7 Ways Small Businesses Can Grow Their Social Media Presence
Social media offers multiple ways to connect with an audience—and small business owners (SBOs) know it.
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Fifty-nine percent of SBOs say that improving their social media skills would be the most impactful thing they can do for their businesses, according to a recent Adobe study.
But that’s easier said than done.
Mikos Adams, a social media and marketing coach and an Adobe Express Ambassador, says small businesses don’t have to reinvent the wheel to drive growth on social. Being authentic, using visuals to tell a story and taking advantage of solutions like Adobe Express—a unified collection of web and mobile tools that make it easy to create and share beautiful content, from social posts and stories to invitations to marketing materials like logos, flyers and banners—can help them engage customers and convert traffic into sales.
Here are Mikos’ seven tips for how small business owners can level up their social media marketing.
Go Where Your Customers Are
Rather than trying to be omnipresent on social, SBOs should focus most of their time and resources on the social media platforms that naturally attract their target audience.
“Every business is different, and your approach should be centered around the places and spaces that your target audience hangs out on,” Mikos says. “There are specific platforms that are great for B2C reach. There are also platforms that are best for keeping your community up to date with what’s new. There are platforms that are perfect for B2B connections. Ultimately, it’s up to the businesses and the niche in which their ideal audience or demographic spends the majority of their time.”
Develop Your Content Pillars
A small business also needs a social media content strategy before it starts posting on a social platform.
Mikos says SBOs can identify their content pillars by asking themselves these two key questions. The first: Whom am I looking to help? The second: How can I help them?
“This typically sets the ground for their elevator pitch, their marketing material and of course their content strategy,” he says.
Once you develop your content pillars, you can organize your content into four main buckets: awareness, engagement, connection and sales content.
Mikos says awareness content helps you reach new audiences. Engagement content keeps your followers interested. Connection content nurtures your audience and shows them that you’re relatable. Promotional content gets people to take action, whether it’s subscribing to your page or newsletter or buying your products or services.
Anchoring your social media strategy around these four content types can help you attract new followers and strengthen engagement with your current ones.
Start With Organic Marketing
Though SBOs may be tempted to pay for sponsored ads, Mikos says it’s better to stick to organic marketing when your business first starts out on social.
“If you do have the budget and you can make the investments, it’s always best to run paid ads after you’ve seen success or after you’ve seen that you have a good product or service that people actually enjoy,” he says. “It would be a shame to invest a lot of your budget on paid ads and your product or service isn’t really where it needs to be.”
Mikos adds that if you do have a small budget to invest in social media advertising, consider running a brand awareness campaign to see what demographics may be interested in your products or services.
From there, he suggests retargeting users who have visited your website after clicking on a post or watched a minimum of 75% of your social media videos. Retargeting ads is always cheaper than running cold traffic ads in a bid to reach people who have never heard of or interacted with your brand before.
Expand Your Toolkit
Unlocking creativity and making standout content can be tough. Forty-five percent of SBOs say they don’t have the time, tools or skills to bring their social ideas to life. Mikos recommends expanding your toolkit to help streamline your content production process.
“I'd highly recommend taking the time to really dive in and learn an easy-to-use platform, such as Adobe Express, to create high-quality content,” Mikos says.
Adobe Express includes several features that can help small businesses create eye-catching social media content. Among them are thousands of unique, high-quality templates to kick-start the design process, 175 million licensed Adobe Stock images, 20,000 premium Adobe fonts, video and image editing features, and content scheduling capabilities.
Think Visually First
Most of today’s social media platforms are visually driven. SBOs should take note.
“Business owners should definitely strive to use high-quality, creative and relevant imagery in all of their content,” Mikos says.
This is true even when you publish content like list-style posts. Rather than use a basic list format for a post headlined “5 Tips For Improving Your Productivity,” consider using an Adobe Express template to organize the tips into a carousel, Mikos says. You can use an Adobe Stock image on each of the slides to fill out the carousel and illustrate your message.
Post Consistently
Should you post every day or only a few times a week?
Mikos says the right answer lies somewhere in between.
“This is definitely a question I get asked probably five to seven times a day, and my answer is always to start with what you can stay consistent with,” he says. “A lot of social media gurus will tell you, ‘You need to post three to four times a day,’ but for a lot of the small business owners, it’s just not realistic.”
The numbers tell the story. Forty-two percent of SBOs say the most time-consuming aspect of digital marketing and social media is posting to and managing their channels. On average, they’re spending nine hours a week on digital marketing and social media. That’s a healthy amount of time, especially given how overscheduled SBOs can be.
Mikos says to find out what a feasible posting schedule is for your business, strategize and plan your content in advance and “stay consistent with the days and times every week so that the algorithm can pick that up and understand when and how you’re going to post. Adobe Express even has a built-in content scheduler feature that can help you plan your posts and take back your calendar.”
Posting consistently will also help SBOs foster regular engagement with their customers, which Adobe research indicates is something they take seriously: Whereas 41% of SBOs value regular engagement, only 24% are seeking to “go viral” when they leverage social.
Repurpose Content That Works
Being creative on social media doesn’t mean you always have to do something new. Use analytics to help you decide what content to remix.
“Take the time to actually look at your insights and see what’s performed well over the past year, and just repurpose that. You may have had a carousel post that performed extremely well and got over 500 saves and shares. Why not repurpose that and create a motion graphic, a reel or an infographic?” Mikos says.
With its vast library of templates, Adobe Express is a useful tool for making old content new again.
“There are so many different ways to repurpose content, and I think that with a tool that provides templates and a lot of extra elements to make your content stand out and look different, it makes it very easy for you to repurpose content and not have to reinvent the wheel,” Mikos says.
