You recognise that social media marketing is a vital aspect in promotional and branding opportunities for your small business. Yet finding the time to get involved in this marketing endeavour can be daunting. If you are a sole entrepreneur or have less than 5 employees, you want most of your productive time spent on business operations.
It takes consistent time and energy to market, promote and brand your business. If you are struggling to put away an hour or two to invest in social media marketing, here are 5 tips that can help you find the right balance between running your operations and keeping track of your social media accounts.
1: Figure out the best times when your business audience uses certain social media platforms. It can be surprising to find out how slow Facebook can become on weekends, or that this social media site turns extremely active during the middle of the day on Thursdays and Fridays. Figuring out the times when your customer audience uses social media allows you to allocate your marketing strategies when it will be seen by the most followers.
2: Know which platforms your audience uses the most. Social media marketing becomes daunting because your time is fragmented in trying to be on all social media platforms at once. Try to concentrate your efforts on the top 3 platforms that most of your customers are commenting and interacting on. You can focus on other platforms later once you build up your content and your presence to the point where you have a large following.
3: Let your followers and satisfied customers help with your social media marketing. Don’t forget, once you gain more customers and followers, they will share your content on those other platforms for you when talking positively about your business on their social pages. So always take the time to create shareable content and provide the tools and buttons for people to post your marketing information across all viable platforms.
4: Use automation tools wisely. These tools can save you considerable time and energy as you don’t have to allot a block of time to post content or answer questions. There are tools that allow you to schedule posts, alert you to when someone mentions your company, and will let you find more followers without buying them through spam sites.
5: Hire people to help with social media marketing or other aspects of your business. You may simply be taking on too many tasks when running your business to effectively create a successful marketing campaign for social media platforms. Instead, you can assign the task to one of your employees or outsource the marketing to a third-party company. You may also find that outsourcing other aspects of business operations that you are struggling to manage, such as accounts receivable, will free up more time for your marketing strategies.
When you are focused in building your presence on social media marketing, you can have more success in generating additional leads that will become future sales. Stay focused and dedicated to this task as in time you will reap the rewards.
