Need help with your small business social media? Here’s our biggest tip!
Small business social media
One of the most frequent questions we’re asked is ‘what is your biggest social media tip?’
We have tonnes of tips for you on each channel. For example, we wrote a blog about the insiders’ secrets of Instagram for our followers (right).
And yet clients still want a single magic bullet that applies to all of their social media channels, regardless of which ones they use.
There really is no specific bit of magic that ensures success on its own, on every channel i.e. Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, etc.
But there is one action that helps your business on every small business social media channel.
And the clue is in the name – ‘social’.
How old are you?
It’s a cheeky question that you don’t need to answer. What we’re getting at is, if you’re old enough to remember the launch of Facebook or Twitter, you remember the joy of those early conversations online.
Maybe you were chatting with family members overseas or reading a reply from your comment on one of Steven Fry’s (actor and Twitter early adopter) Tweets. You experienced a connection. And you probably had a release of dopamine. Dopamine is the chemical produced by our brains – it gives us a feeling that rewards us for actions, and so encourages us to repeat those actions.
In the beginning
Right at the beginning, that’s what social media was for – being social. And all that dopamine made us feel good. We:
- had conversations.
- shared common interests.
- ‘met’ new people.
- acquired new knowledge, views, and skills.
The goal of the platform creators may have been to make a profit from eventual advertising strategies. But it began with being social, and the platforms have retained that social goal in their algorithms.
So what’s the tip?
All social media platforms reward accounts – or increase the exposure of your posts and accounts to bigger audiences – if you socialise online. What do we mean by that?
Creating posts that encourage people to interact with your posts, with likes, saves, shares, DMs, comments etc, is our most important point here. And it sits alongside following up on those shares, comments, and direct messages with speedy replies.
Replying to comments and messages keeps your followers engaged. And for the social media channels, that means it keeps their users online, and ultimately, exposed to great advertising, and potential profit for the social media platforms.
One other action that supports your accounts is getting social on other peoples’ posts. So, don’t just post and run – stay online for a short while. Reply to other peoples’ posts, look for trending hashtags and get involved in the conversations that matter to people.
One final point
It can be super easy to fall down a hole of spending endless hours on social media. Instead, set yourself limited of the time you spend on your channel. If you can, share the load so that different people are monitoring your channels for comments and messages at different times.
If the thought of managing this yourself makes you anxious, that’s where the benefits of outsourcing marketing for your business comes in. You can read more on that on the link below.
If you are unsure where to start with your social media, or need other specialist help with your marketing, drop us a line, and we’d be happy to help.