Why Social Media Marketing Works for Small Businesses

One of the best ways to grow a small business is by your reputation and word of mouth. The internet hasn’t changed that. But the conversation has moved online, and largely to social networks like Facebook. Which is one reason why Social Media Marketing works for small businesses.

You don’t need millions of followers to attract more customers. In fact, if you have a large number of people who don’t care about your updates, then it can work against you. It’s far better to have a smaller group of people who like, comment and share whatever you’re posting.

When Facebook can boost small business:

If you’ve got a typical number of Facebook friends, you won’t see every update they post. By default, Facebook tries to show you the latest posts from the people you interact with the most. And they use a computer algorithm to try and calculate who those people are.

The same thing happens with Facebook Pages for businesses. When you post updates that get Likes, Comments and Shares from a decent amount of your fans, that better engagement means your post will be seen by more people. If you update with content no-one cares about, then that will just hurt your engagement score, and your potential audience (called ‘Reach’ on Facebook) will suffer.

So no matter if you’re a new sole trader or Coca Cola, you have the same challenge to engage as many of your fans as possible. But small businesses have an advantage – you’ll have a much closer relationship with your customers.

How to use your Social Media advantage:

You need consistent, quality content that will get a response. Think about your customers and what gets them interested in what you do? What do they ask about? And what do they find interesting about your company.

Small businesses can also find it much easier to share their personality online. Often big companies suffer by being far too generic and soulless. More and more of us want to support our friendly, local businesses, so why not tap into that?

Sometimes it can be hard to come up with answers to those questions when you’re busy running your business 8-12 hours a day, every day. That’s when getting advice from people with experience can help, so why not contact us for some help? Combine a good website with effective search engine optimisation and social media marketing, and you’ll have a winning formula that will very quickly get you more business.