A Quick And Easy Course On Social Media Marketing For Small Business
Whether you are a seasoned social media marketer or someone who’s just started their search on ‘social media marketing for small business’ – you’ve come to the right place.
In this guide, we’ve covered everything you need to know to build your ultimate, result-oriented social media marketing plan. Here are a few most-asked questions that we’ll answer in this article.
- What are the top social media sites for small businesses?
- How can I promote my small business on social media?
- How can I get more social media followers for my small business?
- How can social media increase sales for small businesses?
- What are the best social media automation tools for small businesses?
- What is the KPI for social media marketing?
What Are The Top Social Media Sites For Small Businesses?
To get the most out of social media marketing for small business, it’s helpful to know the most popular social media sites around. This will allow you to maximize your brand awareness, engage with the right people, and achieve your social media and sales goals.
1. Facebook
Facebook is the biggest social media site around, with more than two billion people using it every month. It’s easy to get started on Facebook and try all kinds of different formats such as text, images, videos, live videos, and Stories.
2. YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing platform where users watch a billion hours of videos daily. To get started, you can create a YouTube channel for your brand where you can upload videos for your subscribers to view, like, comment, and share.
3. WhatsApp
WhatsApp has been working on its business platform to allow small businesses to have a proper business profile so that they can provide customer support, and share updates with their customers.
4. Messenger
Through Messenger, small businesses can now advertise, create chatbots, send newsletters, and do more to engage with their customers.
5. Instagram
Instagram is a photo and video-sharing social media app that allows you to share a wide range of content such as photos, videos, stories, and live videos. The IGTV feature allows for longer-form videos.
6. Twitter
Twitter places a strong emphasis on real-time information, making it different from other social media apps. Another unique characteristic of Twitter is that it only allows 280 characters in a tweet.
7. Reddit
Reddit has a feature called Subreddits that’s a great resource to research and to see what’s popular and if your brand can be part of it.
8. LinkedIn
LinkedIn has evolved into a professional social media site where industry experts share content, network with one another, and build their personal brand. It’s a great platform for businesses to establish their thought leadership and authority in their industry and attract top-quality talent to their company.
9. Pinterest
Pinterest is a platform where users go to discover new things and be inspired. Having a presence on Pinterest could help put your brand on its users’ minds.
10. Medium
Medium is an online publishing platform with a social network element. It’s quite common for brands to republish their blog posts from their company blog onto Medium to extend their reach.
Social media marketing for a small business involves choosing the right platforms to be on. This primarily depends on whether your brand’s target audience is active on those social media sites. However, larger social media sites such as tends to cover a wide range of interests and topics, which makes it suitable for most brands.
How Can I Promote My Small Business On Social Media?
Your core message and how you craft it sits at the core of social media promotion. To truly promote your business on social media, you need to master the art of writing social media copy.
The sole aim of a copy is captivating viewers’ attention and compelling them to take action (eg. increase website traffic or download an eBook). Whether it’s an ad or a post, there are various ways to draft a social media copy.
You can experiment with different variations to identify the ones that generate maximum engagement. However, it’s crucial that you adopt a logical approach that knows how to work the human psychology for positive results.
For example, the phrase “free resource” will spark a better reaction than “detailed resource”.
10 Ways To Write Attractive Copy To Promote Your Business On Social Media
Mentioned below are 10 great strategies that’ll help you create gripping social media copy for maximum engagement.
1. Make It Relevant To The Funnel Stage
When creating a plan for social media marketing, small businesses need to know that users don’t go on social platforms with the intent of buying. They go there to entertain themselves and catch-up with their friends.
While it may be difficult to gauge their intent, you could align your social media copy objective according to the sales funnel.
This involves designing a process wherein users will advance through various funnel stages – awareness, consideration, and conversion.
Awareness: Here, the user is not aware of your brand. The sole aim of the social media copy is to break the ice and create a connection with them by sharing content that’s valuable to them. Try not to promote your brand at this stage.
Consideration: In this stage, the user known about your brand. Here your social media copy will highlight the core problem that your product is solving. You’re still not selling to them, but you are telling them how your product can make their life easy.
Conversion: At this stage, your user is convinced about your product/service and is ready to buy from you. Your message here will be one that promotes sales. It could highlight discount coupons, limited period sales, new user deals, etc.
