Top social media tips for small businesses
Social media is a form of free advertising, so it’s a bit silly if businesses aren’t utilising the tool right? If you’re a small business or you’re just starting out, here are our top tips to maximise your social channels!
We promise it’s simpler than it looks!
You don’t need to be on ALL social media platforms
There is a perception that to have a good online presence, you need to be on everything– WRONG! For a small independent business, you’re likely handling everything from running the company to paying the bills so having multiple social media channels to look after can be overwhelming. Our tip is to choose just one or two platforms that you know your audience use and focus on putting great content out there to grow your followers.
You need to start with one solid social media channel before utilising more, this concept is often applied to business in general – this allows you to develop your content, style, personality and engage with your followers before you scale up – start small and grow over a period of time.
Schedule your posts at peak times
Scheduling posts as an independent will be a lifesaver for you. When you’re the sole person looking after the business and your social media, sometimes it can become a juggling act to manage both. However, with the help of scheduling tools like Hootsuite and Buffer, you can create a queue of posts to appear at specific times.
One important factor to note when it comes to preparing your posts is to ensure you are scheduling them at peak times when your followers are most likely to be online – this way, your posts will reach a wider audience .For example, if you’re a B2B business targeting business owners on LinkedIn you’re most likely to reach this audience during the working week and not after working hours. You can find your optimal peak times through insights on your social media platform.
On Instagram for example, just tap on ‘Insights’. From here, click on ‘Total followers’ and scroll down to the bottom of the page and look for ‘Most active times’. This will tell you when your audience is most active, highlighting the best times for you to schedule your posts.
If you need a hand working out the best time to schedule your posts – get in touch!
Incorporate National Days/popular hashtags into your posts
If you want your posts to be seen by many, incorporating National Days and popular hashtags is the perfect way to do this. The trending section on Twitter is a great way to help you establish which hashtags or topics are trending that day. For example, #FridayFeeling is a regular hashtag that is used on – you guessed it Friday’s – obvs! There are plenty of weird and wacky National Days out there, many of these you never even knew existed.
TOP TIP: Any days you do jump on make sure they’re relevant to your brand. You wouldn’t have a remote working business and jump on #cycletoworkday for example.
Keep your posts regular
It’s important to keep your posts regular to ensure your followers don’t lose interest and unfollow.
It’s entirely up to you how often you want to post, many factors can influence this, like arrival of new stock or even how much time you have to schedule posts. The general guide to posting on all social media channels can vary. For Twitter, it is recommended that you tweet between 1-5 per day, Facebook is 1-2 posts per day, Instagram is 3-7 times per week and LinkedIn is 1-5 times a day.
Video is king on social media
If you haven’t heard already, video is taking over! With video representing 82.5% of all internet traffic. Therefore it makes sense to get involved in this aspect of social media.
Try to keep your videos short, ideally under 90 seconds, or even just a few seconds, depending on the content. This is because the average attention span for video-watching is surprisingly short, with viewers typically engaged for only 8.25 seconds! People scroll down their feeds very quickly and will ultimately stop for something that grabs their attention, keeping it short will help with this.
Need some social media support or just a run through on how you can get your accounts running how you want them, we can help! Get in touch , or why not drop by our office for a coffee?
