A large business with widespread consumer appeal can naturally expect organic social media growth in terms of followers and interaction: people already know your name, are interested in your brand and are looking for answers. In this case, you may spend more time interacting with customers and keeping up with questions than you do just promoting content.
But we were curious: does this mean that if you are a small business with fewer resources, or in an industry not known for an interest in social media, you should abandon all social media efforts?
The simple answer: No!
We don’t mean that you can sit back, do nothing and watch the Likes roll in. But after conducting our own social platform/content test for several months, we were able to prove that by investing a minimal, but regular, amount of time and effort, any business can grow its online social presence – for free.
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Which Social Media Sites Will Work Best for My Small Business?
The answer will vary based on your particular market, but we recommend starting with the “big 3”: Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. Each platform allows you to interact with different audiences that when used together allows you to create a unique community of peers, prospects, clients, and more. The key to getting the most out of your efforts is to understand these differences and use them to your best advantage.
But first things, first. Before we get into the details, let’s talk strategy, because whether you’re a large or small business, you shouldn’t “do social media” for the sake of doing social media.
What is the goal of your social media? Is it to increase sales? Is it to build awareness of your business? In our test, we’re focusing on the latter.
The next step is to set expectations for the three different platforms and understand how all three will contribute to your unique community. Our test confirmed that we can:
- Use Twitter to build relationships with others in the same industry
- Use Facebook to build a solid base of interested fans
- Use Google+ to increase reach among those who may not be familiar with your business
Finally, figure out what content you are going to promote. Do you have original blog posts that others might find interesting? Can you share images of recently completed projects? Is your business part of a larger industry of which you can curate news to share with followers?
Once you understand your content, you can set up a schedule for finding, creating and publishing on each social media platform.
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So how does my small business use Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ all at the same time, but in different ways?
Use Twitter to Build Relationships with Others in Your Industry
Even if your individual business is small, chances are it is part of a somewhat larger industry. And even if you are in an industry whose customers do not actively interact with you on social media, chances are your peers are ready and willing to “talk”. This is where Twitter can be of great benefit to you. You can use Twitter to build a business community which could lead to partnerships, referrals and even potential customers. If you can create this connection with your peers, then your content has as greater chance of being noticed by other businesses and shared among your industry and beyond. Here are three ways to help get you into the game:
1. Start following others in your industry. For example, if you have a painting company, follow others with “painting” in their name. At the very least, you may get some good sources of content from these companies, but they will most likely follow you back. Both you and your followers gain sources of content, and you gain new followers as well. Win-Win.
Our test: By following this simple step over the course of 12 months, we managed to organically grow followers for one client by 93%! By growing followers, we also grew impressions and interaction in a similar fashion, which means all of our content is now seen by a much larger audience.
2. Promote your original content via Twitter. Share it with those in your industry. Tweet at specific people to get noticed (think @ and #), and tweet often. Then, with those followers that you’ve recently gained, you will likely get likes and retweets from those in your industry. Once you break into the scene and share great content, others will notice and remember your name.
Our test: We began our content campaign in September, and by the end of the year we had already seen 80% growth in interactions, including mentions, retweets, favorites and replies. Keep in mind that we already had a working Twitter account before the campaign, but you can see when we changed tactics by the results in our chart. We saw similar results with all our clients, so believe that you, too, can see similar results with your Twitter account.
3. Interact! Retweeting and favoriting posts will gain recognition, and soon enough you’ll be part of your industry’s social media world. Once you’ve tapped into this network, your impressions are bound to increase exponentially.
Our test: We started this “interaction” campaign in November. As you can see, we grew our reach by 25% and more than doubled interaction in just two months!
This is only the beginning. By keeping up this cycle of following, promoting and interacting with those in your industry that care about the same topics as you do, you will see exponential results over time.
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Use Facebook to Build a Solid Base of Interested Fans
Unless you hired a firm that offered to grow your fans for 5 cents a Like (please tell us you didn’t do that!), chances are the majority of your followers are folks who are genuinely interested in you. These are valuable prospects and customers, because they already know your business and they care about your success. The most important types of posts for a small business are those directly related to your company. This includes images of recent projects, company news, products, etc. If you want to see interaction spike, including shares, impressions and reach, your best bet is to promote as many of these types of posts as you can. (Of course, we would never advocate 100% of your content be about you, 80% is a good target.)
Our test:In a study conducted with our signage company client, we posted three types of content over the course of a one-month period: projects/company news, original blog posts, and curated content/industry news. The same number of posts for each category were promoted at similar times of day for similar days of the week.
By far, the posts that got the most views and interactions were related to recent projects or company news. Original blog posts came in second, but only received 62% of the reach of “projects” posts. Curated content was least effective, only scoring 41% of the reach when compared to “projects” posts.
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Now we know what works best, but does this mean you should limit yourself to only one type of Facebook post? Of course not! It just means you can emphasize recent projects and company news, and intersperse this with curated content. Remember: Curated content is always important because it brings variety to your posting – people don’t want to only hear about you.
Use Google+ to Reach Those Who May Not Know Your Business
Google+ may not be the social media platform Google was hoping it would be. But you know what? That’s okay, because that means you do not have to split your efforts to grow multiple fan bases – stay focused on Facebook and Twitter. If you do have a decent following on Google+, that’s great. You can still post to it and receive clicks and interaction as you would with Facebook. But Google+ brings an added benefit – SEO! – that does not require you to have followers.
When you post to Google+, your posts then have a chance of showing up in a Google search, which can increase traffic to your site. When you post to Google+, you want to make sure you have clear and concise titles for posts, as well as descriptions that include relevant keywords. When people search for these keywords, they may be directed to your Google+ page, which could then lead them to your site.
While we spent the majority of our interactive efforts on Twitter and Facebook, we regularly shared our content on our Google+ page. By making sure our our titles and descriptions were targeted to a specific key concept, we found that our Google+ posts showed up in Google searches for those key concepts. This allowed us to reach yet another “community” – searchers who may not necessarily know our business but who are interested in our topic.
Make it a part of your routine to share to Google+ whenever you post to Facebook. It only takes an extra minute or less.
It is often difficult to show a direct correlation between social media marketing efforts and the bottom line, particularly for smaller businesses. But when social media is viewed from the right perspective – as means of building your community of peers, prospects and customers – it’s clear that it is an important tool for marketing a business, large or small. And while it may be harder for smaller businesses with a small following to earn followers and interaction, we’ve proven that it can be done by understanding and taking advantage of the strengths of each particular platform. By following these tips, you can grow your following, increase reach, and gain valuable interaction in just a few short months.
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Sales Renewal’s insight:
A large business with widespread consumer appeal can naturally expect organic social media growth in terms of followers and interaction: people already know your name, are interested in your brand and are looking for answers. In this case, you may spend more time interacting with customers and keeping up with questions than you do just promoting content.
But what about if you are a small business with fewer resources, or in an industry not known for an interest in social media? After conducting our own social platform/content test for several months, we were able to prove that by investing a minimal, but regular, amount of time and effort, any business can grow its online social presence – for free.