How To Use Content And Social Media For Small Businesses

In 2017, it’s widely regarded that marketing and social media go hand in hand. It’s almost a certainty that you need some form of presence on social media to be effective and attract customers to your business. Social media plays a massive part in small business marketing.

One of the best ways to market your small business with social media is to have great content. It’s the easiest method to engage audiences and can be done in a number of different ways. We’ve listed a few ideas for content to populate your social media streams.

Promote your blog

A blog can talk about anything your business does. It could be elaborating on a new member of staff to celebrating someone’s birthday – this will give your business that ‘personal’ feel to it. You can even promote new products, try not to do this too often, try to keep it to ‘good news’ or ‘industry news’ where possible. A blog is a perfect way to talk to your customers that isn’t too sales orientated.

Use case studies

Case studies from happy customers show potential customers you can be trusted. For a customer to turn around and allow you to use them as an example of how your business met their needs and went the extra mile shouldn’t be too hard to find and can easily be transformed into a great case study for you to show off.

Getting the customer or business you worked with to allow you to tag them in the promotion of the case study is a great way to let similar parties see the work you’re doing.

Have customer reviews

As a business on social media, having customer reviews can be the deciding factor for new customers. While this is limited to Facebook currently, we wouldn’t be surprised if Twitter and LinkedIn followed suit soon.

Great examples of places that do this are local hairdressers or barbers as they are face-to-face with their customers for a specific amount of time and push the conversation to getting a review on social media. Sidenote: They’re also brilliant on Instagram at showing off hairstyles to their followers.

New product reviews

If you have a new product or service available it’s always a great idea to let your followers or fans know about it. It could be as simple as a link to the page on your website or an in depth look at what you’re offering.

Don’t post too many ‘new product/service’ posts onto your social media as it can start to annoy followers or fans.

‘Get to know the staff’

The staff are a key part of your business. They are the cogs in your wheel and the ones who bring the customers in, serve the customers or are the people that customers talk to. Without staff, a business can’t survive.

Posting something like ‘get to know the staff’ can give insights into the real world working of your business and if your staff are job proud, they can promote it to their own social media to gain the attention of their friends and family.

Competitions

Competitions on social media are a great way to get people sharing your content. You don’t have to give away much and it attracts the attention of your fans/followers but it has to be worth it for a ‘share’. Giving away some old stock is always a great idea or giving away a new product can boost awareness to previously untapped audiences.

Offers

Posting offers exclusively for social media can be a great way to see if people are responding to your social media efforts. These can be a generic ‘10% off if you mention this Facebook post’ or ‘20% off for the first 20 likes or retweets’ will work for customers who regularly check your social media.

If this all seems like hard work, you can always use social media management tools such as Hootsuite to manage all your social media and plan what content you are going to put out over the coming weeks and months all in one go (although this can still take an hour or so to populate and schedule).