5 Common Questions about Social Media Marketing

Social media, in a nutshell, is an effective way to maintain top-of-mind awareness all while building an active and loyal fan base for your business.

But with great power, comes great responsibility. Social media for businesses needs to be executed in a way that addresses goals for the business but, and more importantly, properly serves their audience in an authentic manner.

How do you create a social media strategy for my SMB business?

First, you need to consider your goals. And no, I don’t mean goals like go viral, or get TikTok famous. I mean real, meaningful goals that support your business.

Goal setting is a core component of all marketing and business strategies so social media is no exception. With a wide range of social capabilities, it can be difficult to determine exactly what your objectives should be. For guidance, here are a few common social media goals to consider:

With an overarching goal for your campaign to provide direction, the next step in creating a great social media campaign is to understand what metrics are available, which ones to track, and which ones are not.

While most social media platforms offer a vast array of metrics, it’s important to not view them the same. Vanity metrics can offer a lot of wow factors, but they aren’t always a good way to measure successes. The most common vanity metric is follower count, or Page Likes, because it’s easy to see growth but the problem with this metric doesn’t show the entire story. You may have a lot of followers or likes but no one is engaging with your posts.

What metrics should I track on my business’s social media accounts?

Engagement metrics offer a better picture because they can tell you the health of your relationship between you and your audience. These specific metrics may be called slightly different depending on the platform but Reach, Clicks, and Engagement are the top metrics you want to track.

Now before you start creating oodles and oodles of content (I promise we’re almost there). I highly, highly, recommend you investigate what your competitors are doing. And if you think you don’t have competitors, you do. Trust me.

Should I care what my competitors are doing on social media?

Analyze what competitors are doing by reviewing their content. What’s making them successful? What type of content are they posting? When are they posting? What kind of engagement are they getting from their audience?

The simplest way to find competitors is through a simple Google search. Look up your most common keywords and phrases then see who shows up. For example, let’s try “handmade natural soaps colorado springs”.

Exclude major retailers like Amazon and Bath & Body Works. Search for other companies, especially local to the area, then check out their social media accounts. (commonly businesses will link to their socials from their website)

Here are a few local handmade soap companies in the Colorado Springs area, and a few details about each.

Besides analyzing the basic metrics of a client, make notes of the content. And if you’re needing inspiration on content, look to the big fish in your industry. There’s a reason they’re so successful, and that’s most likely due to them employing an 80/20 rule of 80% informative and helpful to 20% sales and promotional.

Another reason some businesses are so successful in their social media is that they are consistent. Consistency is by far the most important aspect of any social media strategy. This is because of the fast-paced nature of all the current social media platforms. Between ever-changing algorithms and the sheer volume of activity creating a consistent posting schedule is important.

When should I post on social media to get the best results?

Before searching for the perfect social media schedule for your business refer back to your competitors. What are the successful ones doing? You can also refer to social media experts like Sprout Social. They release an annual report on the best times to post on social media that provides an easily digestible report.

While knowing when to post can be difficult to determine the best advice I have is to test, test, test. Play around with frequency and timing. Just because a report says Tuesdays at 10:30a is great for educational-type content. But if your the majority of your audience is teachers that may not provide the best response.

My team and I have created a sample calendar based on recent research that offers a baseline for when to post on Facebook, Linkedin, and Instagram. Check it out and download your own copy.

[cta for sample social media calendars]

Now that you know when to post… what do you post? Creating content is by far the most difficult part for most businesses. I totally understand and empathize with you. Great ideas flitter in all the time but as soon as you have to create something — POOF 🤯 — gone.

What kind of content should I share on my business’s social media account?

Content can be broken down into 5 different post themes. If you downloaded the sample social media calendars you’ll notice they utilize these themes. These post themes are not only meant to help come up with content faster but you can also batch the creation of posts. For example, if you have 6 motivational & fun posts to create do them all together. This keeps your thought process simpler and ultimately makes your posts more consistent in style. (which is important for your overall branding)

Here are 5 Post Themes to help you create social media content for your business

So there you have it. You now have questions answered about how to use social media for your business. I know this isn’t a complete guide but let’s be real ain’t nobody has time for that. 😉

But in all seriousness, this information should set you on a path for success with your social media campaign. However, if you still have questions, let’s chat.