shared above which showed customers are 71% more likely to purchase from a brand after a positive experience on social?

That’s because engaging with your audience on social is critical.

Customers reach out to you on social for a number of reasons, and our Sprout Social Index surveyed customers to ask why they’re reaching out to brands social.

Reaching out to your customers to answer their questions in a timely fashion is essential to building a deeper relationship and selling more.

Think about it this way: you wouldn’t ignore a customer calling your office phone, would you?

3. Search social for new opportunities

This is probably my favorite tip and our customers light up when they first see the value.

It’s possible to use a social media listening tool to find conversations happening on social media that are perfect for you to join.

Let’s say that you run a pizza restaurant in Chicago that sells gluten-free pizza.

Within Sprout you can set a Brand Keyword that will constantly search social media for people who mention “gluten-free pizza” within a certain radius of your restaurant. Those messages will then be streamed to your Smart Inbox to interact with.

There are a few things you can do to those who are mentioning gluten-free pizza.

1. Give them a simple Like or Favorite. Chances are they will check out your page and see that you similarly offer gluten-free pizza and may put you on their list of places to try.
2. Actively reach out to them. Acknowledge their original message in a way that shows you care about their opinion and even offer them a coupon code for the next time they’re in the market for your gluten-free deliciousness.

It helps me be part of timely conversations that before I may have missed, especially on Twitter. It’s also really easy to say thank you to new followers and donors on social media, where before I may have missed it.

Garrett Hondronastas

Communications Manager, Infant Crisis Services

4. Create a social content calendar

If you’re not taking the time to plan your social media calendar in advance, you could end up scrambling to find content to share.

This is a big problem because sharing quality content across your social channels is key to engage your audience and attract new followers.

Below is a view of a healthy social content calendar with a month’s worth of content across several platforms.

We’ve written a more detailed post on how to create a social content calendar, but it boils down to four key steps:

1. Figure out what content resonates with your audience
2. Decide on how often to post to each social network and profile
3. Create or source great content to share
4. Fill up your content calendar with a social publishing tool

5. Post your content at optimal times

One questions we hear frequently is “what is the best time to post on social”, so we built an entire post with the times that work.

But while that’s helpful it does create a problem: if everyone starts posting at that time, is it really then the best time to post?

The answer is no.

These types of studies come up very frequently and while they are fresh they’re an amazing resource to drive more engagement. But as they become more popular and more users post at those times, streams become flooded and messages get lost.

That’s why it’s a good idea to publish at your optimal send times. You can do this by studying your social media sent messages and finding trends in when posts get top engagement, or you can use a tool like Sprout’s Optimal Send Times to do that for you automatically.

I started using Optimal Send Times in June [2018] right after it was rolled out and saw a huge increase in engagement and reach.

Kristen Waggener

Communications Specialist, City of Lenexa

6. Find the best hashtags to use

While hashtags may seem a bit played out, and they’re frequently on the receiving end of jokes in media, they’re still critical for social media.

Hashtags can increase your reach tremendously and even incentivize customers to Tweet when they normally wouldn’t have.

Not sure which hashtags to use? One of my favorite tools is our Hashtag Holidays Calendar. It’s a free resource that shows you all of the upcoming Hashtag Holidays, like Small Business Saturday (*cough November 24th*). 

Assuming the Hashtag Holiday makes sense to your brand, it’s a great way to inspire content while taking advantage of a trending topic.

We’ve also created an article about finding hashtags if you need additional help.

7. Audit your social presence

Whether you’ve been running your social media accounts for a while or have just been dabbling in social marketing it’s important to conduct an audit of your social presence.

A social media audit will tell you what has worked, what hasn’t worked, what profiles need a bit of an update and so much more. To make it easier our team created a free social media audit template.

8. Create great visuals

If a picture is worth 1,000 words, and the average length of an English word is 5 letters, it would take you 35.71 Tweets to tell the same story you could with one shared image on social media. So why wouldn’t you just include an image?

We’ve put together a separate resource with 39 Free Tools to Create Social Media Images if you need something to help get your creativity flowing!

And now it’s time for a braggy story. We all know how each social network requires differently sized imagery for posting, and if you don’t use the correct size your image may come out a bit distorted.

That’s why I submitted an idea for a free tool called Landscape for our Sprout Social “Hack Week”, and we actually created and shipped the final product! Give it a whirl when you need to resize images.

9. Create social media videos

Video content is an amazing way to increase your engagement on social channels, but creating videos can be intimidating.

Whether you don’t have the necessary supplies to shoot something quality, don’t have the proper location to film or have just a bit of stage-fright, it doesn’t have to be hard.

Here are some ideas from our in-depth list of video content creation tips:

1. Create video content that is meaningful to people who are already your fans
2. Use previous content’s success to inspire new videos
3. Think about the social assets you’ll want before you film
4. You don’t have to hire outside talent – you’re the talent!
5. Be intentional with your CTAs
6. Make your videos accessible
7. Don’t neglect video SEO
8. Analyze video performance
9. Turn your video into additional social assets

10. Combine organic with paid

With so many tips already on this list you can run with organically, why should you consider paid ads?

Well if your messages aren’t getting the impressions or views that you’d like then it is always possible to put a few paid dollars between them to give them a boost. Even just a few dollars can get you hundreds of new impressions for posts, and with Sprout Social’s Boost technology it has never been easier.

Not sure what kind of ads to start making? We have some data for that as well.

We even break down the most compelling content by the generation you may be selling to.

11. Get your team on social

There is no I in Tweet.

Thinking as a social business team is important because social touches all facets of your organization, not just branding and awareness.

From managing client relationships through your customer service and sales teams, to engaging audiences through your social and agency teams, to discovering new avenues for your product team, social plays a role in all ares of your organization.

With a small business, efficiency is key for your social media marketing team. Make sure you’re building a team that is able to respond to your incoming messages without getting overwhelmed. Social media collaboration is key!

Now that you have some stellar tips to improve your social media marketing let’s talk about some of the tools that can help you on the way!