5 Social Media Content Strategies For Small Businesses
Content marketing isn’t just about writing a few articles, posting them then calling it done. It’s more…much more.
Your content marketing should look like your family tree. A bunch of different branches all with their own leaves on them. In other words, content marketing doesn’t stop at your blog. That means you should branch out and start posting a wide variety of articles and other types of content to a variety of media streams which should consist of social media and several other marketing strategies.
In this article, we’re going to talk about the five most effective social media strategies for small businesses along with some popular tools to help you use each of the strategies on this list.
But first, let’s talk about how to find the best websites to use for your social media marketing focus.
How to Find the Best Websites for Social Media Marketing
It’s really not all that hard to learn which social media websites you should be focusing on. Here is a quick overview for picking the best possible sites for your particular industry.
- Start by finding the social media sites where the majority of your customers/clients like to hang out so to speak (see below for more information about this).
- Join those websites.
- Start browsing around to learn the most talked about topics, as well as any questions, comments, and/or concerns that are being voiced.
- Look for trends within those questions, comments, and concerns and use them to formulate your content.
- You can also use this opportunity to contribute to the group by answering questions and providing educational instruction and advice. And, if allowed, you can link back to your website. This tactic is great for building trust with your customers while presenting yourself as an industry leader. Just remember—never post random links, comments, or answers that could be construed as spamming. If you do, you will probably be banned.
Five Social Media Content Strategies for Small Businesses
There are several components of a social media content strategy. Identifying these components, researching and analyzing them, and developing a plan to implement them will be the key to your success.
Here are the top five social media content strategies for small businesses.
1. Research and Analysis
The research will tell you everything you need to know about your target audience. You should seek to learn your audience’s demographics, what they want, what they like and don’t like—anything and everything you can learn about them. A separate set of research will need to be done for every social media site you are considering. Next, you will need to analyze the information you collected in your research. Doing so will help narrow down which social media sites you should be using.
You can make this task easier by using analytical tools such as Google Analytics, which is probably the most popular. There are also social media focused tools such as Buzzsumo which will tell you which content performs the best for any given topic for any of your competitors. There is also Fanpage Karma which will analyze your profile and your competition’s profile, as well as identify your competitors most engaged social media followers, and so much more. You owe it to yourself to check it out or contact your digital marketing agency to handle this task for you.
2. Perform Some Social Keyword Research
Proper keyword research is the foundation for your content and could mean the difference between the success or failure of any social media marketing campaign. There are plenty of tools out there that can help you with identifying the right keywords for any given piece of content. Hootsuite is great for keyword research, but yes, you will have to learn how to use their system in order to use it. Alternatively, you could contact your local digital marketing agency to do it for you. This will not only save you time, but it will also save you money and manpower.
3. Setup and Test Your Chosen Social Media Networks
After you’ve identified which social media websites your customers frequent the most, it’s time to set up your campaigns and give them a spin to see what they will do. This will help you discover what forms of content perform best on which network. You might have to try different types of content to determine which content performs the best and where. Just make sure your content campaigns are individualized for your followers on each of your chosen platforms.
4. Invest in Social Listening Tools
There are a wide variety of social listening tools on the market. Social listening tools allow you to monitor the entire internet, including social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter, company blogs, forums, news websites, and more. The beauty of this is that you can pretty much get all the data you need from one place versus having to browse each website individually then compile and analyze the information yourself. Here are some of the most popular social listening tools.
These tools will tell you who is talking about your brand and what they are saying. They also have many other convenience functions that will make your research and analysis process a whole lot easier, not to mention being able to proactively handle any negative mentions before they get out of hand.
5. Design and Post High-Value Visuals
The best way for any post to go viral is to include a visual component that is easy to read and digest. Infographics, PDF’s, and the like frequently go viral because of all the information they provide in a format that’s easy to share. In fact, most people who visit social media sites expect the posts contained therein to include a visual, graph, photo, video, GIF, etc.
