Social Media Management For Small Business Owners
Social media management for small business owners presents its own challenges. The biggest one seems to be finding the time to spend on your social media management. We believe it’s important that you spend a little time each business day working on social media management. Why? End users spend about two hours a day on social media themselves. Those are your potential customers you want to reach.
There are social media tools you can use to help plan social media posts ahead of time so you’re not always posting live. However, you need to perform other tasks related to social media management that can’t be done any other way. For example, you need to ‘listen’ to your followers. How do you do that? Well, you have to catch conversations that are happening around your brand. This will help you improve your customer service, get vital customer feedback, learn more about your competitors, and find new leads. It should be an essential part of your daily routine.
How do you start? Well, you can track keywords, hashtags, mentions, and messages for your brand and your competitors. Here’s what you should take notice of each day:
Mentions of your brand or product — Scroll through keyword and hashtag streams related to the products and services you offer. Reply to all comments and queries that come up around your brand. If you don’t have time to do this, assign someone who is qualified to answer these questions do this task. It’s simple, but necessary.
Purchase intent — Make sure that you decide to follow search streams that target purchase intent moments. What does that mean? Well, you can list words that customers might use when they’re looking for a solution that your company solves or when they’re evaluating your product. For example, a hotel brand could target and engage with customers getting ready for a last-minute vacation by setting up search streams for specific destinations and keywords such as travel and vacation. You will need to use a social media monitoring tool for this to happen.
Industry news and updates — In your social media account management software, you should follow trending hashtags, industry keywords, and relevant thought leaders in your industry to make sure you’re on top of the latest news.
You should also spend time engaging your customers on social media. A vast majority of customers say they want to have meaningful interactions with brands on these platforms. A lot less of these customers believe that a brand will deliver these meaningful interactions. If you engage in meaningful interactions, you will be far ahead of the competition and make yourself stand out. Focus on replying to customer requests, linking to and commenting on tagged content, following back relevant influencers and reposting user generated content.
You will also want to analyze the types of content you’re using that is generating the most responses and general interaction. The more you post what people like, the more they will interact with your content and the more traction you’ll get out of your social media management.
Social media management for small business owners is not an exact science. It is different for every business and for every network you use. If you use social media software to keep track of your posts and schedule them, you’ll save yourself time and effort. You can also get a lot of analytics that the social media sites themselves don’t offer. We’d ask you to consider looking into social media management tools to help you be more effective as a social media manager for your business. For more information on social media in general, please stay tuned to our blog. We will be revisiting this topic regularly.
