15 Social Media Marketing Tips for Small Businesses to Use in 2023

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Follow these 15 small business social media tips to help you attract and engage more customers.

You know that your business has to be on social media. It’s an essential way of marketing your business and connecting with customers.

Although there are so many millions of people on social media, far too many brands don’t generate the results they’re after.

Before you start pouring money into paid advertising, make sure you’re doing the most with your social media profiles. A few small adjustments in your content strategy can go a long way.

So, if you want to generate more engagement and reach more customers through social media, here are 15 social media marketing tips you can follow.

Have a Clear Objective
Use the Right Social Media Platforms
Know Your Target Audience
Go Live
Sell Products Through Social Media
Optimize Your Profile and Bio
Run a Giveaway
Be Consistent, But Experiment Too
Post at the Right Time
Focus on Short-Form Video Content
Be Social
Make Sure You Use Clear CTAs
Post Content Designed for Each Platform
Humanize Your Brand
Share Your Customers’ Successes

1. Have a Clear Objective

First things first, what do you aim to achieve with social media marketing?

One of the most important factors to consider when creating your social media marketing strategy is to set a clear objective. Without this, you’ll just be posting blindly. This won’t get you the results your business needs.

So, start by establishing a clear goal, or goals, that you want to achieve with social media. This could include:

Sending traffic to your website
Selling products directly on social media
Growing your audience
Growing your mailing list
Increasing engagement with your existing audience
Boosting sales of certain products

And so on.

By creating a clear social media goal, you’ll be able to plan out the rest of your social media strategy a lot more carefully. Basically, this means posting the right kind of content on the right social media platforms in order to accomplish a measurable goal.

Get this right, and you’ll be able to achieve something with your social media marketing efforts. This is the first essential social media marketing tip any small business needs to know. Strangely enough, it’s something that far too many businesses get wrong.

2. Use the Right Social Media Platforms

Your business has a unique target audience. This means you need to focus on social media channels that align with this audience.

Don’t focus on too many social media channels and spread your brand too thin. Instead of maximizing your social media strategy, this will actually deplete it.

One of the most important factors for a successful marketing strategy is to use the right social media networks. These channels need to align with your target audience and your brand. They also need to work alongside your social media marketing goals.

Start by understanding your audience, what demographics you’re targeting on social media, and where this audience is most active. This should point you in the right direction for what platform to use.

At the same time, consider your brand and what message you want to convey. If you’re focused on creating a fun, young brand image, then using TikTok could be a great idea. If you’re a more serious B2B, then you’ll probably struggle to create great TikTok content.

Local businesses need to be on Facebook, Instagram is a great choice for many types of businesses, LinkedIn is ideal for B2Bs, and so on.

Each platform has its own unique audience and type of content that performs best. By understanding what social media platform best matches your brand, you’ll be able to create a more refined social media marketing strategy.

It’s far better to master one or two social media channels than to try to cover every channel without success.

Check out our guide on TikTok vs. Instagram Reels for some helpful insights into choosing the right social media platform.

3. Know Your Target Audience

As with any marketing strategy, the more you understand your audience, the more successful you will be. This is especially true when it comes to social media marketing.

One of the most important, if not the most important, social media marketing tips for small business owners is to gain a complete understanding of your target audience and their demographic. You can do this by creating a detailed customer persona, outlining their interests, pain points, and what kind of content best matches them.

For your social media strategy, this will help you achieve two things:

Focus on the right channels (as mentioned above)
Create the right content that has the greatest impact

You want to speak directly to your audience and ensure you’re targeting the exact kind of information they want to find out. The more relevant your content is, the more engagement you’ll attract.

Understanding your target audience will also help you with things like engaging with the right groups on social media or posting at the right times.

4. Go Live

There’s a lot you can do on your social media accounts, but one of the best use cases is to create a genuine connection with your audience or customers. Your social media profiles provide an opportunity for you to connect directly with your audience, engage with them, and reveal that there is a human behind your brand.

One of the best ways to do this is to go live.

Platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook all offer Livestream functions. This has become a popular feature for social media users.

Try experimenting with going live on social media. You can use this function to introduce yourself, show a more behind-the-scenes look into your business, offer a face behind your brand, reveal your products in action, answer questions, and more. This is a great way for any small business owner to create a stronger connection with their audience.

Live content is more exclusive, and it can make your audience feel like you’re doing something exciting and new.

Check out our guide to going live on TikTok for more tips on how to do this.

Image: Later

5. Sell Products Through Social Media

Social commerce is the act of selling products directly through social media platforms. If you run an online store, then making the most of social commerce is one of the best social media marketing tips you should be using.

Each social media platform offers some variation of social commerce. You can check out our complete guide to selling on social media to learn the ins and outs of each platform.