2. Define Social Media Copywriting Guidelines
When thinking about social media marketing for small business, it’s crucial that you build a relationship with your target customers. Your brand should have a voice that resonates with your buyer persona’s personality.
This is where your brand copywriting guidelines come in and your social media copy must align with them for maximum result. For example, if you are a B2B company that sells raw material for manufacturing, your copy would be a little more technical and straightforward.
However, if you’re a B2C business, then you do have an opportunity to be a little more relaxed and funny/quirky in your communication.
The demographics and interests of your target audience also affect the words you use in your social media copy. For example, content and context will be different when you’re targeting people in the UK compared to the US.
3. Try To Address All The 5 W’s
Social media marketing for small business involves demystifying the five basic questions – who, what, when, where, and why?
A social media copy is a short excerpt that cannot highlight every single detail. Your goal is to show the most relevant content that’ll urge users to take action. For example,
Who: Who are you? (Company name)
What: What is your core offering?
When: Relevance of information with respect to time
Where: Relevance of information with respect to place or location
Why: Why are you sharing the information?
4. Write And Re-write Your Headlines Until They’re Perfect
The first thing a user notices in an ad copy is the headline. This means that it must be enticing enough to grab their attention. To create conversion-oriented headlines, try addressing pain points, listing the benefits, or evoking curiosity in the onlooker.
Headline length is an important factor. The shorter and crisper the headline, the better it performs.
If you can come up with a perfect headline for a social media copy, it can alone compel a user to take action.
5. Optimize Social Media Copy For Length
People don’t usually prefer lengthy posts because their attention span is short and they have other things to do. So, to get them interested, optimize the length of your social media copy to suit the platform.
The ideal length differs from channel to channel. According to a study, Facebook posts with less than 140 characters received 91.39 percent more likes.
Tweets between 120 and 130 characters witness the highest click-through-rates (CTRs). The moral of the story is – keep your copy short, concise, and meaningful.
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6. Compliment Your Text With Attractive Visuals
Visuals attract more attention than just text. To get someone’s attention, have an attractive visual that complimented with a great copy. Ensure that the messaging on both is linked and communicates one important message.
For example, if an image highlights the car interiors, the copy should further highlight those benefits. Write a copy that compels the user to experience the interiors by scheduling a demonstration at their doorstep.
7. Create FOMO (fear of missing out)
Do you know 56 percent of the social media users experience FOMO? They believe if they are not on social media, they’ll miss out on an experience, a deal, etc.
As a marketer, you can use this FOMO element in your social media copy to increase engagements, sign-ups, downloads, etc.
The FOMO experience has three main components – scarcity, urgency, and exclusivity.
Scarcity is when the offer is available in limited quantity,
Urgency is when the offer is valid for a limited duration, and
Exclusivity is when the offer is available for the “special ones.”
Use these accordingly to boost conversions.
8. Boost Impact Using Numbers, Emojis, And Hashtags
Spicing up social media copies with additional elements along with words can generate fruitful results for you. Plain text tends to get a tad monotonous.
Consider sprinkling numbers, emojis, and hashtags in the copy to make them more attractive and relevant.
Users tend to be more receptive to numbers because it’s related to measurement and reasoning.
Emojis, besides expressing emotions, are attention-grabbing elements.
Hashtags increase your reach and aids in branding.
Find a good balance between these elements to craft a winning social media copy.
9. Highlight The Pain Points Of Your Users
Social media marketing for small business is most effective when you address the problems and needs of your target audience and provide a solution. Empathizing with people by stepping in their shoes helps create a bond with them.
This, in turn, encourages them to take action. To know their pain points, you must work on creating a customer persona. Further, keep eyes on social media discussions happening in your niche.
For example, you know people are looking for natural cosmetic products that don’t harm their skin. If you are a company that sells 100 percent natural cosmetics, you can create a social media copy that highlights and promotes this fact.
10. Use Power Words As Hooks
Power words are persuasive terms that trigger a psychological or emotional response in people. As a copywriter, you can use power words to increase the effectiveness of your social media communication.
There are various types of power words such as – trust words, vanity words, curiosity words, greed words, angry words, motivational words, etc.
For example, instead of writing “Bake red velvet cake in 5 steps,” you can rephrase it as, “Quickly bake delicious red velvet cake in 5 easy steps.”
The words – quickly, delicious, and easy – are power words that trigger the imagination of the viewer. Using these power words can help you increase your conversion rates.
