4 Social Media Tips for Your Small Business
Resources for business owners during Small Business Week
We’re extremely proud to sponsor Small Business Week and celebrate the small businesses that do so much to help their communities and local economies thrive.
We’re honored to hit the road to meet small business owners all over the country and provide educational resources this week (and every week!) for small businesses.
Our Local Outreach Manager, Emma Vaughn, was in Washington, D.C. with our team to kick off Small Business Week with the U.S. Small Business Administration. Along with other experts, Emma spoke on a panel to give small business owners the tips they need to be successful on social media. Watch the full video here.
Interested in using your social media to get new customers and keep them coming back?
Check out our blog post below for 4 tips small business owners can use to post the right content at the right time on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, hashtag effectively on Twitter and Instagram, and finally, extend their customer service on social media.
1. Post the Right Content at the Right Time
Engaging with users across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram gets more eyes on your customers’ pages, making it possible for them to discover their online community, spread word-of-mouth, and create conversations with current and potential customers. But what’s the best time of day to post and what types of content works best?
Your content on these three platforms in particular has the power to get your followers familiar with and excited about what your business offers, so here are a few tips on when and what post to keep your followers engaged and keep new customers coming in the door.
Pay attention to time of day/month/year
Think about the kinds of content your followers would want to see and when they want to see it.
Here are some examples: If you own a gym, let your customers know when you get new coaches and introduce them later in the day so you might draw people in after work — like you see here with CrossFit DC on Twitter.
In this Instagram post by Adams House B&B, they remind their fans and followers that spring is coming up as well as SXSW, which is a very popular festival in Austin in March, to remind potential guests to book their stay with them (over their competition) and before rooms get all booked up:
2. Vary Your Content
Your customers want to know the story of your business — so tell it! Give them interesting content they’ll come back to again and again — like engaging photos and videos, trivia, tips, and local love.
Check out this post by M2 Chiropractic with the theme, “Health Tip Tuesday.” If they are consistent with these tips on Tuesdays, you can see how their followers would be more likely to return to their Facebook page every Tuesday for more helpful health-related information. Every week is a good cadence for these kinds of tips, not every day. You don’t want to become too predictable to your followers.
Here are some additional great content ideas to fill your feed and keep your content fresh:
Post photos of the products you have in store, photos of the interior and exterior of your business, and photos of your team members on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Show your followers what’s happening in your salon, pet store, yoga studio, or restaurant!
By showcasing what your business is all about on these platforms, you’ll entice your fans and followers to come by for a visit. But don’t forget to track and test. What works for one brand or business might not necessarily work for your posting strategy, so be sure to test, track, and test again. The best way to track your post performance is to use the Insights feature on Facebook and Twitter, and keep track of your engagement rate on Instagram to make sure that the number of followers you have syncs with the number of likes you’re getting per post.
3. Hashtag Effectively on Twitter and Instagram
Using hashtags on social media, especially on Instagram and Twitter, can be an effective way to enter new conversations and get your content in front of new eyes. But if you use them incorrectly, they can disrupt your messaging.
Users click on hashtags to find content that’s relevant to what they just looked at or read about. From a user standpoint, hashtags are used to categorize content, making the discovery of new or related articles and insights easy to do. But when hashtags are used incorrectly, people looking for new content have to dig through irrelevant, miscategorized content in order to get to what they’re actually looking for. This can disrupt the experience that you meant your customers to have with your content.
Don’t miss our full blog post on using hashtags on Twitter and Instagram here!
Many users and businesses use hashtags on Instagram to increase their post reach and get their content in front of new users.
Using relevant hashtags in your caption (like you see here with Sur Restaurant) will get new eyes on your business’ Instagram content and help you boost your engagement.
What are relevant hashtags? Anything your followers would find interesting, or anything you think might help your post reach more people on the platform — that can be hashtags specific to your local area, or hashtags that are used widely on the platform.
You can add up to 30 hashtags per post, but when you go over 10, engagement starts to drop, according to TrackMaven.
Tweets with hashtags are 33% more likely to get retweeted than tweets without hashtags, however, engagement will drop on Tweets with more than two hashtags, according to TrackMaven.
So, what hashtags should you use? The same rules that apply on Instagram apply on Twitter as well. Use hashtags that are relevant and interesting to your customers, local area, and industry. If your business’ account is public, any users who search for a hashtag you’re using just might find your tweet in their search results. You can also start conversations on Twitter by searching popular hashtags or keywords that relate to your business. Once you find tweets from people using those hashtags, then, you can start chatting!
4. Extend Your Customer Service Online
As a small business owner, you know how important it is to show your guests excellent customer service when they come into your local business. The same philosophy applies to your followers on social media. Consumers have come to expect quick responses from businesses and brands to their questions, comments, and requests on social media — which means that each and every message, mention, and wall post that comes in for your business on social media has the power to influence that consumers opinion of your business and their likelihood to visit.
Get a system in place to monitor all wall posts, direct messages, mentions, reviews, and tags that come in for your business on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Yelp.
Many of these online reach outs from your current and potential customers will be requests for business information, questions about your products and services, real time notifications of their visit to your business, or description of previous experiences. You want to respond to all of these communications in order to seem accessible, appreciative, and responsive to your customers.
Customers who receive a service request response through social media spend 20–40% more, so providing a quick and helpful response to every online interaction will positively impact your business’ social media ROI.
More on extending your customer service online here on our blog!
At Main Street Hub, we have a deep love for local businesses and helping local heroes thrive. That’s why we’re proud to sponsor Small Business Week.
Check out our webinar for more tips on this important topic:
Have you registered for SBA’s Virtual Conference during Small Business Week May 1–3? Sign up here for expert tips from us and other great companies in the local space!
Main Street Hub was founded in 2010 and offers a 100% do-it-for-you service where we manage Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and customer review sites like Yelp and Google for thousands of small business owners across the country.
We work with local business owners and capture their unique voice and brand in order to tell their story online. We also respond to every review, wall post, and tagged mention that comes in for your business to manage and protect your online reputation and extend your customer service online.
We’ve written over 10 million posts for our customers — every day, we take managing social media off their plate, so they can focus on doing what they love and and serving their local community while we take care of their customers online.