The general idea is that you can tag products in your social media posts and send your followers to a product page directly in the social media app. This enhances their buying journey and cuts out friction – helping you to increase sales directly from social media.

This strategy works best with lower-value impulse buys, although you can use it for any type of product in your online store.

Try this strategy out if you have a catalog of eCommerce products, as it’s a great way to open up new sales channels and get your social media doing more for you.

6. Optimize Your Profile and Bio

One of the most essential social media tips that far too many brands get wrong is to make the most of your profile. Beyond the content you post, you need to ensure your social media profiles are set up to help you achieve your social media marketing goals. This should include spreading brand awareness and directing traffic to your website.

To optimize your profile, ensure you include clear and consistent branding across your social media profiles. Make your profile picture easy to recognize and consistent across each channel you use.

Ensure you include important business details in your bio – like your business address, contact details, and website URL. Your bio is some of your most valuable social media real estate – so make the most of it.

Also, include a short description of what your company does, and make it clear what your social media is all about. Far too many brands don’t make it clear enough what they do, and their social profiles end up being too vague. This could confuse new potential customers.

Go back to your social media goals and ensure your profile is aligned with this. For example, if your goal is to increase website traffic, focus your bio around a link to your website, If your goal is to boost sales, add a discount code and link to a specific product page.

7. Run a Giveaway

Giveaways are one of the best marketing tactics for any brand on social media. This is because they can help you achieve many different things, like

Increase your audience
Boost sales
Increase social media engagement
Spread brand awareness
Improve knowledge of a new product
Gain user-generated content

And more. No matter what you sell or who your audience is, running the right kind of giveaway can help you make a big impact on social media with low effort.

Here’s how a giveaway on social media should work:

Choose a prize – this should be aligned with what your business offers and what your target audience is interested in. The best prizes are your products or services.

Come up with contest rules. This will include how participants can enter and how a winner will be chosen. One of the best tactics here is to get participants posting about your brand, such as through a branded hashtag challenge or a photo entry contest, This can help you gain social proof and possibly go viral.

Use a platform like Wishpond to create a contest landing page and capture contest entrants. You can add all contest entrants to your leads database and then follow up with them via email marketing.

Promote your contest on your social media channel.

Choose and announce a contest winner.

Follow up. Now you should have a full mailing list of people who entered your contest. These are people who have shown a direct interest in your brand and your product. Send them a strategic email marketing message to promote your brand and possibly generate sales. A good practice here is to send out a limited-time discount code to help you generate impulse buys.

There are many different types of contests you can run one will help you achieve something unique. Whatever the case, running a contest is a low-effort social media marketing tactic, and it can help you generate a major impact.

8. Be Consistent, But Experiment Too

One of the most prominent social media marketing tips is to be consistent. Post consistently and frequently. Stick to your social media calendar and what you know.

Yes, this is incredibly important – especially the posting constantly part. However, it’s also important to constantly experiment and try new things.

This is because social media is always changing. New updates are constantly being rolled out, and new trends are always emerging. If you are too consistent (predictable), your social media tactics will soon lose steam.

Instead, focus on trying new things. Experiment with new features, new formats, and new styles of content. See what works and what doesn’t, and optimize your strategy around this.

This is good to do on social media because your social feed will soon change. If something doesn’t work, carry on posting and forget about it. Your audience will soon forget about it too.

If you want to make a big impact and go viral, the only way you’ll get there is to experiment, try new things, and continually grow as a social media marketer.

Here are a bunch of Instagram hacks and Instagram Stories hacks that you can try if you want to add some new ideas and formats to your content strategy.

9. Post at the Right Time

One of the best ways to beat social media algorithms is to post your content at the right time.

If you post when your audience is most active, you’ll instantly increase engagement as soon as you post. This is a good sign to any social media algorithm, and it will help you get your posts even more traction.

The result is your posts spend more time in “discover” or “For You” feeds, which will help you generate more awareness, visibility, and engagement.

The best way to establish when to post is to understand your audience and use your business profile’s analytics platform.

Check our guides on the best time to post on TikTok for more information.

10. Focus on Short-Form Video Content

In case you’ve been living under a rock, short-form video content is everything on social media right now. Reels and TikTok have taken over, and it’s only getting more popular.

As a small business, posting video content lets you generate more interest and engagement. Videos are the most engaging form of social media content, and they can help you grab interest and do more for your brand. They’re a great way to show off your fun side, reveal your products in action, and get more people interested in what you do.

Short-form videos like Reels and TikToks also make it easier to get seen by a lot of people. Thanks to the unique algorithms of these video formats, you can use them to reach more people. This is important for spreading brand awareness.