When it comes to small businesses, especially in the wake of disasters and crises that essentially force shops to close, it’s even more important to succeed on the online front. This is also why focusing on social media is more critical than ever, with social media marketing campaigns, posting series, livestreams, and tools like easySocials surging in popularity.
Fortunately, there are a ton of ways in which social media can be leveraged to help make small businesses thrive. Naturally, a lot of this will depend on the nature of the small businesses in question. However, as long as the process is done right, there should be no obstacle to making the most of what social networking sites and platforms have to offer. To cope is to survive and social media is simply the future.
Multiple Platforms
One of the worst mistakes you could make when trying to launch your social media initiatives is to only have one or two accounts in one or two platforms. This is simply not going to be enough if you are looking to make a huge impact that will then translate to conversion. Instead, you need multiple accounts on multiple platforms.
This is to ensure that you are able to cast as wide a net as possible and reel in as much traffic as possible. While social media might not be the golden goose that a lot of marketers make it out to be, it is a grand opportunity for anyone who is able to make the most of what it has to offer.
The first step is to always have a finger in every pie, or at least the major ones. You don’t need to bother with the more obscure platforms unless they are full of the kind of users you are aiming for, in the first place.
Outline & Follow Marketing Goals
You need to have marketing goals that you can easily target in your mind. Which demographics are you after? What age group would you like to get the most? What about the regions, religions, sex, and so on? More than that, you also need to make sure that you actually need to know what the signs of success of achievements will be.
Is it a certain number of targeted traffic? Do you measure via conversion? What about feedback? Those and many more points like them are what you will need to keep in mind.
Regular Posting
If you ever want to succeed in your social media endeavors, you will need to post and post a lot. Doing so only once in a while will quickly kill any momentum you might have built and that’s assuming you were able to build any, at all.
Your users, followers, and fans need to know that they can rely on you to keep feeding their need for more of your posts and signs of activities on a regular basis. If you can time your posts, shares, and comments to the minute, this will only be to your benefit.
Engage and Retain
It goes without saying, but you do have to make sure that the posts and contents you are sharing are actually engaging. They need to not only attract the attention of potential visitors but they also need to make people believe that you will keep delivering such posts and contents.
The more they look forward to your next post, next share, next re-tweet, or whatever else, the more often they will keep checking out your accounts. Eventually it will turn into a habit and once that habit has been established, it can quickly turn to trust. In the end, you can then make use of that to gain traffic that you can convert.
Closer Relations
You must never make your visitors feel like they are just numbers on a board that you are scratching out. This is why it is always best to build relations with them. This means engaging with them whenever possible, highlighting contributions and discussions, and bringing up concerns that they may have.
You never want to be the kind of marketer that forgets the human factors that make people pay attention. At the end of the day, you are dealing with people with actual emotions and reactions. The more you make them feel valued and rewarded accordingly, the longer they will stay with you and the more willing they will be to spend money on whatever you are trying to offer.
Email Marketing
Even these days, email marketing is still a huge aspect of the online marketing space and this is exactly what you will want to implement as soon as you can. By messaging your visitors in their inboxes, they will be a lot more engaged, provided they actually signed up to whatever you are offering.
However, it would be best to throw in some social media aspects to your campaigns. Share events, photos, posts, comments, reactions, and others just to make the emails more engaging. Remember that internet users typically have very low attention spans so you need to keep throwing out bait to keep them hooked.
Comments, Posts, Shares, Etc.
Finally, it’s always best to engaged with your users where they are. This means the comments section, their own posts, and even the stuff that they share. If your users can see you taking an interested in the things that they are passionate about or showing an interest in, they will appreciate it. This appreciation for your actions will then be reciprocated.
Now, it will not work for everyone since there are many users that simply do not engage in other social activities, even with ones that they themselves have started. You can learn more about that when you visit website guides that discuss behavior of social media users or traffic sites like elitewebsitetraffic. The gist of it is that you need to provide the right incentives to get the kinds of results that you are looking for.
This goes doubly true for social media users that are not as active as others.
