5 Ways To Use Social Media To Grow Your Small Business

As a small business owner, you know that growing your business is an important part of keeping it sustainable. Unfortunately, it can sometimes be expensive to engage in some effective marketing tactics that help you widen your reach.

Thankfully, social media is a potent channel for you to spread the word about your small business and connect with your consumers. Understanding some key ways to take advantage of various social media platforms to grow your business can make growing your business an easy task as well as it suits perfectly for startup scaling.

Five ways to use social media to grow your small business

Invest in Platforms That Your Consumers Actually Use

When it comes to taking advantage of social media as a small business owner, it can be tempting to invest time, effort, and money into every single platform. Unfortunately, some of these efforts will be in vain if your business’s consumers aren’t using them.

For example, if you have a small business that sells weed-killer for lawns, it’s important to determine who one’s target audience is and what social media platforms they use. You may find that most of your consumers are older homeowners that use Facebook. As such, you can avoid pouring money into social media platforms such as Tik Tok that cater to a younger audience that wouldn’t necessarily use your product.

By doing thorough consumer research before embarking on social media campaigns, you can save yourself a tremendous amount of time and effort. This being the case, it’s important to be clear about who your consumers are and what platforms they’re using in order to grow your business with social media.

Create Novel Content to Build Brand Awareness

For many small businesses, one of the first obstacles that need to be overcome is people not knowing that you exist. Social media is a great way to start crafting content that is representative of your brand to start gaining the attention of potential consumers.

Unfortunately, it can be hard to stand out amongst a crowd of countless other small businesses. This being the case, it’s vital that you create novel and interesting content that catches the eye of consumers and starts building awareness around your brand.

Creating novel social media content for your small business can help you lean into your strengths. If you’re funny by nature, make a playful campaign filled with jokes. If you’re a musician, craft videos with an amazing scores. However, you go about creating novel content, standing out in the crowd is an attainable way to get the word out about your brand and grow your small business.

Keep Your Social Media Pages Consistent

Today, social media has become an integral part of many people’s lives. This being the case, many of your potential consumers are likely to use social media to vet companies and gain an understanding of their brands. Sadly, this means that being inconsistent with your social media pages could convey the wrong message.

Fortunately, this is an easy problem to fix. By being consistent on social media, you can convey an aura of professionalism to consumers that encourage them to make purchases from your store.

To ensure that you’re being consistent with posts, it can help to take advantage of software that allows you to schedule and automate social media posts. This way, you can take a few hours every month and have everything ready to go instead of worrying about having to make posts every day.

Use Targeted Paid Ads

One of the most exciting aspects of social media marketing is the power that one has to market to a specific demographic of people. By targeting your select audience to market to on social media, you’ll be able to get more value for ad spend and grow your business more efficiently. This means it’s important to take advantage of business pages on social media platforms in order to utilize consumer analytics information.

In addition to being able to target specific demographics, most social media platforms have sophisticated software that allows you to track which ads are working well and which are not. By paying close attention to these metrics, you have the chance to constantly make your social media marketing efforts more effective by utilizing the types of ads that work the best.

Paid ads also offer you the chance to reach a larger audience than you may have with organic social media efforts. As such, taking advantage of this form of social media marketing gives you the power to grow your small business powerfully and effectively.

Engage With Your Consumers

One of the most effective ways to use social media to grow your small business is by engaging with your audience. The more you’re able to engage with your consumers, the more reach your small business will gain.

When it comes to getting your audience involved on social media, there are some tried and true methods to kickstart your engagement efforts. One extremely useful tactic is to hold contests or giveaways that require your audience members to repost something about your brand.

The reason that these forms of contests are so effective on social media has to do with reaching your specific audience. For example, let’s say you run a beanie company. By getting your consumers to repost pictures of your beanies, you’ll be marketing to all of their friends on social media as well, many of whom are likely also beanie enthusiasts.

In addition to contests, simply responding to comments on various platforms can be extremely beneficial. The more your small business is able to engage with your audience in this way, the more loyal and connected your followers will feel to your brand and its products or services.

Social Media Can Help You Take Your Small Business to the Next Level

Social media has democratized marketing in an impactful way over the last decade. Whereas small businesses use to have to compete with large corporations for print, television, or radio advertisements, today, any business has the chance to craft a robust social media presence for a relatively low price.

This being the case, you can utilize social media platforms to grow your business in new and exciting ways. Before long, if you take advantage of all of the opportunities that social media has to offer, your small business may turn into an industry behemoth that others look to for inspiration.

About the Author

Ryan Ayers is a researcher and consultant within multiple industries including information technology, blockchain, and business development. Always up for a challenge, Ayers enjoys working with startups as well as Fortune 500 companies. When not at work, Ayers loves reading science fiction novels and watching the LA Clippers.