With all the hats that a small-business owner has to wear, social media manager can often be the most difficult. At friendly martian, we even find it hard to find the time to post, harder to remember to post, and hardest to summon up the resolve to post. But we all have to do it, don’t we?
To make it easier, here are three tips that will help businesses manage their social media:
Find your best social media outlets
With so many social media outlets available, it’s important to know which your customers use. You don’t want to waste your time making crazy TikToc videos for your hardware store customers who just want to know about your cabinet hinge offerings.
When people ask us about friendly martian’s small business services, they often have questions on what social sites they should use. Social media research shows that Facebook users are mostly adults, while 70 percent of Pinterest users are female, and 60% of households with an annual income above $100,000 use Instagram. With a little digging, you will find the social media platforms that your customers are likely to use, and then you can ignore the rest.
Use a social media dashboard
Social media dashboards save tons of time by allowing you to make the same post to multiple social media platforms at once. These online tools allow business owners to upload a photo, cut and paste the post text and send it simultaneously to several outlets. No need to log into every site and make the same post over and over again.
Several dashboards offer free and low-cost plans, such as Buffer, Hootsuite and Later. Each site also includes a set of tools that let posters examine audience reach or impressions, repost previous posts, schedule posts, assign team members and more. The toolsets on each site are different, so do your homework or sign up for a free trial.
Apply hashtags to reach more people
A hashtag is a way to categorize a social media post so that it reaches people who are following that category. For example, if you type #mars into Twitter’s search bar, it will present you with tweets that are related to the FM home planet.
Facebook, Twitter and Instagram all make use of hashtags. Not all hashtags are the same on each social media platform, but the majority are, so the people who are following #CuriosityRover on Facebook have the same interests as the people following the hashtag on Twitter.
Here are two basic ways to use hashtags: The first is to target people who have a specific interest by using a tag like #DigitalMarketing or #Cookies. The second is to include a trending hashtag in your post. Trending hashtags are the most popular tags on a social media site at any given moment, so you can associate your post (and your business) with a hot topic of the day.
You can find relevant hashtags by looking at topics on each social media site. There are also several websites (free and paid) that collate hashtags for each platform. For starters, try hashtags.org, or best-hashtags.com.
Get on with the social media gameplan
Once you’ve narrowed down your social media options, set up a dashboard and dialed in your hashtags, your small business social media plan will be a lot easier to execute. If you need more advice or options, contact us today.
Recent Comments