An Easy Guide To Social Media For Businesses

If you are not familiar with social media, it can be daunting to try to understand and navigate, especially as new platforms come into play and trends change daily. Personal accounts on social media are also very different from social media for businesses requiring a little more planning to be an advantageous marketing strategy. In this blog, we’ll help break down how to get started with social media for businesses so that over time social media can become a tool for your business instead of a burden. 

How To Use Social Media For Business

Before starting the discussion on daily tasks and monthly planning, one of the most important things you need to decide for your business’s social media is who your audience is and the purpose it needs to serve them. Doing this first will help you narrow down which platforms to focus on and what kinds of things you should be posting. 

While the main goal of using social media for marketing is to gain more revenue and business you must do this carefully as people do not like to be advertised to all the time. It’s better to position your business by providing value to your audience. This can be with a combination of educating, entertaining, nurturing, and establishing a community. 

For example, as a beauty salon, you can help educate people about professional hair care, as a local restaurant you can entertain your audience by sharing aesthetic drink creations or garnishing new dishes. By doing this you are naturally creating interest and a want to experience the services. Social media business post ideas around these key approaches are truly endless. 

Depending on your goals, some platforms are better than others, not only are some platforms specific to an age group, but they also require different forms of content. If you decide to have multiple platforms, the content’s format should be recreated to suit each platform’s requirements. Whatever you decide, choose the platforms that make sense for your company and your ideal customer, not every platform will be important to have and keep active. Take a look at the guide above to decide which platforms will be a good fit for your business.

Daily Social Media Management

Social Media for Businesses is not difficult if managed and planned correctly, your daily task lists should take no more than 15-30 minutes.

Reply, Message & Answer Tags

Start out every day by replying to messages, engaging with your audience, and planning content. When you reply check your messages and mentions everyday if not multiple times a day. Established businesses often will have many questions from people on Instagram, Facebook, Tik Tok, and Google My Business Profiles. 

Always reply thoughtfully, you should put in a little more effort than just “liking” or “hearting” the message or tag. Your response showcases what it is like to work with you, especially to returning and new potential customers. It also helps stimulates growth on the social media algorithms; the more authentic engagements you have, the more likely you are to attract followers and thereby potential customers.

People get excited when they get a response from their favorite brands and businesses, so your messages and mentions can elicit a very positive response that it turn stimulates growth. 

Connect With Similar Accounts

Social media for brands is all about connecting with people and businesses in your industry. This is the “social” part of social media, you will want to find similar accounts, like their pages, follow them, and comment on their posts. Other similar accounts already have the audience that you want to acquire, and the best way to get them to your page is to engage in conversations with people. Because your business is already in their scope of interest, people will notice you and will likely want to follow you especially if you offer a new perspective to the industry.

Consider collaborating with other businesses on occasional posts, this way you reach a whole new audience and establish a partnership with another brand.

Create Engaging Content

Social media for business marketing only works if you are engaging followers with regular new but valuable content. You must give people a reason to follow you. The nice part of social media is that you can pick the method of sharing content that feels most natural to you and your business. You can set up a weekly live video on Tik Tok, Instagram, YouTube, or Facebook; share stories, videos, and voting polls of your behind-the-scenes on Instagram; write blogs and articles that are relevant to your industry on your website; or create a Facebook group for your audience of interest.

Social media business post ideas, again, are infinite, think about what your audience wants and would find useful: Is it an FAQ session? A video about your process? A tutorial on how to use a product? An exciting announcement? Whatever it may be share it, small trivial things, and the in and outs of your job may be what your community craves to see.

Create Weekly And Monthly Plans

Plan your content weekly or monthly. This includes doing research on relevant hashtags or keywords and looking at recent trends. Planning everything out for the week, or the month will save you time as well as help you see the big picture of accomplishing your social media goals. So, how should you plan for the next month? 

Monthly Planning For Social Media

The biggest part of Social Media for Businesses is monthly content planning and goal setting. In addition to creating content, you should set goals for what you want to achieve through social media, this can range from gaining new followers or converting a few followers into customers.

To accomplish this you’ll need to plan variety of post that appeals both to new followers and to followers who have been following you for a while and needed that reminder that you are open to consultations or bookings. The more you post the better. 2-4 posts a week is a good start but the key is to set a number that you meet consistently while still producing quality content; quality is always above quantity.

Creating Social Media Content

The problem for many business owners is that day-to-day tasks keep them so busy that social media often becomes the last thing on business owners’ minds. To prevent this issue, you can photograph, film, and write batches of content a month ahead of time. A great way to do this is by hiring a blogger and social media photographer to come every month to create fresh professional quality visual content. Photographers and social media managers can help you come up with new ideas and coordinate a staged setup to bring your vision to life.

With new images and video clips to work with every month, you can set aside time to create and schedule the content. Social media platforms like Facebook allows you to do this, but a way to simplify the process is to invest in tools like Canva, Agorapulse or Tailwind, that will help with designing and posting to multiple platforms at once. These tool truly help manage social media for brands much more easily – we know this because we love use them ourselves.

Starting out, we recommend planning and experimenting with a good variety of posts that will feature your business from multiple angles while providing value. You can have weekly trends such as showcasing a team member one day, sharing more information about your services or products the next day, and educating about the industry on the third day. Over time you will know what your audience likes to see the most so you can refine your Social media business post ideas later on.

Social Media Analytics

Social Media for Marketing only works if you frequently check its effectiveness. You must refer to your statistics monthly if not weekly and keep a record of your performance numbers. Each social media platform has metrics to show how well different posts performed. While success can be measured in different ways, you need to focus on the type of content that had the most reach (how many people and accounts saw your content) as well as engagement such as likes, follows, clicks, comments, and shares. Shares for many platforms are the most important, your shared content tells the algorithm that the content was so interesting it’s worth sharing and promoting to further audiences.  

When checking the analytics, pay attention to what made the post so successful – the content, timing, text, hashtags, or keywords. This will help you get more direction on where to go with your next posts as well as understand what your audience wants to see more of. Do not be afraid to experiment, trying something new and different may be just the key to getting the engagement back up. How to use social media for business is not a strict science, creativity is often rewarded on social media; you don’t always know what type of content will become the next viral trend. 

With these tips in mind, be sure to also frequently audit your account information to ensure that all the everything is relevant and accurate. Outdated or poorly written bios and broken links can be a major reason why you are not growing your audience. 

Social Media For Businesses, Conclusion

Following these strategies will help you stay organized and consistent, ultimately helping you use social media as a marketing strategy. Social media does take a lot of effort and work, whether you do it yourself or hire a professional to manage it, it takes time to grow. However, consistency on each of the platforms can be a rewarding and an amazing alternative for reaching new audiences to grow your business. 

Digital Duo is a professional photographer and videography for businesses in Chicago and nationwide. If you have questions about this blog or our services be sure to contact us!