grow your business, small business, Social Media Tips & Tricks

The Complete Guide to Social Media Marketing for Small Business

Major social media apps with their icons

Social media marketing has become a wild concoction of conspiracies, memes, hashtags, and TikTok dances.

That said, never has marketing on social media been more important than now. It’s a low-cost, high-yield marketing solution that all small businesses need to know if they want success.

In this article, we’ll discuss all the basics you need to know to start your journey in social media marketing for small business. Then, I’ll help you create a marketing strategy that you can use on most social media platforms.

Here’s everything we’ve covered in this guide:

  1. What is Social Media Marketing?
  2. The value of Social Media for Small Businesses
  3. Start your social media marketing campaign today!

What is social media marketing?

Social media marketing is when social media platforms are used by brands and companies to market their businesses. 

4.62 billion people use social media daily, with almost half a million joining in 2021 alone. 

With such a large audience at your disposal, your business can build a large community of followers. This sort of relationship was impossible to build before the internet. But now, a company can quickly post any promotions, issues, or newsletters to all of their fans at the tap of a button.

Social Media Apps with Icons

The value of social media for small businesses

Usually, in smaller businesses, employees are tasked with multiple roles. It can be hard to juggle all of your tasks and stay sane.

It’s especially true for small marketing teams. Marketing departments are in charge of graphic designs, social media press releases, and any or all forms of communication marketing. With all these responsibilities, it can be easy to overlook the importance of social media marketing.

Whether you’re just starting out handling all of the marketing yourself or a local business trying to manage your social media accounts while also managing the books, there doesn’t seem to be enough time in the day to prioritize social media.

The truth is that social media should be a top priority in this day and age. Social media isn’t just for sales though. You can also leverage it to build customer relationships.


Develop customer relationships

Social media platforms are excellent tools for developing your customer relationships. There are plenty of ways to do this, but to get started you will need to set some business goals.


Set social goals for your small business

A lot of small businesses forget that setting goals are an important part of further growing your business.

The same goes for your social media marketing.

If you’re planning on running social media marketing campaigns, you will need to justify why, and set end goals for each campaign. Some campaigns could be to garner more followers, thus growing your follower base, and some might be to boost lead conversion. Both of these still fall under customer relations. 


Use chatbots

Chatbots are an excellent way of building customer relations. 

A lot of questions customers might have can be answered by a chatbot, instead of an actual employee. Not only will a chatbot respond much faster, but it gives employees free time to do something else, boosting productivity.


Follow trends and holidays

There are plenty of holidays apart from government and religious ones. 

Many companies leverage these days, such as National Donut Day or World Peace Day (depending upon relevance to their business), to boost engagement on their social media platforms. 

A great example comes from Cookies by George. On National Cookie Day, they announced a competition on their Twitter page. To enter the competition, you would need to follow their Twitter account, like and repost the Tweet, as well as comment on your favorite cookie in the comment section. 

This is a great way to boost engagement on a post, as well as promote your business.

Another great way to get your social media posts optimal engagement is through hashtags.

Hashtags are added to posts so that other users who don’t follow you can see your post that has the hashtag in it they are searching for. Following trending hashtags will help you expose your social media posts and campaigns to more users, who in turn might follow your page or even go further and buy something from you.

Finding the right hashtags to generate traffic can become time-consuming. Luckily many great hashtags generator tools are available on the market to help facilitate the process and save you some time. 


Better audience insights

There is a vast range of analytics that you can get from looking at your social media accounts.

Most social media platforms also have built-in social media analytics.

These come with a plethora of options and information, like geographical analytics, age demographics as well as post-engagement.

Age and geographical demographics can help you focus your products and marketing strategy better to reach the largest optical audience, and post-engagement should help you better write and organize your posts for optimal conversion.

A great example is Twitter analytics. It is a paid-for feature on Twitter and should be a part of all businesses’ social media marketing strategies.

With Twitter analytics, you can see your Tweet activities, view rates of videos, impressions, and engagement of your Twitter posts, as well as conversion rates of your ad campaigns.

If you’re looking to further your social media analytics game, then visual analytics should offer you even more information. These interactive visual fields offer deeper insights that might just give your small business the edge.


Lead generation

Social media lead generation is the act of using social media platforms to create new leads for your business.

Using social media as a marketing tool will not only offer your company excellent leads, but these leads are more likely to convert than leads from other organic routes.

Social media platforms are also able to provide you with all the information you need, to create your marketing campaigns around your followers, which will help generate more leads.

There are plenty of ways you can generate leads, whether it be through paying for an ad campaign on Facebook or Twitter, or using hashtags and promotions to entice followers to share the content. 

You can also use geo-targeting. This is when you choose which countries or areas an ad will run in. This allows you to customize ads to suit the location they are in, which in turn leads to better lead generation.


Validate your business

Validation is something that happens passively. You might not think much of it, but when it comes to validation, the consequences are wide-spanning.

Social media validation is all about your image and online presence. This includes business reviews, word of mouth, the comment section, and even other people’s vlogs and blogs.

When it comes to social media platforms, apps like Facebook have official accounts and business accounts where users of the product or service can leave reviews.

Other platforms like YouTube are riddled with review videos of anything and everything you can think of. It’s no wonder having a clean slate online is so important. With half of the world on social media, a scathing review by a large Youtuber that might garner millions of views can be devastating.

Thus, social media should be used to your advantage. Get your accounts verified on social media platforms so people know it’s the real you. Leave feedback on negative comments that are not passive-aggressive, or degrading, but instead constructive and knowledgeable.

This sort of behavior will only help further your validation within the online community, as well as build trust between you and your followers.


Increase your brand awareness

After you’ve validated your accounts, you can start focusing on brand awareness.

This is when you focus your marketing strategy on reaching an audience wider than just your current audience. It’s not targeted, since you most likely aren’t trying to sell something. Instead, you’re trying to gain more followers, or create more leads.

Brand awareness is important. Not only will it get people talking about your business on social media, but it could help it get trending.

Coke is probably one of the best examples of creating the #ShareACoke hashtag to promote sharing. The idea was that you would share a picture of yourself sharing a Coke with someone else, and add the hashtag.

Coke is already famous around the world and needs no introduction, but learning from big corporations like Coke, who have massive marketing teams is something smaller businesses can do.


Turn your efforts into results

Over and above everything we talked about, social media can help you get new customers. Not just leads, but real customers who pay. 

Make the most out of your social media marketing efforts by converting profile visitors into paying customers. You can do this by adding a Book Now button to your Instagram and Facebook pages and booking links to all the other social platforms. But for that, you need to have an account with a partner scheduling software like Appointy

Sign up with Appointy now to start accepting bookings from social media!


Start your social media marketing campaign today!

There has never been a better time to start using social media for marketing for small business. 

Depending on your business type, your strategy might differ. A great way to get an idea of how to do it is to take a look at your competition.

Social media marketing is low-cost, and when it comes to running a small business, keeping costs down is important. It’s also less intensive, which means you won’t need a massive marketing team to run your social media accounts.

If you follow this guide and spend enough time developing your social media presence, you’ll start seeing more leads and conversions in no time!


About Appointy

We at Appointy, help business owners grow and run their businesses with our online scheduling software. This blog was a part of our ‘Manage your Business’ category, where we provide expert tips, and resources, or simply talk about the challenges that small and medium businesses face every day. 

If you have any thoughts on this blog or would like to chat about your business struggles and achievements, let us know in the comments below. 

We love a good talk!