Social media is an incredibly powerful tool that can help your small business to gain traction, as well as helping you to build your brand and attract new customers. We understand the unique challenges that small businesses face when it comes to standing out online in a saturated market.
A strong social media presence can help you to reach potential customers, engage with them, and promote your services in a cost-effective and organic way. Whether you’re just getting started or looking to sharpen up your business strategy, here’s how you can use social media to grow your business.
Why is social media so important for small businesses?
Platforms like LinkedIn may be your first thought when it comes to social media for your business. However, utilising platforms like Facebook, Instagram and X, as well as TikTok, Bluesky and YouTube, has become essential to ensure your reach is as wide as possible.
All of these platforms can benefit your business and help you to:
Increase visibility - Your potential and existing customers are already scrolling through social media in their spare time, A professional social media presence helps them to find you and identify you easily.
Engage with your customers - Social media allows you to communicate directly with your customers, which means you can chat, answer questions, and resolve problems.
Build trust - Posting regularly, maintaining a presence and interacting with your audience helps to establish yourself as reliable and approachable.
Drive traffic to your website - By sharing links, information, new features and offers, you can direct traffic from social media straight to your sight.
Generate leads - Social media is a powerful platform for lead generation and communication with customers, and you can also utilise ads to boost reach.
Ways to boost your social media presence
Ready to make the most of your social media presence? Here are four simple pointers to get started:
Build a consistent brand across all platforms
First impressions matter, and ensuring your brand is consistent across all platforms is key to reflecting your brand values wherever you are visible. Make sure you use the same business name and branding on all social media platforms, and make sure to keep your tone professional and consistent. This helps to build trust and create a brand voice. Make sure your social media presence aligns with your website branding.
Engage with your audience
Ensuring that you encourage engagement with your customers helps them to feel seen and heard. Use your platforms to connect with people and communicate. Make sure you respond to comments, ask questions, and encourage interaction. This can add a human touch and humanise your business.
Share valuable and relevant content
Make sure the social media content you post aligns with your brand and provides value to your audience. This could be a new blog post, industry news, customer success stories, use cases, or behind-the-scenes content. With so much content vying for attention, you need to make sure you stand out.
Create strong Call-to-Actions
Make sure that the next steps you want your customers to take are clear. This could be a link to your website, a follow-up question for them to reply to in the comments, or an invitation to share your post. The more engagements your posts get, the more likely others are to see them.
How a strong social media presence can boost customer satisfaction
Having the tools to communicate effectively with your customers is key. Social media gives you the ability to showcase your products and services, as well as giving your customers a voice and humanising your brand. This is crucial for fostering trust.
Additionally, consider getting a business phone number to add to your social media bios, giving yourself a visible real world presence that your followers can use to get in contact with you directly. Even better, with a virtual phone number you can sidestep putting your personal contact details online, giving you better work-life balance.
Setting up a social media account doesn’t have to be overwhelming. If you're just starting out, begin with one or two platforms you know you will be able to use consistently. Over time, build momentum.
Social media is key to building on existing relationships, attracting new business, and growing your presence.
And it’s not going anywhere any time soon - so don’t wait to get started!