5 Essential Social Media Tips for Local Businesses

Using social media to promote a local business is a highly controversial topic in digital marketing. Many marketers believe that you can rely on solely social media to power your business’ growth, while many believe social media is a waste of time. It all depends on your industry, but a healthy dose of organic social media content could always prove beneficial.

Social media is regarded as the most convenient way to communicate with your audience, as long as you can maintain their attention.

Determining whether or not to use social media as a part of your marketing strategy relies on a few things. Does it align with your marketing objectives? Could it help increase your exposure among your target market? Does your ideal customer even use social media? (Most often, yes).

Evaluate Your Marketing Objectives

The goals of your marketing should always guide your decision making when choosing promotional platforms. Determine whether or not your target market uses social media and identify where they are on social media. Your social media marketing strategy should align with your overall objectives and help boost your results.

If you are targeting millennials who value technology, use social media to talk about technology and resonate with their interests. Provide useful information that they can apply to their lives or use to solve a common problem they are facing. Don’t use it to relentlessly promote your products or services, but instead to help build rapport with your niche market.

Develop an Authority

Standing out as a well-known expert is easily the best way to build a following and drive organic conversions. People do business with people they like, who help them solve their problems, and who they trust. By using social media correctly, you can develop your brand into all three.

You can achieve this by producing resourceful information that speaks to your audience’s direct problems. By demonstrating your understanding of these problems and knowledge of solutions, you can establish your brand as a helpful expert in your field. Consumers will come to you with their questions and trust the information that you publish as reliable.

Ultimately, by publishing content that your viewers want to see, you encourage them to engage with you online, share your posts, and start conversations with and about your brand. When you increase your engagement, you increase your following, which establishes a sense of reliability when people who don’t follow you visit your page. In turn, this provokes them to look through your content, follow you, or check out your website. With due time, having a central focus on this aspect of social media marketing will drive your organic conversions to levels you have only dreamed of.

Stand Out

Social media has a lot of noise pollution. It’s a place where friends, family, and brands are all fighting for the same consumer’s attention. The only hope local businesses have of being noticed and retaining that attention is to stand out.

There are several ways you can do this, starting with engaging content. Besides providing your audience with detailed, helpful information, you can engage them with conversation. Publish a post that asks a question and prompts a response. Use polls to get conversations started in your comments section. Use imagery and videos to take up more space on your viewer’s timeline.

Evaluate what kind of content your readers seek out and put an interesting or unique twist on it. Be different, be yourself. Use your online presence to humanize your brand by speaking with consumers rather than talking at them. Social media is a place for conversations to start, where trends ignite, and where opinions and ideas are shared. Contribute to those conversations and always give more than you take.

Stay Consistent

By staying active on social media, you enable your viewers to come across your brand weekly, if not daily. This also allows your brand to appear approachable and interactive, which consumers love to participate in. If you don’t believe me, look at the Twitter accounts for McDonald’s and Wendy’s.

Making your brand accessible encourages consumers to interact with you more, share your content, and help you grow your online presence without having to ask them to. As a result, your brand develops a strong, loyal customer base without spending thousands on ads.

Posting consistently also allows you to dominate that social media platform. Instead of customers coming across your competition’s content every day, they see your brand and how engaged your audience is and want to be a part of it. Staying consistent also helps your brand remain relevant, as opposed to neglecting your fanbase and causing them to distance themselves.

One great way that your can hold yourself accountable for this is by creating a content calendar like the one shown below. You can also set reminders on your phone for days and times that you need to be actively posting.

Content calendars are a great way to hold yourself accountable for staying consistent with your online presence.

Identify a Clear Goal

You shouldn’t be posting content just to post content and you certainly shouldn’t have a social media presence just because everyone else does. The only way your business can grow using social media is by leveraging it as another marketing tool. The most harmful thing a small business can do for their brand is post content solely on the hopes of someone finding it.

Identify a way that social media can align with your marketing objectives and set up a goal specifically for social media. Your goal shouldn’t be to get more followers or get more likes. You need to come up with a tangible, reasonable goal that you can track and actively pursue. Every post you publish should have a strategic purpose in getting you closer to that goal.

If you are in the service industry and are looking for more clients, you can use social media to demonstrate your expertise and attract potential clients who are looking for your services. You can share resources, industry statistics, and helpful information that you curate yourself for your ideal client. If you stay consistent with your efforts and engage with your audience, you’ll have leads coming to you asking for your advice and potentially your services. See content marketing for small businesses to learn more about leveraging content to attract your ideal customers.

If you have a restaurant or a bar and you want to promote your location, post pictures of your environment, your food, and your specials. Tag your employees and your customers and engage with them in the comments. Promote your deals and post aesthetically pleasing images of your dishes. Social media is one of the best ways a restaurant in particular can build a loyal customer base. Check out Sprout Social’s complete guide to social media marketing for restaurants and bars for more examples!

The most important thing to remember when deciding whether or not to use social media for a small business is that it will require constant attention and quality content. If you don’t have the time to manage and grow your social media presence, you will need to find someone to do it for you. If you aren’t sure how you can use social media for your business, you can use All Business’ website to search for social media content ideas.