Social Media Management for Your Small Business

Many small business owners don’t think that they need to be marketing on social media, keep up with their profiles or even pay attention to social media management because they don’t think their business will benefit from it. That’s just not true.

Small businesses can and should use social media to stay top of mind and grow word-of-mouth referrals. But, there is a right way and a wrong way to do it. The key to good small business social media marketing is to humanize your brand and make it easily approachable for viewers. Interaction with customers (or potential customers) is far easier to achieve through social media than expecting someone to fill out a generic contact form on your website.

When you are able to create a social media presence that is both recognizable by viewers and approachable by those users that wish to interact with you or allow you to occupy some space on their feed, you will achieve top-of-mind awareness and word-of-mouth referrals. When people are sitting around on a Friday night trying to figure out where they want to go eat dinner or standing in line at the store figuring out what store to make their next purchase at, the odds of them choosing your business increase exponentially if they’ve consistently seen your brand messages popping up in their social media feeds.

Here are some stats related to local business social media marketing:

• 51% of internet traffic is from mobile devices, which includes social media usage
• Around 75% of adults are using social media now…which has grown from only 7% in 2005
• The average adult spends around 40 minutes per day on Facebook
• Customers that follow a brand on Twitter are 47% more likely to visit the business and make a purchase
• 90% of people look at online reviews before making a purchase decision. Of those, 88% consider an online review to be just as trustworthy as a personal recommendation from a friend or family member