5 Ways To Use Social Media To Expand Your Reach
Being a small business owner is tough, especially when it seems like you’re only competing with large corporations. How is your mom and pop hardware store going to triumph over Ace Hardware? Even though it may seem daunting since you don’t have various locations across states or countries, there is still hope.
The secret superpower of today’s small business is social media! On the internet, everyone can be on equal footing if you have a solid social media marketing strategy that complements your online and physical store. Expand your social media presence, and you will have customers from across the world wanting to engage with your business that you won’t even see the Ace Hardwares of the world as a threat anymore.
So how do you expand your social media reach? Here are 5 simple ways to get you started:
1. Prioritize Strong Content
First and foremost, in order to expand your social media reach, you must have strong content. Without strong and interesting content that highlights your business and your products, there is no amount of analytics or posting strategies that can expand your social media presence and grow your business.
While the goal of social media marketing is to eventually promote your business, there is a fine line between promotional content and educational and/or entertaining content. It is clear now that most social media users don’t want to be hit over the head with advertisements. They are longing for genuine, interesting, and informational content from businesses on social media, illuminating the employees, the industry, and the products without the pressure to buy. For example, once you get your followers excited about the day to day workings at your company or update them on new rules or innovations in your industry, their interest in and loyalty to your brand will grow deeper, resulting in purchases.
2. Post Consistently
For solid social media marketing, posting your strong content consistently is the way to stay in front of your followers and top of mind. The more your great content pops up on their feeds, the more they will engage with your business and your reach will expand. This is where knowing your target audience is essential so that you can learn when they are online and are craving certain pieces of content that can be satisfied by you.
Create a social media posting calendar that identifies in advance what kind of content you’d like to post on which social media platform and when. This not only will streamline your social media marketing process, but also give you an advanced plan and overview of the content you need to prepare. Since there are different times that are best to post on each platform, it is helpful to know when and where to post so that the highest number of potential customers can see and interact with your content.
3. Engage Directly with Consumers
You want to make sure that you are enriching your customers’ lives through your content, and sparking their curiosity in your product or services, leaving them to take the next step, instead of just pushing advertisements in front of them. This leads the way for organic growth on social media which is the best way to expand your reach and grow your business as a result.
The best way to light up your customers’ interest and get them interacting is to hit them with dazzling visuals. Everyone loves a shiny picture or a funny video! Focusing on quality visuals that people love to share will boost your organic growth and expand your social media presence. Over 60% of social media marketers share that using visuals is the most important part of their marketing strategy.
Once you get your followers liking, sharing, and reposting your posts, then they will directly contribute to your social media marketing strategy by engaging with your business through their own user-generated content. They will leave reviews, speak positively about initiatives your company is taking, and even make their own content about their experience with your products, all expanding your social media reach.
You can answer their questions, take suggestions, and give them back more of the content that they are excited about. And all of this stems from your original, high quality, and nonpromotional content.
4. Highlight Your Products and Business
Your outstanding visuals and engaging content won’t grow your business without highlighting your business and products, making them interesting to your customers. Even though you don’t want to push customers to make purchases in your posts, your content should help lead them down the path to wanting to make a purchase (or whatever your particular call to action may be). We are here to grow business with social media, after all!
An example is a fun Tik Tok video by a bubbly employee demonstrating how wonderfully a curling iron works is a great way to show followers that they will also have a great experience and get the same curls, leading them to make the purchase.
5. Use Analytics To Inform Your Social Media Marketing
Growing business with social media and expanding your social media presence is not something that just happens overnight. It takes a lot of consistent and targeted research, work, and creativity, with no magic formula that aligns it all for you. Every business is different, and what is important to customers is always changing, so everyone will have a different social media marketing strategy.
The way to stay on top of yours is to analyze your audience’s engagement with your posts and work from there. Engagement with organic content is the number one marker of enthusiasm, brand loyalty, and social media reach, with the majority of companies looking at levels of engagement as the main indicator of how successful a campaign is. Using resources such as social media listening tools and keeping up with current social media trends are great ways to get insights on your followers to know what to post next (or to skip next time). Meeting your followers where they are will expedite and expand your social media reach.
Conclusion
There is a lot that goes into crafting the best social media marketing strategy to grow your business. However, if you know your audience, create engaging and interesting content specifically for them, and post it consistently, then you are basically there. Adding in some conversation with your followers and backend analytics will take your social media presence to the next level and grow your business exponentially along the way.
LincSell is here to help you on every step of the journey. Book a demo to see all the possibilities that can expand your social media presence!
