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How to Improve Your Social Media Presence: Tips for Small Businesses
Since they started gaining popularity, social media platforms have turned into an important part of the everyday lives of millions around the world. For many internet users, social media is the main source for leisure time activities, it’s where they get informed, find out the news, and a lot also use it as their main way to interact with others. As a result, these platforms have become important channels where businesses can reach potential clients and communicate with them.
But social media can do a lot more for your small business. A huge number of people nowadays get most or all of the content they will consume throughout the day – that is most or all of the things they will read, listen to or watch – on their devices. Small businesses can take advantage of this, by offering content that can capture the attention of their ideal customers.
Offering relevant valuable content translates into engagement – shares, likes, comments, etc., which in a way helps businesses turn their followers into an efficient and powerful advertisement tool.
Know Who Is Your Audience
One very important thing to keep in mind when you are working on your profiles is that simply being present, isn’t enough. Even offering quality content may be a futile endeavor without a well-thought-out strategy. Knowing your target audience and learning their internet behavior can be crucial for the success not only of your profiles but also your overall results.
Aside from helping you create better content, this can help you make a more accurate assumption on when your potential clients might be looking at their devices, allowing you to find the best time to post on Instagram, for example. One way to ensure a good social media strategy is to hire professionals and use reliable tools designed to help you improve engagement.
Use Multiple Platforms and Adapt Your Content
There are numerous social media platforms with different purposes and different levels of popularity. Researching which are the most popular, especially amongst your target audience, can be very helpful for small businesses. And using multiple platforms will maximize your reach and help you engage with the right people.
That being said, building and maintaining successful profiles across platforms isn’t as simple as some might think. It takes time and a great deal of effort. For one, each platform has different types of audiences, expecting a certain type of content. As an example, Instagram users prefer visual content – images or videos, whereas Facebook users may also enjoy reading articles or attending webinars.
Offer Diverse Quality Content
Without content, your internet presence may not only be worthless but may even harm your reputation. People nowadays use social media to research companies, products, and services, and finding a profile without engagement, full of poor-quality content or irrelevant posts, may prompt them to abandon their cart or leave your website.
Your best bet is to offer content on subjects relevant to what you are selling, as well as your target audience. Moreover, creating diverse content formats is a great way to ensure success on all of your profiles, and increase your reach. Offer text and visual content that may help your audience solve a problem, educate themselves on some relevant subject, have fun. The formats you should consider, depending on your field, include webinars, text or video guides, product demos, visual presentations, e-books, infographics, and so on.
Whether you are creating visual content or articles, don’t forget to focus on aesthetics. It’s proved that it takes mere seconds for a person to decide whether they will finish watching a video or bother reading an article. And this depends primarily on the visual aspect. Poor-quality images or video content may be perceived as unprofessional or may irritate your target audience. Similarly, articles with long paragraphs, too many images, or other things that may distract the reader, aren’t likely to keep their attention, even if the content is valuable to them.
Conclusion
Thanks to the rise of global awareness on a variety of social issues, consumer behavior has changed a lot in recent years. One of the big changes that may work in your favor, is the trend of breaking with the mainstream and opting for small, local, and independent businesses instead of huge, global corporations. Social media allows businesses to build a personal relationship with their prospects, something for which the majority of consumers are striving.
To take advantage of the many opportunities social media can offer, you should focus on your content, as well as learning who might use the particular platform, the behavior of your target audience. It’s important to remember that you should always work on improving your profiles. To do this you should continuously gather data and optimize your content accordingly.