How Can I Get More Social Media Followers For My Small Business?
One of the key goals in most social media marketing plans for small business is to increase followers. How can you expect to build credibility and boost engagement if no one is looking at your posts?
Listed down 15 actionable strategies that’ll help you build your social media audience on multiple platforms. And as a bonus, implementing these tips will also help you improve your social engagement.
1. Begin With Goal Setting
If you have a goal of achieving X number of followers in Y months, you’ll accordingly build a plan to grow your social media audience.
Goal setting gives you a long-term vision and short-term motivation. It helps you mobilize your resources and organize tasks to accomplish the goal within a set timeframe.
An effective tactic here would be to create SMART goals to increase your social media presence. SMART stands for:
Specific,
Measurable,
Attainable,
Relevant, and
Time-bound
For example, you can set a goal to grow your Instagram audience to 10,000 followers in 6 months.
2. Identify Your Target Audience
Having a defined target audience is like hitting the bull’s eye. You cannot target everyone on social media because only a particular group of people is interested in your offerings.
You must create a buyer persona, which is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal buyer.
Doing this simple exercise will help you in creating content that’ll resonate with your target audience. A customer persona reveals customers’ social media behavior as well.
To identify demographics, interests, and behavior, you can use tools such as Facebook Audience Insights that analyzes your Facebook audience to show you detailed insights.
3. Maintain Consistency To Increase Your Social Media Audience
Customers relate to brands that they often see and hear about. For example, when you hear Coca-Cola, you can immediately conjure up a red-and-white Coca-Cola logo in your imagination.
Brand consistency across social media is essential to increase brand value, improve customer experience, and render a long-lasting visual impact.
Try setting up a social media brand style guide that emphasizes color combinations, fonts, logo, image sizes, etc.
Every social media network has its size requirements. Customize your graphics according to the size guides. Also, your social media copy should be as per the platform and your copywriting style guide.
4. Build A Social Media Content Calendar
Social media marketing for small business gets a lot easier and manageable when you adhere to a set content calendar.
Since social media management is an ever-going process, you need a calendar to track everything, such as – content creation, posting schedule, managing campaigns, abiding by deadlines, measuring results, and more.
You can either use a simple Google Spreadsheet or any social media management tool to create a content calendar.
In addition to creating a schedule, you can create tasks and assign responsibilities to social media managers. Make sure you post content at times when the engagement level is at the peak.
5. Deploy Social Media Automation Tools
Managing multiple social media accounts can be hectic and confusing. For example, if you are present on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter, you can’t hop on from one network to another all day.
Deploying a social media automation tool is a feasible way to increase your social media audience efficiently.
(We’ve listed 10 social media automation tools further in the article to help you get started.)
A social media automation tool will help you with scheduling, content creation, monitoring, analytics, team management, and security.
Further, some of the tools help you manage paid social media promotions as well. They also allow third-party app or tool integration to facilitate seamless workflow.
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6. Add A Human Touch To Your Communication
There was a time when brands interacted with their audience on social media in a formal, almost robotic manner. Luckily, the tables have turned now.
To increase your social media audience, you must humanize your business and portray your true brand personality.
For example, instead of responding from your business account, let your employees take charge of interacting with the audience. The human approach, quirkier conversations, and personalized conversations can help render a more considerable impact.
Further, share pictures from your team outings’, behind-the-camera updates, and more to nurture a personal bond with the audience.
7. Pay Attention To Every Response
Do you know 97 percent of review readers consider businesses’ responses to reviews while making a decision?
So if you are skipping social media responses to reviews, queries, and comments, you are sabotaging your online reputation and hampering your efforts to increase your social media audience.
Since the majority of businesses are on social media, people prefer communicating with them on those platforms.
Talk to the people, resolve their queries, listen to their suggestions, interact with their posts and comments, and respond to their reviews. Try making up for a bad experience so that a customer feels heard and happy.
8. Focus On Solving Problems, Not Selling
On average, it takes 8 touches to schedule a meeting, or attaining a similar conversion, with a new prospect. The sale is not even in the picture right now.
When it’s about increasing your social media audience, don’t try to hard-sell your offerings in every alternate post.
Remember, the primary aim of social media is to promote user interactions. Focus on developing a connection with your audience, solve their problems, post informative content that addresses their pain points, and more.