Unlocking Your Audience On Social Media
With creativity tools like Adobe Express, you don’t need to be a world-class designer or marketer to stand out on social media. With just a few clicks, you can create captivating and shareable social media graphics and content that grows your audience—no design skills necessary.
For more tips on how to unlock your creativity to grow your business using Adobe Express, check out Adobe and Meta’s new Express Your Brand program.
02
Hey grads, clean up your social (media) life before you get to campus or your new job
Teens say the darndest things, and their words can come back to haunt them far beyond getting grounded for the weekend. This is especially true when a think-they-already-know-everything-ager posts something shady on social media that they can’t walk back when they grow up and come to their ever-loving senses.
The internet never forgets and tweets, Facebook posts or even Snapchat videos they thought would disappear – can have devastating effects. Like when a recent high school grad realizes that their first-choice college ran a quick Google search on their name, found some offensive posts and rescinded their admission. That’s happened at Harvard, Cornell, Marquette University and many schools in recent years.
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Also bad? When a fresh-faced college grad gets to the interview phase for a new job only to be cut over a Facebook photo. “I was in an interview and (they) checked my social media pages, saw a picture of me enjoying a drink upon disembarking a cruise (which, by the way, I usually never drink) and accused me of being an unreliable alcoholic,” Sean Sullivan, who now works in the PR industry, wrote in an email.
Whether fair or not, perception is a big deal. In the same vein as updating your transcripts or resume, cleaning up your social media presence is a requirement for college admissions and job hunting. Here are some big red flags to look for on any Twitter, Facebook and Instagram timelines:
Posts about sensitive issues: Free speech is a right, but freedom from the impact of your words isn’t and a recruiter or would-be manager could easily dismiss you as a candidate over incendiary comments, even if they agree with them. We’re all passionate about various social, political and environmental issues, but a harshly worded Twitter post isn’t changing anyone’s mind in your favor and it could cost you big time.
Offensive comments about individuals or groups: A joke that you made in a Facebook post in 2015 might have seemed mild at the time, but standards for what is acceptable have changed dramatically. Even if you didn’t mean to offend, the same language you used back then might sound very different today and it’s better to be safe than sorry.
Party time: Sure, a 30-second video showing you conquering a two-story beer bong might seem awesome to your friends, but your future boss might not be so impressed. Posting over-the-top content for everyone to see probably isn’t going to help your case when you’re college searching or job hunting.
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These are the absolute basics for cleaning your social media profiles. You should also make some other tweaks, such as editing your bio to remove anything that might get misinterpreted or raise red flags.
Ask HR: What is the best way to turn down a job offer?
Cleanup time
You’re staring at 10 years of social media postings and wondering how on Earth you’re going to wrangle it all, right? The good news is that there are some super simple ways to tackle the problem, regardless of where your posts live.
Facebook
Facebook’s built-in tools are actually pretty good for this sort of thing. From your desktop web browser, head to Facebook and then click the down arrow in the top corner of the page. Here, select Settings & Privacy, Settings, then the Privacy tab on the left-hand menu. In this menu, do the following:
Set “Who can see your future posts?” to Friends or, if you want maximum privacy, Only Me.
Set “Who can see the people, Pages and lists you follow?” to Only Me.
Set “Who can look you up using the email address you provided?” to Only Me.
Set “Who can look you up using the phone number you provided?” to Only Me.
Set “Do you want search engines outside of Facebook to link to your profile?” to No.
Most importantly, under Your Activity, select the option to Limit Past Posts to turn all your previous posts to Friends Only.
You can also manually sift through posts you’ve been tagged in by other people by selecting the Use Activity Log option and removing yourself from questionable posts, pics and videos.
Overshooting: College grads expect $103,880 in first job – almost twice the reality
Twitter posts are public by default, so you have two options here: Either set your profile to private – which limits the visibility of your posts to people who already follow you – or delete the posts themselves. Here’s how to go private:
Deleting your tweets is the other option and often the better one. It ensures that any weird posts from your past will never haunt you, but there’s also a downside: losing all those old memories.
To erase them, head into your Twitter settings, then Your Account and select Download an archive of your data before deleting tweets so that you have a record of them for later if you need or want to look through them. After you’ve done that, you can recruit a helpful tool called Tweet Delete:
From your browser, head to Tweet Delete and sign in with your Twitter account.
Verify your permissions on Twitter to allow the tool to delete the tweets you authorize.
Once back on the Tweet Delete page (it’ll take you there automatically), select Delete Tweets.
On the next page, you can select what tweets you want to delete based on the timeframe. For example, deleting tweets older than three months will wipe out anything you posted before that time.
The Tweet Delete tool can only delete the most recent 3,200 tweets, so if you have more than that, you’ll have to upload the Twitter archive data file you downloaded earlier.
Pay someone else to do it
Of course, if you can’t be bothered to sift through your social media posts yourself – or the task is just too overwhelming – plenty of people will take care of it for you – for a fee.
Reputation management company BrandYourself will scour the internet for things that could turn off an employer or college admissions office. They’ll nix publicly viewable posts that mention alcohol and drug use and references to sex or sensitive topics like religion and politics. It’s a complete digital makeover for a cool $99.
Scrubber Social offers a similar service while also touting that it targets fake news posts you might have shared. Run the tool on your social accounts and it’ll highlight sketchy posts. It also scans comments made by friends on your posts that might implicate you in unsavory activities. You can run a single report for free, but ongoing use with a premium subscription costs $29 for the first month and $9 per month after that.
Jennifer Jolly is an Emmy Award-winning consumer tech columnist. Email her at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter: @JenniferJolly. The views and opinions expressed in this column are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of
USA TODAY.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: How to scrub your social media: How new college grads should clean up
03
Just Social Panel: The Ultimate Tool To Grow Businesses and Brands With Social Media
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