Social media hacks for small businesses

Having a social media presence as a small business is a great benefit in the long run. Customers are online now more than ever, interacting on social media and online shopping. There are more strengths than weaknesses for your business being on social media so take that opportunity to build your target audience and engage even more with customers.

There are many small tips and tricks that will add to building your social media presence and help increase your following. Here are 8 social media hacks your business can utilise:

Have your content on a schedule

Making sure that your content is scheduled will help with your time management. There are now many tools and apps (we love Buffer!) for social media management that will work with organising your weekly content. This means you can spend less time keeping your social media posts consistent.

Remember the ‘hashtag’

This tool is a fantastic way for your business to reach new customers and your target audience on social media. Take into consideration the hashtags you’re going to use and try to tailor them to your business, not just using the popular ones all the time. Get Social with Grace has a handy article on the guide to hashtags.

Start that blog and boost the traffic by promoting it on social media

If you haven’t started writing blogs or articles for your business yet, then now is a great time to start. Blogs are an effective way to keep audiences and customers engaged in your content. So, once you have that blog or article, promote it on your social media pages and to drive traffic to your website.

Looking at partnering with ‘micro-influencers’

Influencer marketing can be a good way to get your business services or products out to a wider audience. A micro-influencer will have a following of around 2000-50,000 followers on social media and that influencer will tend to focus on a topic that’s specific.

Look at when the right time is to post

There are specific time slots where audiences will look at social media more during the time so try to tailor that when you schedule each post. Each platform will be different, but you can see in their analytics when their best times are to post content. Looking at your analytics can also show when your audience is interacting with your content the most.

Focus more on the engagement

Try not to get drawn into the amount of likes on specific content or the followers you have in total, look at which content is getting the most interaction and engagement. There are many analytic tools for each social media platform that can help you review.

Instagram stories are effective

Instagram and Facebook both have features where you can add a 10-second clip/photo to your account ‘story’, this is additional to a post. The story disappears after 24 hours and you can also ‘highlight’ that story to your profile if you want to keep it for people to refer back to. These stories can be a really efficient way to keep your followers engaged in a short space of time. Balance out the amount of stories you post each day so followers don’t end up just clicking through and not interacting with them.

New small-business stickers on Instagram

There is a new feature on Instagram where you can add a sticker to your story and these stickers have been created to help generate more traffic for small businesses. The stickers include buttons that can add a command such as purchasing a product/service or donating to a specific fundraiser. The button links to another site where a customer can complete the action. This initiative helps with supporting small businesses and also promotes their content more.

Now you have some hacks to add to your tool-kit for navigating around social media as a small business, start to take some time to build that presence whether it be writing your first blog post or posting your first Instagram story. The list is endless and your business will benefit in the long run so you can thrive more.