When they start trusting you, sales will flow in automatically.
9. Collaborate With Influencers
89 percent of the marketers believe that ROI from influencer marketing is either better or comparable to other marketing channels.
You can also harness the potential of those popular in your industry to increase your social media audience. The key is collaborating with influencers in your niche, having similar audiences as yours.
People prefer the advice of those who they trust rather than celebrities. Therefore, collaborate with social media influencers and create informative content for the audience.
Let the influencers handle the narrative so that the audience can relate to the content.
10. Hold Contests And Giveaways
Contests and giveaways are a great way to engage your audience and have some fun along the way. It’s a quick and legitimate strategy to increase your social media audience.
In addition to gaining an audience, you’ll generate leads and brand advocates. There are so many ways to hold contests and giveaways.
For example, if you are a travel company running a contest for Valentine’s Day, you can ask social media users to share their favorite picture from a couple’s trip, tag two users, tag you, and share it on Facebook and Instagram. The lucky winner will get a week-long holiday trip to the Maldives.
Simple, easy, and effective.
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11. Support A Social Cause
Social cause campaigns have a tendency to get noticed. It’s human nature to empathize. Therefore, if you support a cause and contribute to it, you’ll show your users that you care.
Make a strategy to promote your work for a cause on social media (don’t brag but promote subtly.)
For example, TOMS, a shoe company famous for its buy-one-give-one-pair-of-shoes model, has been donating $1 for every $3 they make to Global Giving Fund for combating COVID-19 effects in the society.
They’re not doing it for the publicity. However, it does help them in portraying their company as a responsible organization.
12. Stay Up To Date With The Latest Trends
If you can align your social media promotions with the trending topics, you’re likely to gain some traction.
This is because social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are avenues where social interactions take place, whether it’s personal, professional, or trending.
For example, assume you are a business that manufactures fitness apparel & goods. In these COVID-19 times, you can help people stay fit by sharing fitness videos, sharing diet tips, and more.
Further, you can share health tips to keep COVID-19 infection at bay. If you share valuable content, you’ll increase your social media audience in no time.
13. Make The Most Of Videos
Social media posts with videos get 48 percent more views. This is one of the reasons why you should experiment with different formats of content, especially visuals if you want to increase your social media audience.
Instead of sharing text posts, you can convert those into jazzy visuals that are more captivating.
For example, instead of sharing health tips as a text post, create an infographic that presents tips in a visual format. Similarly, you can create videos, presentations, downloadable guides, podcasts, and more.
14. Tell The World You Are On Social Media
With the increasing competition, social media marketing for small business has become a tad challenging. Organic reach is not as effective as it used to be a few years ago. Now you need to work harder – and smarter – to grow your social media presence.
Besides mentioning social media links on your website and blog, there are other ways to promote your accounts.
When you send emails, ask people to follow you on social platforms, run paid promotions to reach new prospects, collaborate with influencers, and so on.
15. Use Social Media For People, Not Followers
Most businesses focus just on the follower count–they want to see those numbers increasing. Having millions of followers is of no use if you don’t consider them as real people.
Remember that social media users are human beings with emotions and intellect. Always cater to them in the way you would in the real world.
Create and share content that triggers emotions in your audience. While responding to their queries and suggestions, try to understand their perspective by stepping into their shoes.
How Can Social Media Increase Sales For Small Business?
What’s the point of putting in all this time and resources if it doesn’t move the needle on the sales front? Listed below are five strategies that can help you increase sales for your small business.
1. Be In Sync With Your Customers And Their Social Interaction
Cristiano Ronaldo, one of the highest-paid athletes in the world, earns more from Instagram than from soccer.
This might tempt just about every business to hop on the Instagram bandwagon, but is that really the right decision?
Before you invest in a social media platform, ask yourself the who, where, and how.
- Who are my customers?
- Where do they normally interact?
- How do they use this platform?
Each social media platform provides something unique to its users and has an audience of its own.
The conversations on Facebook, for example, vary greatly from the user-generated content of Instagram.
It is vital that a business does its homework before treading into territory that hosts none of its audience.
2. Use The Public Nature Of Social Media To Your Advantage
Customers purchase trust, just as much as they do an actual product. Social media marketing for small business is unequivocally the best way to display your trustworthiness to the masses.
