Small-business owners rely heavily on social media marketing. It has its merits, but it is not a guaranteed answer to your business needs. Social media is an excellent platform for sharing interactive and creative content and interacting and boosting engagements with your customers. With over 4.48 billion users worldwide, it has become the most influential virtual space for reaching many people through advertisements, promotions, and good marketing.
There are many ways to use social media to your company’s advantage, and the opportunities are endless. With the right showcasing and profile building, you can grow connections and a stable number of clients. But to what was mentioned before, it is not the answer to your every business needs. Businesses have a lot of strategies to overcome for them to grow. Having a social media platform for your brand is not just one easy click.
Here, we’ll discuss what social media can do for small-business owners and what owners shouldn’t expect when they have decided to join in.
Expectation vs. Reality
Expectation: It will probably take me a few weeks to build my social media platform.
Reality: I have been working on this for almost two months now, and I still haven’t reached my target follower count yet.
If you compare your content with your personal profile, of course, that will take a few minutes to make. It will also be easier to gain followers since people already know who you are. Your friends and family members will automatically follow your content.
Meanwhile, business accounts take days to have the right content. Finding the right content that fits your branding is no easy task. Also, you’d have to study the algorithm, making sure that you’d post on time. There are a lot of factors with business accounts that make them more complicated with a personal one. You would also have to develop SEO content, ensuring that you’d stay relevant with your competitors. That includes finding the right hashtags and keywords and writing an attention-grabbing caption.
Expectation: Posting great and heavily edited photos will surely attract customers.
Reality: You spend hours and even days taking photos and editing them via Photoshop, but no one buys at all.
Heavily edited photos, videos, and other media content is nothing if you don’t have a connection with your audience yet. Sometimes the media you’re posting may not fit the brand nor the customers’ interest.
Feel free to ask what they like. Conduct polls and let your customers get to know you as an owner. And remember to incorporate you and your brand into every posting. You have to make sure that when clients see an image or a video, they connect and relate to it and, at the same time, are reminded of who you are as a company.
Expectation: I would have to post every single day to boost interaction.
Reality: I’m posting every single day, but no one’s even interacting on it.
Sometimes less is more. People don’t want to see two to three social media posts from you every single day. They will get fed up even if they’re a fan of your brand. The worst-case scenario is that you can be penalized by the algorithm if you have a lot of social media posts that don’t have enough interactions.
Maybe that works for some brands, but it depends on the services and with the audience. For example, a semi-truck accident attorney offering their services may not have to post every single day compared to a food truck that changes its location weekly.
This can be considered as testing ground. If you see that your posts aren’t receiving the interactions you expect, tone it down and lessen it. No amount of posts, stories, tweets, and updates can boost your way up to the algorithm. Study what your audience wants and provide them the content they need—in moderation.
Expectation: I’ll have giveaways soon; my customers will love that.
Reality: Only eight people have joined.
As mentioned before, you can’t expect your followers and potential customers to interact with you if you haven’t built a community or interacted with them yet. Plus, having giveaways, promotions, and discounts is a big no if you haven’t created a persona yet.
People will only interact with you because of what you’re offering. It’s a fleeting connection and when the promotion ends, so does their interaction. You need real people who are fans of your brand, the perfect target audience that would appreciate your company and not just what you offer.
Social media presence is an excellent way to tell your brand’s story, promote your products, and connect with your customers in a more personal way. You can easily create brand awareness by sharing how you started the business.
You have to pay for sponsored advertisements, photographers, and models for your content, but you don’t have to pay for website hosting nor membership fees. Good media content with SEO can help boost your rank by using proper keywords.
Social media is open to all people, giving anyone a chance to boost their small businesses for potential clients. It’s no easy task, but the opportunities for your brand are endless.
