Small business owners face a number of competing priorities on any given day. If you have ever managed a small business, you definitely know how this feels. It can be frustrating, exhilarating, and exhausting. You have to manage employees, make sure your financial books are up to date, support your customers, and plan ahead for the future. Also, in order to maintain or grow the size of your business, you need a steady supply of new customers.
This is where your marketing strategy comes in.
Marketing is essential for business growth, but it can be quite complicated and very time-consuming for a small business. Your marketing efforts for your small business can take many forms but will most certainly include social media in some form.
Posting about your business and engaging with customers on social media can provide invaluable customer loyalty, new leads, and referrals from your current customers. But, if you’re spending too much time trying to get it right, it sure can eat up a whole lot of your time. You have to run an entire business, after all!
Let’s discuss how to optimize these processes for your business to free up a bit of your time while rocking your social media strategy.
1. Scheduling posts
Social media posts are the foundation of any social media strategy and the foundation of social media itself. Creating engaging, insightful, and on-brand content is not easy. But, there are some ways to plan for success. Scheduling your posts in advance is the most efficient way to take on this challenge. By bulk scheduling posts, you can plan your content in batches to ensure you’re hitting all of the key posts you have in mind. Additionally, it will just take a few hours to plan content and schedule it in bulk, as opposed to 20-30 minutes creating content each day.
Utilizing a social media scheduling tool like SocialPilot will help you plan ahead, stay organized and schedule your posts 2 weeks to 1 month in advance. If you’re feeling really ambitious, you can even schedule your social media content 6 months in advance!
2. Content Curation
Every great social media strategy includes some content that is not your own, or “curated content”. Curating content takes some of the burdens off of producing daily content, and also helps connect your audience with content that they care about. This can often seem challenging, as it may be difficult to continuously come up with fresh and interesting resources for content. But, it’s not as hard as it seems with just a little help.
SocialPilot’s Content Curation & Discovery feature can help you find content simply by searching for keywords that are relevant to your audience. For example, you can search “skin care tips” or “healthy lifestyle” to get results for your small business. It will immediately populate with articles to share on your social media pages. You’ll also be able to follow content creators you love to continue sharing their content with your audience.
What’s more? You can also access this feature for free with ShareIt – a free content curation & discovery tool. ShareIt can also help you in brainstorming content ideas relevant to your business.
3. Analyzing Strategies
Do you know if your social media strategy is working for your business? Many small business owners don’t take the time to measure their results and analyze their strategies, which is certainly a missed opportunity! Measuring the success of your social media efforts is crucial to understanding the value of all of this effort you’re putting into creating and curating content.
Since social media is a crowded and competitive space, analyzing your efforts will help you continue to increase your impressions, engagements, and shares. The more you understand why your social media strategy works or does not work, the more you can make improvements to succeed and grow. Measurement is the first step to improvement.
Whether you’re looking at your analytics for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or LinkedIn, SocialPilot – a social media analytics & reporting tool – will help you best interact with your target audience. You’ll get a comprehensive overview of your performance, monitor your audience growth, understand the optimal posting time for each social network, improve your audience segmentation, and get to know the preferences of your audience. Doesn’t that sound great?
4. Setting a Team Workflow
Social media is not a one-man job, it’s all about collaboration! The best social media strategies include a team of talented individuals. But this collaboration may not come easy at first. Identifying roles and assigning tasks can be daunting without the right tools. SocialPilot’s teams & collaboration feature will help you develop a seamless social media strategy for your organization.
Each member of the team can have a different role, including Account Owner, Manager, or Content Scheduler to create an efficient virtual workflow. This lets every member of the team understand their responsibilities within the social media strategy and workflow.
Better yet, you can avoid errors using SocialPIlot’s content approval system. There’s nothing more cringe-worthy than seeing a typo in a professional social media post. Using this tool, you’ll feel confident knowing your business is posting content that is free of typos or misspellings and that your customers will continue to take you seriously.
Teams change throughout the months, and that’s okay! Your social media strategy should be as dynamic as your team. If you want to remove a member of the team, no problem! Simply edit their access level with just a few clicks.
5. Customer Service/Support
Customer care is what social media is all about. Customers are online 24/7 and expect you to answer their questions quickly. If you miss a response, you might miss out on a new customer for life.
Your Social Inbox will allow you to answer comments and messages from all of your social media profiles in one place. This helps you save time and rest easy knowing that every single inquiry is answered. You can even answer comments with a photo or GIF to make them more dynamic.
Are you ready to tackle your social media strategy?
Social media shouldn’t be intimidating. It’s such a valuable tool for connecting directly with your audience and should be incorporated into your monthly marketing mix without pause. In this day and age, there’s almost nothing more important to a marketing plan. But, are you prepared for success? Using a social media tool can help small businesses have an amazing social media feed that rivals any big brand out there.
SocialPilot’s features for social media scheduling, content curation, analytics, teams & collaboration and social messaging are perfect for any small business out there. This tool saves you time, effort, and money so you can focus on growing your business and reaching even more potential customers. Isn’t that what owning a small business is all about?