Potential issues with a product? Why make a customer call you in person when you can give them the option of sending you a public message on Twitter or Facebook?
Netflix, for example, uses Twitter as its hub for both customer service and humor.
This lets both the aggrieved customer and the rest of the streaming giant’s followers (and non-followers who come across the thread) see how reactive the company is with issues.
It builds trust and customer loyalty. It shows, very publicly, that the company is unafraid of taking responsibility for the failure of its products.
The humor is just the cherry on top of the icing- it gives a personality to the brand and makes it more relatable to everyone.
Even small businesses can use a similar strategy to increase sales, before spending a fortune towards external marketing.
3. Educate Your Team And Yourself
Data is invaluable to every business. It is commonly held knowledge that most social media platforms collect and analyze consented user data for external businesses.
It gives insights about existing customers and other stakeholders that no amount of human intuition can possibly purvey.
As a result, investing time and money into educating your employees about reading and analyzing data is requisite, in this day and age.
- How efficiently can your team navigate through Facebook Business Manager?
- What stats and numbers do they consider important?
- How will they translate information given to them- free and paid- to increase sales?
The answers to these questions can only be answered with the help of proper time investment.
If you’re a small business owner and don’t have a team, educate yourself, and become your own company’s social media MVP.
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4. Keeping Up With The Kardashians Kompetition
A quick glimpse into a marketing account such as Mad Over Marketing will give you access to the latest trends in social media marketing.
A glimpse into your competition’s account will help you understand how they’re using the latest memes, trends, internet lingo, platform features, and much more.
Given the vastness of the internet, new information and trends keep flowing on the go, and to increase sales, a business must keep itself informed and stay on top of these trends, and use them creatively to their advantage.
This is especially true for businesses that target millennials and Gen-Z, two target markets that were brought up when the Internet of Things (IoT) began settling in.
Social media marketing for small business is all about you being relevant to your social audience.
The audience already knows, for example, how a meme works. Now it is up to the brand to use it creatively to increase sales by making the internet trend relevant to its products or services.
5. Utilize The Platform For More Than Just Selling Products
Tinder recently released a web series on its platform. By all conventional standards, a dating app releasing a show doesn’t really add up all that much.
However, a quick look into their Instagram account will show just how content-driven Tinder is.
Pushing your product or service incessantly will probably not increase sales. It might just do the opposite, in fact.
Visitors of social media have so many options that a door-to-door salesman equivalent might not necessarily catch their appeal.
If resources allow, having a dedicated editorial team is a fantastic step to creating a consistent social media presence with uniform content.
It introduces your brand to not only your existing customers but also potential ones that you can acquire to increase sales overall.
What Are The Best Social Media Automation Tools For Small Business?
There are various social media automation tools available right now.
However, your selection of the tool depends on your business needs – whether you are a solopreneur, small business owner, or a large enterprise. There are plans for every type of user.
Also, while analyzing automation tools, check out connectivity with social networks. For example, if you are active on Facebook and Pinterest, you should opt for an automation platform that connects to both the social networks.
Here’s a list of 10 social media automation tools that you can get started with right away.
1. Hootsuite
Social networks: 35+
Mobile apps: Yes
Hootsuite is a unified platform that facilitates complete social media management on automation, right from scheduling posts to measuring ROI on marketing spends.
Some of the features that make Hootsuite unique are:
- Content management: Schedule posts well in advance, curate content from scratch, assign roles and responsibilities to team members, and more.
- Social media monitoring: Hootsuite makes social listening easier. Find mentions, follow topics and conversations, set up custom content streams, and more.
- Social media security: Manage approval workflows, employees’ access, and user levels.
Hootsuite enables third-party integrations to stay compliant with regulatory standards.
2. Buffer
Social networks: 5
Mobile apps: Yes
Buffer is a comprehensive social media automation solution that enables you to attract, engage, and convert prospects into customers. Buffer offers a full-stack package comprising three products:
- Publish: Draft and schedule your posts, collaborate with team members, track publishing calendar, integrate with third-party apps, and more.
- Reply: Engage with your audience and team members over social media channels. Manage tags and folders, assign conversations, develop customer profiles, and more.
- Analyze: Keep a tab on the results with performance overview, dig into individual post analytics, discover audience demographics, lookout for answers, and more.
3. Agorapulse
Social networks: 5
Mobile apps: Yes
Agorapulse is a unique social media automation tool that focuses on intricate details. For example, categorizing queued content by topic and time slot.
