Social media marketing is one of the most popular forms of both free and paid for marketing for both big and small businesses. Many companies have now realised that using social media marketing, results in higher conversion rates than previously favoured traditional marketing methods as it provides a platform to not only grow a brand but to also drive its sales. However, in contrast, many businesses can end up devoting significant amounts of time to their social media marketing without yielding any results, due to inexperience and inconsistency.

Fear not, running a successful social media marketing campaign is far from an impossible task, it just requires some understanding and commitment.

Here are our top social media marketing tips for promoting your small business online and helping grow your brand’s social media presence.

Only chose the platforms that work best for you

One of the things that can impact your social media marketing results the most is your choice of platform. From Twitter to Instagram, there are a lot of social media sites out there that almost everyone seems to be using, but don’t assume you need to be using them all.

Choose just two or three and learn how to use them expertly, rather than stumbling your way through them all. Remember: one or two consistent accounts have much greater value than three or four accounts with sporadic, inconsistent activity.

To determine which two or three platforms are best for you, it is important that you take into consideration your target audience, their preferences and identify where your business’ audience is flocking the most.

Once you’ve narrowed down your social media targets, it’ll be a lot easier to focus on offering quality content for your audience.

Create a plan to follow

The biggest mistake a lot of businesses make is not having a plan and just blindly posting content across all their social media platforms because they think they need to. Social media should be treated in the same way as any business function, and to get the most out of it, you need to establish exactly what you want to achieve.

Do you want to enhance brand awareness, increase sales or a particular product or yield more click-throughs to your site? Once you’ve set your goal, keep it in mind when planning your strategy.

There is an abundance of supportive tools out there that can help schedule your content and make regular posting much easier, for example, HootSuite and Buffer are great examples of popular free-to-use tools that all allow you to sync multiple social media accounts and plan your posts in advance.

To get the most out of these tools, we recommend picking one day a week to schedule all of your posts in advance and then checking in daily to review comments and answer questions from your audience.

Use #hashtags

Hashtags are one of the best ways to organically expand your reach on social media. Using popular hashtags for your industry can help potential customers find you so, using them correctly can help your business reach a wider audience easily.

Research popular hashtags in your industry, as well as more generic and widely used ones. These are the hashtags people are actively searching for on both Twitter and Instagram. Including them in your social media posts will give your content a better chance of showing up in the search results and reaching a greater audience.

Square Media is Northamptonshire’s premiere Web Design & Marketing Agency experienced in developing effective content and marketing strategies for forward-thinking companies in the local area. Our team of specialists consistently deliver outstanding results working in a variety of areas such as Search Engine Optimisation, Social Media Marketing Consultancy, Pay Per Click (PPC) and AdWords Management amongst a wide range of other services.