Social Media Strategy for Small Businesses
Every company is active on social media these days, right? They’re all out there engaging with their customer base on Facebook, trading witty bon mots on Twitter, posting hilarious videos on Instagram and Tik Tok and ... Wait? You mean every company (like yours, perhaps) isn’t doing all that? Hmmm. And then, please remove that duplicate copy from the start of the blog so that it starts with:
Strategies for Getting Started in Social Media
Every company is active on social media these days, right? They’re all out there engaging with their customer base on Facebook, trading witty bon mots on Twitter, posting hilarious videos on Instagram and Tik Tok and …
Wait? You mean every company (like yours, perhaps) isn’t doing all that? Hmmm.
In truth, your company (like many others) is probably doing some of the social media stuff. And maybe you’re wondering what is working, and what isn’t, what your customers like and what they don’t, and if any of this stuff actually results in new sales.
Fuel Media has worked with dozens of companies who have asked us to help them enter, or improve their presence in, the world of social media. To do that, we first begin by asking some questions. If your company is wondering how to make social media work better, learning what questions we ask of new clients … and why we ask them … might be edifying.
First up, we want to identify the target. We will ask new clients: Who are your customers?
We start with broad brushstrokes and start digging down. People who like widgets, is the broad answer. Then we dig deeper into the demographic depths: people who like widgets, who live in the Northeast, are usually male, college educated, annual income of 100K+, married with children …
Armed with this info, we can form a picture of the typical customer, know what kinds of things he (or she) likes and dislikes, what messages they may respond to, what kind of lifestyle they strive to attain and much more. This helps us determine which social media platforms may be best for your company’s engagement.
Next, we will ask who are your competitors? There are always other companies trying to do what you do. Some may be large multinational or even global companies; others may be local Mom and Pop stores.
But once we know who you compete against, we can examine their social media presence, notice what they are doing to engage and excite their customer base, and note how successful those efforts might be.
Once we know who your main customers are and what your competitors are doing to reach those same customers, we can begin to develop a plan to reach them.
The different social media platforms have differing appeal to various demographic groups. Boomers like one platform, Gen Zers can be found someplace else. These are all relative, of course: almost everyone scans Facebook, but some groups do it more often than others. And for different reasons.
So, now that we know the customers we want, and we have a plan of attack on how to reach them, we can begin to develop a content program.
Social media is all about engaging. Conversing. Sharing information. Asking what they think, not just telling them what you want them to know. It is this sense of a back-and-forth conversation with your customers that gives social media such marketing power.
But to get that conversation going, you have to begin by providing engaging content. Social media is not a space where you tell the customer “here’s what we sell, it costs this much, how many do you want?” Instead, it’s framed more like “Isn’t this new product interesting? Here is how we make it. What color do you like best?”
Finally, an effective social media marketing campaign must have identifiable metrics. You need good feedback to know what is working, and what isn’t. You need to set benchmarks to determine how engaging your social media campaigns are doing. And those benchmarks are often less definitive than the number of sales this month.
You need to determine if customers are responding and engaging with your content. Not every social media post goes viral on a global scale, but you can tell if one message resonates more than another. In a well-run social media campaign, you keep track of the hits and misses, and try to repeat the hits and eliminate the misses.
Those first steps – target, research, plan, create and test the results – are the basic essentials of social media marketing. Fuel Media has the benefit of a staff of experienced digital marketers – designers, writers, SEO experts and more – who work in this segment every day. We stand ready to work with your company to start, or improve, your social media presence and deliver excellent results.