Agorapulse also has a set of free tools that help in assessing the social media marketing performance. Exclusive features of Agorapulse are:
- Intelligent scheduling: Schedule, reschedule, queue, or bulk upload content, manage content calendar, organize posts into categories, and more.
- Built-in CRM: Complete information about fans and followers. Label influencers and ambassadors, categorize audiences and review the complete history of interactions.
- Social inbox: All conversations in one place. Reply, review, assign, or label them. Manage organic/paid comments, mentions, reviews, and much more. It also allows you to automate conversations.
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4. SproutSocial
Social networks: 5
Mobile apps: Yes
SproutSocial provides unparalleled functionality when it’s about social media management. Whether it’s publishing content, social media advertising, or customer engagement, SproutSocial has the right set of tools for every task.
Use this automation platform to:
- Monitor & engage: Keep track of brand-related activities across all the social media platforms, manage conversations in the social inbox, tag and label messages, assign duties, and more.
- Plan & publish: Collaborate and plan content calendar, set up automatic scheduling and publishing, and maximize impact by posting at optimal times with ViralPost – Sprout’s patented technology.
- Report & analyze: Generate PDF/CSV reports, track post-level performance, analyze competitor’s activity, schedule timely reporting, and more.
5. Post Planner
Social networks: 2
Mobile apps: No
Post Planner is a budget-friendly social media automation tool for solopreneurs and small businesses.
The user-friendly interface and focused functioning of this tool help users attain desired results from their social media marketing. You can use Post Planner to:
- Find: Discover top-performing content from various sources such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and blogs. Predict content popularity based on Post Planner’s 5-star rating system.
- Plan: Set up the best time to post content, prepare publishing schedule in advance, choose the content format, optimize content, and recycle top-performing content for best results.
- Post: A centralized dashboard for managing posts, editing posts in real-time, quick access to analytics and performance metrics, and seamless collaboration with team members.
6. SocialPilot
Social networks: 50+
Mobile apps: Yes
SocialPilot is a go-to automation tool preferred by all types of businesses, whether an agency or an enterprise.
The power-packed features, competitive pricing, and access to informative resources are the factors that favor SocialPilot. The automation platform can help you with:
- Publishing & scheduling: Create and manage content, social media scheduling, RSS feeds automation, set up publishing calendar, use browser extension to discover content, and more.
- Collaboration: Manage your team, assign roles and responsibilities, keep your clients in the loop, let them add social media accounts, and more.
- White-label solution: Complete white-label social media management solution for you. Customize URLs, user interface, email addresses, login credentials, generate white-label reports, and more.
7. MeetEdgar
Social networks: 4
Mobile apps: Yes
MeetEdgar is a social media automation tool specifically designed for small business owners and entrepreneurs.
This women-led bootstrapped company aims at providing an affordable yet feature-packed solution to budding businesspersons. MeetEdgar can help you with:
- Auto-variations: Besides scheduling and creating content calendars, MeetEdgar can automatically pick excerpts/quotes from blogs and articles. You just need to share it with your social media audience.
- Content management: Save your posts in the content library, add content from various sources like RSS feeds, podcasts, YouTube, and more. Manage posting rules based on the content type.
- A/B Testing: Meet Edgar performs in-depth analysis to determine the best performing content. With A/B testing, check what content is working and increasing website traffic.
8. SocialOomph
Social networks: 12
Mobile apps: No
SocialOomph has been around for more than a decade. It’s a trusted social media automation tool for businesses of all shapes and sizes.
SocialOomph follows a simple approach and focuses solely on social media management. It will help you with:
- Content creation: Create posts from scratch, use webhooks to create content automatically, tag your posts for ease of organization, use RSS feed data to create social posts, and more.
- Scheduling & posting: Manage publishing calendar, bulk upload content, queue up posts based on preferences, and post on social media networks and blogging networks.
- Team management: Assign roles and responsibilities, organize members in teams, use tags and features to segment data and profiles, and assign members to as many teams as you want.
9. SocialFlow
Social networks: 5
Mobile apps: Only iOS app available
SocialFlow is a social media automation tool exclusively designed for publishers and media companies who want to monetize their social media and online presence.
