1. Most Small Business Marketers Don’t Know if Facebook Efforts Are Working
Suzanne Delzio
Despite the fact that 92% of small businesses agree that social media is important for their business AND that the majority use Facebook for their social media marketing, most also report that they don’t know whether their Facebook outreach is “working.” “Working” may mean building brand awareness and relationships with customers. It could also mean bringing in more leads and sales. The bottom line is that the majority of small businesses either don’t know if Facebook achieves the goals they’ve set or it does NOT achieve those goals. It could also mean they have no goals or they haven’t bothered to measure their progress toward goals.
2. Advertising on every platform
Jasmeet Singh
Every social media platform has a different user base. For example, users on Facebook are looking for entertainment and fun related content. They are there to pass their time by looking at updates posted by their friends or families. The same user, when logged into LinkedIn, is there for professional networking. There is a stark difference in between how both the platforms can be used in social media marketing. While Facebook is a good social media platform for B2C Campaigns, LinkedIn is a good platform for B2B Campaigns.
3. Generate business familiarity
Alison McGuire
Social media creates high engagement and provides the opportunity for two-way communication that facilitates close interaction with the audience. You can post all types of content on social media. From images to text, videos, blogs, tweets, and infographics, every piece of content generates viewer engagement, elicits their response and can often go viral by creating an instant connection with the audience.
4. Use Social Media to Market Your Small Business — Analytics
Kristi Hines
Google Analytics is essential for any business or startup. But social media can tap into the more personal side of your company’s analytics. While Google Analytics does have breakdowns of your website visitors age brackets, gender, and general interest groupings, Facebook Audience Insights has even more (based on your fan base). And that’s just the beginning. In Google Analytics, you can find out how many people have viewed your content and how long they stuck around. In Facebook Insights for your page — you can see how many people have liked, loved, and have been wowed by your content thanks to the new Facebook Reactions.
5. Word of mouth
Chirag Kulkarni
64 percent of marketing execs believe word of mouth is the most effective form of marketing. They have good reason to think so, as this form of marketing drives around $6 trillion in annual customer spending, with research suggesting that it accounts for as much as 13 percent of all
6. Instagram is the new Facebook
Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré
“For marketers searching for a social media platform that can provide access to a growing audience of highly engaged users, Instagram has become a market leader.”
Instagram has been growing like crazy, and there are a few reasons why. For one, it’s still a happy, cheerful place where people share pictures of their breakfasts and vacation destinations, rather than spewing their political opinions. For another, it hasn’t yet reached the ad saturation that prompted Facebook to switch around its algorithm yet again to prioritize “friends, family and groups”.
7. Publish Your Content and Earn Traffic for Your Marketing Campaigns
Clarence Fisher
People are more likely to check your social media pages than your homepage for business news. Nevertheless, you can encourage more traffic to your website by posting on social media. To do this, you need to craft great content previews for content like shared blog posts.
For campaign-related traffic, try to describe your offer in attractive terms to earn attention. If you’re in business, describe a sale for your website store. Or, you can encourage people to join a contest by posting a link to a landing page.
8. Assess Your Current Online Reputation
Sameer Somal
You can begin by determining what your actual reputation is. Ask friends, family, clients, business partners, and stakeholders what comes to mind when they hear your business’s name.
What do people already think about you? Does your digital presence match your reputation in your offline network?
If your online presence is consistent with your reputation offline, great! If it’s not, consider it an opportunity to build a solid presence as soon as possible.
9. Post Open and Closed Questions to Spur Responses
Ann Smarty
Asking questions is the most efficient method of engaging someone, be it your blog reader or Facebook follower.
Questions trigger the natural human reflex called instinctive elaboration. This reflex forces people to pause and start looking for or formulate an answer.
10. You can learn directly from customers and prospects
Mike Eckstein
We use social media to learn from our customers and community about how we can improve their experience.
Having this direct line to customers enables us to build relationships, develop empathy and ultimately build a better product for our users.
11. Do not delete negative comments
Allison Nance
A big mistake that many businesses have made is deleting negative comments. This only aggravates the commenter which only makes the problem worse. It can also potentially move the conversation elsewhere, at which time you may lose any chance of addressing the situation. Also, most internet users intrinsically hate censorship. While you might occasionally be able to delete a post on your social media pages, many viewers will notice that something is missing. This brings into question your integrity to any viewers witnessing the exchange because they know you are trying to bury bad feedback.
12. How to get viewers’ attention
Adam Torkildson
As a general rule of thumb – and you have probably noticed that already on your timeline – brands use subtitles whenever applicable. Not only it solves the problem of muted videos, but according to Uscreen, having subtitles helps comprehend videos, makes them more efficient, and even 15% more shareable. YouTube allows you for generating subtitles automatically using its speech recognition technology, but for other platforms, you might want to add text manually.
13. Where is everybody?
Kaarina Stiff
To increase your chances of meeting people in person, you might attend an event where you expect to find other people who want to connect.
In other words, you go where people are hanging out. On social media, you need to find the posts that people are talking about. Luckily, that’s what hashtags are for.
14. Be Seen on Your Page
Kristi Hines
Are people commenting on your posts? Are you getting reviews? Are you responding? Having a page and posting on your wall every day is not enough. To really get seen more on Facebook, you need to be seen more on your page. And that means through real engagement. Respond to comments and reviews on your page. Don’t be tempted just to do private replies, even with the new Message feature. It’s okay to send a private message when a private message is needed — but be sure to reply publicly to acknowledge that you plan to reply privately as well.
15. Diversify Your Marketing Efforts
Rebekah Radice
We’ve all heard the saying, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” Just like with your offline marketing, you should definitely diversify your online marketing efforts. Does this mean you should build a presence on every social media site? Absolutely not. What this means is that you should become laser-focused about who your target audience is. Instead of focusing on the demographic of the customers you HAVE — consider focusing on the customers you WANT.