14 Mar How to Use Social Media Effectively: Four Useful Tips for Small Businesses

55% of consumers discover new brands through social media. And 78% of consumers are willing to buy from a company after having a positive experience on social media.

These are just a couple of examples that clearly show how important social media can be in today’s online marketing landscape. And that’s especially true for small businesses that need to maximize their visibility and exposure, leveraging the organic virality that social media can offer when used effectively.

However, with most brands today having at least some social media presence, attracting an audience relevant to your brand isn’t as easy as merely having a profile. You need to have a comprehensive strategy for getting the right people’s attention and know-how to stand out from the crowd.

With that in mind, let’s look at a few of the most effective ways you can use social media to grow your small business and gain a powerful new way to make sales consistently.

1. Facilitate Engagement and Traffic

Getting the ball rolling on social media can be a challenge. To grow your audience organically, you need to have at least some form of engagement, but if you’re still getting your first followers, you might not have anything to build on yet. And even if you do have a small social media audience, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the number of followers will grow on its own.

Let’s take a look at Instagram, for example. The good news is that there are services designed to help speed up the process and get you real followers who are interested in what you have to offer. While services like Trusy have received negative reviews, there are more reliable alternatives that have been able to help small businesses generate organic traffic and new followers consistently.

Sure, you can grow your social media presence organically. Still, instead of wasting many months building your following, it might make sense to invest in service with the experience, reach, and tools to provide you with faster results you can build upon on your own.

2. Consider Using LinkedIn

Even though LinkedIn isn’t typically grouped in the same category as Facebook or Instagram, it’s still a social media platform. The main difference is that instead of being used by everyone, it’s more geared towards professionals and B2B audiences, which is why it might not be ideal for everyone.

But if your business operates in the B2B sphere, LinkedIn can become the single most powerful social media platform for getting your brand noticed by the right audience. And the good news is you can utilize professional tools like Linked Helped 2, designed to turn LinkedIn into a consistent source of high-quality leads for your business.

On LinkedIn, it’s much easier to succeed with LH2 than on your own because you can do every task more effectively, at scale, and with more possibilities. These types of tools can help grow your network, use drip campaigns with connections, and turn LinkedIn into your CRM.

Even though LinkedIn can be a potent tool for growing your small business through social media, the competition on the platform is becoming more fierce as well. Using tools like LH2 is a great way to give yourself an edge over your competitors and get in front of the best leads for your business.

3. Refine Your Brand Through Content

Social media creates the perfect environment for showcasing what your brand is about. But at the same time, you need to have an authentic, appealing, and distinctive brand that your target audience responds to if you want your posts to gain any traction.

When developing a social media strategy, you should consider what posts to create to generate a better response. On top of curating your content based on your brand, you should also adapt it to each platform you are using. The type of content you would post on Facebook will vary significantly from a platform like Instagram, which is much more visual-based.

You should combine beautiful on-brand visuals, engaging and informative information, and user-generated content for a mix of social media posts that will generate interest from various target customers. Use a specialized customer engagement tool to make content collection and sharing easy.

4. Look for New Opportunities

As mentioned before, marketing on social media has become quite crowded in recent years. And because of that, carving out a space for your business isn’t easy and can take a long time.

The good news is that since social media is continually evolving, there are always new opportunities you can pursue to break through the clutter and gain a lot of exposure for your brand and products.

In recent years, we saw the rapid rise of platforms like TikTok, and small businesses that were quick to recognize the potential and adapt their social marketing reaped huge benefits, gaining access to millions of users without sharing their attention with them the competition.

Conclusion

Social media can be a great way to get your brand noticed and make more sales. But at the same time, you need to understand how to utilize every potential advantage you can get.

Whether it’s utilizing the right tools, outsourcing engagement to professional services, or even recognizing when there’s a new platform that could be worth trying, it comes down to being willing to experiment while also utilizing the best practices of today.