SocialFlow manages social media campaigns and ensures you deliver quality content to the audience and desired results to the advertisers. Unique offerings of SocialFlow are:
- Social Distribution: Right from content creation to scheduling to publishing to monitoring, SocialFlow provides a centralized dashboard for content distribution on social platforms.
- AttentionStream: This feature takes Social Distribution to another level wherein advertisers can sponsor the distribution of top-performing content on social media.
- Branded Content: Run social media campaigns for branded content. Keep track of the social media performance metrics using the SocialFlow dashboard and achieve desired goals.
10. Dlvr.it
Social networks: 8
Mobile apps: No
Dlvr.it is an intelligent social media management tool that automates the most redundant tasks involved in social media marketing.
Competitive pricing and seamless integration with most-used social networks are the factors that favor dlvr.it. The tool can help you with:
- Social media automation: Automate post creation and publishing to social networks, including Google My Business. Source information from various sources such as blogs, eCommerce websites, RSS feed, etc.
- Auto hashtags: Simply mention the top-performing hashtags in the content feed. When dlvr.it shares posts, it will use hashtags automatically based on the type of content.
- Content reshare: Use the Echo feature to auto-schedule the resharing of posts at a particular time, date, and day. Power Scheduler allows you to share the same content multiple times across the same social profiles.
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What Is The KPI For Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing for small business can only prove beneficial when you set clear goals and have the right metrics in place to measure them.
As a small business, you might already have a strategy in place on how to leverage the various social media platforms.
However, to track your social performance, you need to look at defining your KPI aka your social media metrics.
What Are Social Media Metrics?
Social media metrics give you data that can be used to determine the impact and success of your social media marketing for small business.
It helps you understand how your content is performing, and how you can improve your strategy to get better results.
With these metrics, you can identify what social data is relevant for your company and analyze their results.
Here is a list of 10 most important social media metrics that you can track for your small business.
1. Audience Growth Rate
Audience Growth Rate helps you in measuring the speed at which your brand’s following is increasing on social media.
One of the most important aspects of your social media strategy should be to quantify how quickly you’re gaining followers.
The metric is not just about calculating the number of new followers you gain, but to calculate how fast you gained them. To measure it, follow these steps:
Step 1: Select a reporting period.
Step 2: Calculate your new followers over that period.
Step 3: Divide your new followers by your total followers. Multiply this number by 100 to get the percentage for your audience growth.
2. Social Share of Voice (SSoV)
SSoV helps you determine the percentage of the overall conversation about your industry that is directly or indirectly focused on your brand. It gives you a comparison with your competitors.
Since most social media conversations are publicly accessible, you have the opportunity to measure your competitors’ impact and learn from it.
For instance, let’s assume your brand has been mentioned, directly and indirectly, 300 times over a month. Two competitors have had 500 mentions. Adding all the mentions gives you a total of 800 mentions in the industry.
To measure your SSoV, you can divide 300 by 800 and multiply it by 100. Hence, your SSoV would be 37.5%.
3. Social Media Conversion Rate
Social Media Conversion Rate is the percentage expression of the total number of conversions that have resulted through social media.
For instance, if a visitor downloads your ebook or subscribes to your email newsletter, that would fall under the category of social media conversion.
You need to calculate how many such conversions are happening through your social media. To calculate it, follow these steps:
Step 1: Make your call-to-action trackable by using a link shortener.
Since the URL shortener places a cookie on your system, you can later track the total number of conversions that came through it.
Step 2: Divide the social media conversions by your total number of conversions.
Step 3: Multiply the number from step 2 by 100.
This is your social media conversion rate.
4. Cost-Per-Click (CPC)
CPC is an important metric to consider if you’re using paid promotions on your social media. It is the amount you pay for a single click by your visitor on your sponsored social media posts.
Since you’re spending money on these posts, CPC helps you determine whether your investment is worth your returns.
CPC calculates the amount based on every click you get from your visitors making it a relevant social media metric to track.
To calculate CPC, you simply need to divide your total Ad spends amount, by the total measured clicks.
5. Bounce Rate
Social media metrics not only help you identify the positive results of your social media profiles, but also the negative ones.
For example, the bounce rate measures the number of people who landed on your website or landing page through a CTA on your social media but quickly left, without taking any action.
If your bounce rate is low, it would mean that people are better engaging with your landing page. It is also an indication that these users would convert at some point.
However, if your bounce rate is considerably high, then it is an indication to revisit and rework your landing page.
