Resources and time are small business owners’ personal demons. Supporting this fact is a Bank of America survey where small business owners voted to say that running their businesses was twice as stressful as handling relationships with a spouse and three times as stressful as raising children!
If you’ve felt that limited manpower and funds have been setbacks in terms of marketing your business, here are six simple ideas that will change your mind and your business.
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Small Business Social Media Ideas and Marketing
1. Employ Nifty and Affordable Tools to do the Heavy Lifting
Social is massive. Facebook has 1.65 billion monthly active users. There are 350,000 tweets every minute. If you’re specialized in an industry, say technology, how would you sift through each of those uploads to find the ones best suited to your social media audience?
The answer is you can’t. But the right tools can do that for you, and intelligently. What you require is a tool that can crawl the Web and find high-quality shareable content for you. Tools like DrumUp let you curate and share content through the same interface and help you stay active on social with ease.
Buyer behavior is pertinent when building marketing strategies. Invest a good amount of time in profiling your target audience. It’ll be a one-time and worthwhile investment because everything that really works on social isn’t random — it works for very specific reasons.
For instance, if you run through Starbucks’ Twitter page, you’ll discern a distinct theme — all things that are coffee, feel-good and look great. Check out a cinnamon coffee recipe share. It is relevant, something that’d help Starbucks’ loyal audiences, who are ardent coffee fans, and it looks great.
Make quick lists of specific topics — like recipes but relevant to your industry and use content curation tools to find shareable content.
3. Organize Your Efforts, this Actually Saves More Time Than it Consumes
You might spend about an hour a month planning what to share, but this beats spending an hour every day! Content calendars are very simple and effective. All you have to do is download a calendar of each month in advance and then write a theme over each date. Or you could use Google Calendars which are fairly easy.
Your themes could be drawn from the lists you’ve made in the previous step. Suppose you have 10 possible themes that you’re sure your social media audience would love. You could allot those themes to dates on the calendar on a cycle, 1 through 10 and then back to one. This way, you’re audience would get both value and variety on your social media pages.
4. Include Content from Diverse Sources and in Varying Formats
If there’s anything that all audiences look for, it is the freshness factor. Expert blogger Nir Eyal once said, “People don’t want something truly new, they want the familiar done differently.” This idea fits perfectly well into the strategy we’re discussing.
You do the same themes on a cycle — familiar stuff, but you do it differently — with different sources and formats.
What are the formats you can use? Blogs, videos, vlogs, gifs, infographics, graphs, the more interactive and visual the better. Always make quick inclusions of nice-looking visuals, because visuals increase willingness to engage by 80 percent.
5. Make the Best of Your Existing Content
If you’ve already shared a bunch of stuff on social, that’s great! Because now you can reignite conversations on those shares and use that to drive traffic to your site. Reuse and recycle your old stuff, edit the title a little and maybe add a new image. Throw in a hashtag? Especially on days when you don’t have enough time to look at anything, you could always do this as a back-up. Some content curation tools even have content libraries where you can store golden posts for a rainy day.
Another way of using old stuff is re-purposing it. Have you noticed a particular post that has gotten you a lot of engagement? Pick it up, re-purpose it and re-post! All you have to do is pick a new angle discussed in that post and title it accordingly. A quick and easy way to get results!
Curation is a great way to connect with an audience without having to commit much time to the practice, but it certainly can’t compete with originality. If you’re hard pressed for time, what you should definitely be doing is adding a touch of your personality to everything that you curate and share. It shouldn’t take you more than a few seconds to type in a few words before sharing.
Add your personal touch using one of these 3 easy ideas
1) State an opinion
2) Add a personal greeting
3) Ask a question
While curating content remember this simple rule. Share as you and share for your audience. Consider what they’d like to read and what would excite them and always add your personality to whatever you share. After all, the biggest asset of a small business is its personality.
Do you have any small business social media and marketing ideas to share? Leave them in comments if you do!
Typing Photo via Shutterstock
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