How to Use Social Media for Your Business

Social media goes hand in hand with entrepreneurship, and it’s essential to have if you are running a business. If you are wondering how to use social media for your business, the dedicated team of social media marketing experts from FirstPage Marketing can help you create the ideal social media strategy for your unique business needs.

Preparation Phase

Before you start, it is important to set some basic goals and brand guidelines. If you are starting from scratch, you should set out to build brand awareness and to generate a following of people within in your target audience. After that, you can work on website traffic and lead generation.

Get to Know Your Audience

To effectively engage with your audience, it’s important to know who they are. What are their motivations, interests, and pain points? This will help you create content that resonates with them and encourages them to engage with your brand. You can gather insights about your audience by using social media analytics and tailor your content accordingly.

When getting to know your audience, make sure to answer the following questions:

• Who are your ideal customers?
• How old are they?
• What do they do?
• What problem are you solving?

Choose the Right Platforms

While there are quite a few social media platforms available, not all of them are going to be suitable for your business. Choose platforms that align with your business goals and where your audience is most active. For example, if millennials are your target audience, TikTok and Instagram may just be more effective than Facebook. If you have a DIY business, Pinterest could be very useful for you.

Content Production Phase

There are several ways you can go about creating content you will post on social media. Nowadays, you don’t need a graphic design degree. You can use drag-and-drop tools, pre-set templates, or build a template of your own and just change content and elements on it. This way, you can have a template with your brand colours and even work on brand recognition.

Bulk Content Production

If you want to churn out a lot of content pieces, the best way for it is with themes and templates. Create several categorized templates you can edit. Examples of themes could be:

• Tips and tricks
• Blog promotion
• Sales posts
• Fun facts and fun posts

When creating content in bulk, research ten pieces of content for each theme. Edit the templates and write the captions. This way, you can have 50-60 posts which you can schedule 2-3 months in advance.

Here are some additional guidelines for small businesses posting on social media.

Create a Content Calendar

In order to stay organized and consistent with your social media posts, it’s a good idea to create a content calendar. This will help you plan out your posts in advance and ensure that you’re posting regularly and staying on brand. A content calendar is a glorified sheet/table with images, links, and captions for social media posts and hashtags.

Use A Social Media Scheduler

No need to hover and obsess over posting times. You can easily load the assets from the content calendar and captions into a social media scheduler, like Hootsuite, months in advance. If you choose to use a social media scheduler, make sure to check from time to time that the posts are indeed being posted.

Engagement Phase

Once you start seeing some results coming from your social media strategy, you can work on engaging your customer base. It’s all about building relationships with your customers. Make sure to respond to comments and messages and to engage with your followers by asking questions, sharing user-generated content, and offering promotions and discounts.

Engagement doesn’t have to start online, necessarily. You could offer QR codes in stores that would lead customers to your social media pages. You could promote giveaways and ask for engagement actions like liking, following, and sharing something while tagging a brand.

Analysis Phase

At this point, you will start seeing some results. Social media strategy is all about testing and finding the right set of actions that work for your brand. Once you get the knack of it, you should delve deeper into analytics.

Take the time to re-evaluate who your ideal audience is to ensure that you are targeting the right people for your products and services. Make sure to check demographics and how they engage, as well to test the different types of posts and posting times.

If all of this sounds too complicated for you to handle, we can help you create the ideal social media strategy for your unique business needs. Get in touch with us at 1-800-676-4393 to jumpstart your social media presence.

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