Go to the profile of Holly Reed
Holly Reed
Creative at Sakka Studio, a design agency for small business.
Try these strategies to put social media to work in your business today.

6 Tips to Make Your Small Businesses Win on Social Media

You have my permission to stop feeling guilty. You tried, but haven’t stumbled on that magic formula for sending millions of customers to your door with a single Tweet.

I’ll let you in on a little secret. Unless you sell a particular kind of product, social media doesn’t work like that.

But it can be a positive force in your business.

Here’s how:

1. Be a Mentor

Nothing helps crystallize all that intuition and skill you’ve acquired quite like teaching someone else. Use social media to teach others how to do what you do. It won’t translate into sales directly but becoming a recognized authority in your industry will raise your profile.

Instead of trying to use social media to reach your end buyer, consider using it to network with your peers, build a community, learn, teach and stay informed.

2. Find a Mentor

No matter where you are in your career, you could probably learn a lot from a generous mentor. Who are the influencers in your industry? Try building a relationship with them. You may be surprised at how free they are with their knowledge.

3. Connect with Your Community

  • Geographic: If your business neighborhood doesn’t already have a group, start one and spread the word. Use the group to help look out for each other, to pool resources and save on services and to band together in the face of problems like proposed zoning changes.
  • Industry: Follow your industry influencers, join Facebook groups, read industry blogs and listen to industry podcasts. Podcasts are a great way to discover new blogs and influencers because they usually feature a rotating list of guest interviews.

4. Find Your Next Great Hire or Vendor

Advertise job openings inside these your industry community groups. This yields faster results and more experienced candidates than posting to a generic job website.

Use your industry community to find vendor referrals, then do some social media detecting. Read Facebook and Google reviews, see what they Tweet about. Are they responsive to customer concerns? Do they offer an help videos on YouTube? Do any of their customers follow them? Are they active in their industry community?

Hint: think about your own business and what a prospect would see if they did this same digging on your company.
As you continue contributing good content and helpful information and generally being a good social media citizen, you may become more discoverable to people looking for your product or service.

5. Keep Tabs on Your Customers and Competitors

If you serve other businesses, you should be following them on social media. Whether you follow under your personal profile, your business profile or anonymously is up to you (and there are valid reasons for all those choices).

If you sell to consumers, find where your customers interact online and follow to those channels. You don’t need to pour hours of your week into these channels but at least set up alerts for keywords and phrases that relate to your business. Services like Hootsuite can help you there.

Many social media platforms offer a way to follow your competition without them seeing. Twitter has private lists, Pinterest has private boards and there’s always the trusty hashtag search. Stay informed and look for opportunities where you see gaps in their service, process or product offerings.

In the end, if you’ve built a good foundation of content, contribution and citizenship, you’ve elevated yourself into a place where you can be found, trusted and engaged.

6. Serve & Educate Your Customers

Which social media channels do your customers use? Could you make yourself available to answer questions and offer support in those channels?

  • Use Twitter to offer fast responses to customer service questions. This has the added advantage of making these answers available to others and gives you an opportunity to demonstrate to your prospects just how fast, friendly and proactive you are.
  • Could you provide advice to customers that tag you in Instagram photos to show their problem?
  • What’s your most commonly asked support question? Demonstrate the answer in a YouTube, Periscope or Vine video.
  • Are you a consultant? Host a free live Q&A session once a week on Periscope. Give it a catchy name and promote it in other channels.
  • What could you share that would let your customers get more from the product you sold them? Speak up!

There is no magic recipe, but if you keep working to build a foundation of contribution and good social citizenship, you’ll elevated your brand to a place where it can be found and trusted by your buyers.

And remember: In social media there are no points for attendance. If you’re not contributing to the conversation, it’s like you were never there.

This article was originally published at Sakka Studio as 12 Social Media Actions to Strengthen Your Small Business. For the other six tips and more in depth pointers on the tips above, check out the full article.

If you’re interested in trying some of these techniques but aren’t sure where to begin, shoot me a question on Twitter or Facebook.