Sarah Berry is a Lead Web Marketing Consultant at WebFX. With more than 10,000 hours of experience, she offers practical insights and strategies you can use to grow your digital revenue. When she isn’t polishing her Time Magazine Person of the Year Award, she’s spending time with her flock of ducks.
Social media provides lots of benefits for businesses. You get the chance to engage with social media’s 5 billion active users. In doing so, you can increase awareness of your brand, boost traffic to your website, and even generate leads and increased sales.
How to set up social media accounts for your business
Before we get into the top social media marketing tips for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), let’s talk about how to set up social media accounts for your business. First, you need to figure out which sites you want to use. The main consideration is where your current and potential customers spend time online.
Try surveying your customers and looking at social network user base demographics. Instagram’s user base, for example, includes 67% of U.S. adults between the ages of 18 and 29 but only 8% of those 65 or older.
Creating business social media accounts is similar to creating personal ones. Just fill in your business’s information and add a profile picture and a cover photo, if applicable. On Facebook and LinkedIn, you need to create your business page from a personal account.
On Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest, you can create a business account whether you have a personal account or not. When you partner with WebFX, we can set up and optimize your social media accounts. We’ll make sure your accounts are ready to help you meet your goals, but you’ll have complete ownership of your accounts.
So, how can you make the most of your social media presence?
Check out these social media tips and tricks for businesses like yours.
1. Create a goal-driven strategy
Set clear, actionable goals early in the process. These objectives will help guide your social media strategy. You might, for example, want to increase conversions or brand awareness.
Try to create SMART goals — that is, goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
2. Show some personality
People aren’t likely to follow a company that just tweets pictures and descriptions of their products. Instead, they want a brand that has a personality and provides useful or entertaining content. Show off your personality with your social media content, while making sure it’s consistent, authentic, and aligned with your brand.
Doing so will make your content more engaging and help users connect with you. Here’s an example of how MoonPie injects humor into its social media persona, which makes its content more entertaining and engaging:
3. Engage with users
Social media works best when it’s social, so engage with your followers whenever you can. A great hack for better social media engagement is to ask questions in your posts to encourage comments. Respond as quickly as you can whenever someone mentions your company.
You can use various tools to monitor social sites for mentions of your brand so that you can respond quickly. These tools can help you increase customer engagement and loyalty by responding to positive comments. They also help you do damage control by enabling you to address complaints quickly.
4. Use visuals
One of the best social media tips for businesses is to use visuals, including images and videos, in your social media posts. On Facebook, posts that contain visuals get more than twice as much engagement as posts without them. On Twitter, visuals can increase retweets by as much as 150%. In the Facebook ad below, you can see how prominent the visuals are and how they help make the ad more eye-catching.
Does it make you want Taco Bell?
5. Monitor and adjust your performance
Monitoring your social media accounts allows you to gauge how well your social media efforts are working. This social media tip is crucial for businesses to follow, as it enables you to refine your strategies for optimal results. Social media sites themselves often offer analytics tools, and you can also use some tools listed above.
One of the best social media tips, especially for small and medium-sized businesses, is to consider working with a professional social media management company. WebFX is an experienced digital marketing and social media services company focused on getting results for our clients. We’ve been in business for more than 29 years, and our data-backed, results-driven approach has helped us generate more than 24 million leads for our clients over the last five years.