Building a strong and authentic social media presence can be a game-changer for small businesses, growing brand recognition, fostering customer engagement and directly influencing sales. Social media platforms are free to join and offer highly cost-effective paid advertising options, making these channels an invaluable marketing tool to achieve broad reach and visibility without a large budget.
Much more than just a promotional tool, social media creates two-way communication with customers, helping to cultivate meaningful relationships and lasting loyalty. By thoughtfully engaging with your audience and strategically sharing valuable content, you can boost customer confidence in your brand and establish your business as a trusted authority in your industry.
Which Platforms are Best for Your Small Business?
In today’s digital age, you’ve probably explored most popular social media platforms. Creating a consistent identity across every channel can be a herculean effort without a dedicated social media manager on your team. It’s important to focus your efforts and prioritize the channels that align with your business type and target audience.
B2B Companies
Focus on platforms that facilitate professional networking and industry-specific conversations.
- LinkedIn is ideal for establishing thought leadership, sharing long-form content, networking and connecting with decision-makers in your industry.
- Facebook is effective for running targeted paid advertisements and engaging with various communities in your industry.
- X is a useful tool for sharing industry updates, engaging in trending conversations and even building relationships with key media contacts in your field.
B2C Companies
Businesses reaching out directly to consumers should consider the audience and demographics of their product or service. Older generations generally prefer platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, while younger generations gravitate to more visual, content-driven platforms like Instagram and TikTok. Understand your audience’s preferences and tailor your content to each platform accordingly.
- TikTok has exploded in popularity among younger audiences with its creative, short-form video content.
- Instagram is another highly visual platform great for showcasing products and connecting with Millenials and Gen Z.
- Facebook can be a versatile platform, but is essential for reaching older demographics or running ads targeted to specific audiences.
- X is an effective tool for timely updates, customer service conversations and keeping tabs on broader industry conversations.
- Reddit may be a newer platform for many small businesses, but is an excellent opportunity to engage niche communities and foster organic discussions about your brand.
Social Media Best Practices
Create an editorial calendar
Develop a social media calendar or posting schedule for any of the social media platforms that you want to focus on growing rigorously. Social media algorithms—across all platforms—are driven by frequency and engagement, which means consistency is king. Before we expanded our marketing team, our small business was posting on social media every week or so on an inconsistent basis. After creating a schedule and sticking to it, we saw dramatic positive changes in our engagement and follower growth.
Consider a social media management tool
If you are trying to grow your following across multiple channels, consider using a social media management tool to automate posting across different social platforms and track metrics in one place. I’ve used tools like Buffer to promote our company blog posts, which are then shared on our primary social media accounts. While these tools help with scheduling and automating posting, you’ll still need to spend time manually engaging with your followers and other relevant content to see the most benefits.
Engage authentically
Social media isn’t just about posting consistently—it’s about building relationships with your audience. Respond to comments, answer questions, engage with user-generated content and interact with partner content to begin building a community. Sharing stories, testimonials and behind-the-scenes content can humanize your brand, and authentic and meaningful interactions with your customers build trust and loyalty.
Leverage thought leadership
Creating thought leadership content requires a significant amount of your valuable time. As the head of marketing for our small business, I often find that I spend the majority of my time writing bylined articles we contribute to industry publications. Given the effort invested in these pieces, it’s vital to me that we maximize their reach. Social media provides the perfect platform to leverage and promote our content and allows us to engage with these industry publications and their followers. We’ve found that this strategy helps build trust with our existing clients and attracts new leads as we position ourselves as experts in our field.
Drive traffic
A strong social media strategy will drive traffic to your website, funneling potential customers to your online store or service pages. We include a link to our company blog or another page on our website in almost every social post we publish, with the ultimate goal of converting new customers. Incorporate clear calls-to-action (“Learn More”, “Shop Now”, etc.) and link directly to optimized landing pages to make it easy for viewers to take action.
Tips for tracking ROI
Think about your primary goal as the first step for tracking ROI. Are you trying to build a following to win influencer brand deals, or is your focus on driving brand awareness in a competitive landscape? Once you set a target, you can narrow in on the metrics that are most meaningful to your ROI.
At our small business, views are less valuable than click-through rates. Once someone clicks through to our website via a social media post, we can track their next steps—whether they spent time on our blog, visited our pricing page or made a purchase. This gives us the best insight into the time we spend promoting on social media to gain new customers.
Once you’ve determined which metrics are most important to your goals, regularly review platform analytics—monthly is a good place to start—to understand what’s working and what isn’t, and adjust accordingly. Most platforms have their own analytics tools built in to measure engagement, reach and conversions, and many social media management tools exist for a deeper, more comprehensive dive. Utilizing this data to optimize your content, posting schedule and overall strategy will ensure you’re maximizing your investment in social media and delivering measurable results.
Social media is an opportunity for your small business to connect with potential customers, build brand awareness and loyalty, and achieve measurable growth. By focusing on the right platforms, engaging authentically and leveraging data-driven insights, you can turn your social media presence into a powerful tool for success.
Kaycee Miller has 15 years of marketing expertise, leading strategies to drive brand awareness, enhance customer engagement and help businesses grow and thrive. Today she is co-owner and Director of Marketing & Operations at Rentec Direct, a property management software company recognized as a top small business by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.