Building a social media strategy is one of the biggest challenges small business owners face. It's no surprise—between managing operations and other daily tasks, finding time to make content can be overwhelming.
But by creating a streamlined system for your social media, not only will you save time but you'll also improve the consistency and quality of your posts. Additionally, having a solid social media system in place allows you to easily delegate the work to someone on your team, freeing you up to focus on other critical areas of your business.
A survey by Buffer found that 58% of businesses feel that social media marketing is their most time-consuming marketing activity. We want to reduce this time, if possible, and ensure that the time we are spending on social media is making a measurable impact in our businesses.
Let's talk about how you can go about crafting a social media strategy that works for your business.
1. Understand your Audience
Understanding your audience is crucial as it lays the foundation for your entire social media content strategy. By analyzing customer demographics, such as age, gender, location, and interests, you can tailor your content to resonate more deeply with your target market.
This means not only creating engaging content but also addressing your audience’s specific pain points and preferences, leading to higher engagement and stronger relationships.
Check out tools like Facebook Audience Insights and Instagram Insights, which provide valuable data and make it easier to create relevant, impactful content that truly connects with your audience.
2. Choose the Right Platforms
Once you've determined who your audience is, you have to find what platforms they're present and active on.
It's best to start with one or two platforms and do them well instead of spreading yourself too thin by trying to post on every platform.
If your demographic is younger, apps like TikTok or Instagram might be the way to go. For a slightly older crowd, Facebook might be more suitable. If you don't know what platforms your customers use, just ask them.
Once you identify one or to key platforms, focus on them to effectively engage with your target audience and gradually expand as you grow more comfortable and your resources allow.
3. Competitive Analysis
I perform a competitive analysis early on anytime I help businesses with their social media. It's the best way to see what's working in your industry and stay on top of trends.
Start by examining your competitors' social media profiles to see what types of content they post, which platforms they use, and how they engage with their audience.
Take note of their most popular posts and engagement rates. This process can help you discover new content ideas and understand the strategies that resonate with your target audience. By identifying what's working well in your industry, you can adapt those successful tactics to your own social media strategy, fostering continual improvement and staying ahead of trends.
4. Audit your Content
To effectively audit your social media content, I find it helpful to pull up your social media feed and put it right next to the feed of a competitor in your industry.
Examine your posts critically: evaluate their engagement levels, attention-grabbing potential, the tangible value they offer to your audience. How does your feed compare to your competitors? Is it attractive and engaging?
Reflect deeply on whether your posts are a true representation of your brand ethos and objectives. If not, how can you improve over time to show off your brand's unique personality?
During this process, try to think about why a customer would view your profile in the first place. They're probably not just looking for coupons and special deals. Instead, they want to see examples of your high quality products and services. They want to see your brand's reputation, your company culture and the passion you have for your work.
5. Choose your Content Types
The next step is to create a list of a few types of content that you'll be posting. Here are a few examples of content ideas:
- Testimonial post (video or graphic)
- Product photo
- Video / Reel
- Employee highlight
- Educational post (photo or video)
- Product tutorial
- Longform video
6. Create a Posting Schedule
Since social media is the most time consuming marketing activity, you have to be proactive about your posts to make sure this important work gets done consistently.
To achieve this, I find it's easiest to choose one day to create all the content and then schedule it out to be posted throughout the week.
Try sitting down for a couple of hours, planning out your content, and creating enough posts for at least one week. Then, just use a social media scheduling tool that can automatically post them throughout the week. This way, you don't have to think about social media every day, allowing you to focus on other important tasks.
As you develop a system for posting content, keep documentation of what works well and what doesn't. Make an operations manual for your social media process so it will be easy to delegate social media work to employees in the future.
7. Collaborate with Others
I believe this area is one of the biggest missed opportunities of many small businesses.
You've heard of 'Influencer Marketing' for large brands and huge celebrities, but this process can be used in small business as well. Two ways you can collaborate with others to promote your business are through partnerships and sponsorships.
Partnerships - Find other businesses that don't compete directly with you, but that your customers would likely enjoy. If you own a spa, you could connect with a yoga studio and sell a package with both of your products. Or, you could simply agree to promote each other in your email newsletters.
Sponsorships - Reach out to local celebrities or social media pages with large followings and ask if they're open to sponsored posts. I follow several local food Instagram pages where I've found some amazing hidden gem restaurants in my city. If I owned a restaurant, I'd ask those pages if they'd be open to posting about my business in exchange for a fee. Prices for sponsorships like this can vary anywhere from $50-$1000+, so check to see what the market rate is to make sure you're getting a fair deal.
Strategies like this can have huge ROI potential because you're able to get your business in front of a large number of people that are interested in the product or service that you sell.
8. Measure your Success
In order to determine if your social media strategy is working, you'll have to keep track of some metrics over time.
Keep an eye on things like follower count, engagement, impressions, website traffic, and conversions from your social media pages. Some software tools help you measure these over time with dashboards.
9. Adjust & Evolve
There's no silver bullet in social media marketing, but one of the ways you can essentially guarantee success is by testing and improving over time.
Keep notes about what posts perform the best and resonate the most with your audience. If you post a Reel that gets a few thousand views, try to figure out what made it popular and create more like it. You can even try running your most successful social media posts as paid ads on Facebook and Google.
Over time, stop doing what doesn't work and continue doing what does. Eventually, you'll have a powerful social media machine that catches the attention of potential customers and gets them engaged with your brand.