You can use Google Analytics, to measure your bounce rate.
Under the ‘Acquisition’ tab, you will find the ‘All Traffic’ option, under which there is ‘Channels Segment.’ There you should find the option of ‘Bounce Rate’.
You can sort it from lowest to highest, to identify which channels have high bounce rates, and take remedial measures.
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6. Click-Through Rate (CTR)
CTR helps in tracking the number of people who have clicked on your CTAs, to be redirected to your website or other landing pages.
CTR is one of the most important social media metrics, as it helps you weigh the quality of your social post against your audience’s desire.
A low CTR would mean that you are unable to capture your audience’s interest with your content, and vice versa.
Besides, as per the algorithm on social media platforms, posts with high CTR get more reach and impressions than the others.
To measure CTR, follow these steps:
Step 1: Find the total clicks on a post’s link.
Step 2: Divide the total clicks by the total number of impressions that have taken place on the post.
Step 3: Multiply the figure by 100 to get your CTR percentage.
Many social media platforms such as Facebook calculate your CTR for you and show it in your Facebook Ads tab.
7. Amplification Rate
One thing that you want from your social media followers is to share your content. The more your audience is organically sharing your posts, the wider your reach.
Likes and comments are great, but to amplify your content and reach out to bigger audiences, you need those shares.
The amplification rate is the ratio of your post shares to the total number of followers. To calculate it, follow these steps:
Step 1: Identify the number of times the post has been shared by your followers.
Step 2: Divide the figure from step 1 by your total number of followers.
Step 3: Multiply the resulting figure from step 2 by 100.
This is your amplification rate.
8. Customer Response Rate
Your visitors engage with your posts, by liking, commenting, and even sharing them. However, your job is not only to create those posts.
Often your users ask questions or share their feedback on these posts.
You need to make sure, you’re responding to as many mentions as possible. It may not be possible to answer all, and sometimes these mentions could be spam.
However, the more you respond to these questions, the better the brand value and your overall customer experience.
You can simply calculate your customer response rate by dividing the number of responses you have given to your followers, by the total number of visitors who engaged with your brand and multiplying it by 100.
9. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
NPS is a metric that helps you determine your customer loyalty. One thing that would help your business to grow is recommendations from your customers.
You’d want word of mouth marketing from your customers so that your brand reaches to a larger set of audience organically.
NPS is segregated into three categories based on how well your customers rate your business from 1-10:
- Promoters: Customers that rate you 9-10
- Passives: Scorers that answer 7-8
- Detractors: Customers that fall into the score range of 0-6
To calculate NPS, follow these steps:
Step 1: Create a survey and distribute it among your users who have engaged with your brand.
Step 2: Based on the data you receive, segregate your users in one of the three categories mentioned above.
Step 3: Based on the data from step 2, subtract the number of ‘detractors’ from the number of ‘promoters’.
Step 4: Divide the figure from step 3 by the total number of customers who responded to the survey, and multiply it by 100 to get your NPS.
For instance, the total number of respondents in your survey is 50, of which 30 are ‘promoters’ and 10 are ‘detractors’. Your NPS would be 40%.
10. Social Media Reach
Your social media reach is basically the total number of people who have been exposed to your brand or content through your social media accounts.
Even though the reach is not a direct measure of how many people are converting or engaging with your brand, it’s important to identify your total reach since it will give you a fair idea about your actual audience.
Reach is important because a bigger reach gives you better brand awareness and growth prospects.
You can use it as a denominator for other social media metrics. With the help of reach, you can identify what percentage of your potential audience is converting, sharing, or engaging with your brand.
Social media accounts such as Instagram and Facebook, show your post reach under the ‘insights’ section itself.
If you go and check your insights, there will be detailed information on your total reach–on particular days, on different posts, etc.
You can use this data to identify your overall reach and blend it with various social media metrics for a bigger picture.
In Conclusion
Social media marketing for small business is a full-fledged job function and not something that you do on the side. To truly have a successful social presence, you need to ensure that you:
- Set SMART goals,
- Know which platforms to advertise on,
- Know the specific metrics to chase,
- Write meaningful and effective copy,
- Automate your process,
- Increase your followers
A strong social media strategy and plan can not only help small businesses such as yours to build brand awareness but, in the long run, it can help you improve sales and build long-term customer loyalty.