Social Media Business Ideas
Businesses are increasingly relying on social media for marketing
Content
- Examples of Social Media Business Ideas
- Social media best practice for business
- Develop Strategies That Match the Client’s Goals
- Social Media Manager
- Market research
- Create a daily, weekly or monthly series
- Build relationships
- Run a contest or giveaway
- Begin Attracting Customers
- Post about industry hot topics
- Spy on the activities of the big companies in the industry you want to emulate
- Social Media Advertising Specialist
- Innovative business offering
- Social Analytics Specialist
Frequently Asked Questions
- How to Use Social Media for Small Businesses?
- How is it best to, maximise exposure for my business across my social media?
- Which social media ideas catch your eye?
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Examples of Social Media Business Ideas
There are many ways to approach starting a business on social media. The best place to start looking into ideas is by searching Google for “social media business ideas”. This will give you a list of sites where you can find inspiration and information.
Here are a few business owners who have found success in promoting their own company’s social media channel using some of these ideas. Create a blog series that focuses on one of the specific areas of expertise and knowledge that is needed to run a successful business. This could include tips about hiring the right employees, the best practices when creating an effective marketing campaign, or how to maintain good customer relations. By providing valuable information your followers can use, they will be more likely to stay subscribed and engaged with your content which will lead them back to your company website where they can find out more about what you offer. Use hashtags related to current events or popular culture trends as a way to start a dialogue with potential new customers. To keep your feed from looking stale, consider adding a few photos taken at a meet-and-greet event or hiring an individual on Instagram to whip up some original content that can be used on your social media accounts.
By creating a dedicated social media channel for your company you are going above and beyond what is expected from businesses these days. When followers know that they can come to your social media page for updates, news, and exclusive offers they are more likely to keep coming back. Implement some of the ideas mentioned above and watch your company’s social media presence grow in no time!
Social media best practice for business
If you want to build a successful social media presence, it’s important to understand the basics of social media marketing. Here are some tips from our experts on how to get started.
Creating a social media strategy
Before you start promoting your business on social media, you need to develop a social media marketing strategy. This includes identifying your goals and target audience, as well as creating content that aligns with your brand. Social media strategies help
“The first thing to do is think about your Social Media Marketing Strategy and how it fits into your business strategy,” says Sarah Mason, Social Marketing Manager at Social Media Examiner. “Once you have a plan in place you can start with the basics such as setting up your profiles on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.”
Creating content for social media
Once you’ve created a social media marketing strategy, you need to come up with content ideas that will engage your target audience. This includes creating blog posts, videos, images and infographics that are relevant to your brand.
“Your content must be top-notch in order for Social Media to be successful,” says John Rampton, co-founder of Due. “From blog posts that educate your potential customers, to infographics that tell a story or convey information in an engaging way, Social Media isn’t Social Media without content.”
Developing your social media presence
Once you’ve come up with some content ideas, it’s time to start promoting your business on social media. This includes setting up profiles on all the major social networks, as well as creating social media schedules that align with your goals.
“It can be helpful to create a Social Media Calendar where you map out your posts for each day and week in advance,” says Mason. “This will help you stay on track and ensure that your posts are timely and relevant.”
In summary research, social media best practices for your industry have a plan and a goal in mind. Are your posts and ads simply to build your brand, offer a place to get free information to solve your prospects main problem or to try and make direct sales. Build a strong follower base and make sure your posts are unique, helpful and original. Stay engaged and responsive to your followers and fans by building a relationship with them share links to your other social media pages. Keep your posts interesting, have useful industry facts with some humour and great images or video. Be bold and encourage engagement to promote your posts with timely updates including social ads, giveaways and highlight past customer experiences. Have clear goals for each series of posts and make sure you evaluate your results select the best-performing posts or ads to start another campaign. Monitor and respond to comments as consistently and responsively as possible.
Develop Strategies That Match the Client’s Goals
Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are designed to give users what they want. They’re not always the best tool for reaching business goals, though. For example, if you want to drive traffic to your website, then advertising on Facebook may not be the most effective way to reach your target audience. With that in mind, it’s important to develop social media strategies that match the client’s goals. Executing a solid strategy can drive social media traffic, improve brand awareness and increase sales.
Here are some strategies you can use to help achieve your clients’ business goals through social media marketing.
1) Repurpose Content with other Social Media Sharing platforms
Social media sharing plugins can help you repurpose content more effectively. For example, if your client’s website has an article that’s particularly popular, then sharing it on social media will increase brand awareness. It also helps to provide additional value for users who may not have seen the original post before and help with search engine optimisation and entity building. However, simply copying and pasting the link may not be the most effective way to share it. So, you can use social media sharing plugins to create a custom post that will grab users’ attention and help you stand out from the competition.
2) Use Images for Social Media Posts
Images are a great way to capture users’ attention and make your posts more engaging. They also help with brand awareness, as images are processed faster than text and can help you cut through the noise on social media. To make sure your posts stand out from the competition, be sure to use custom images instead of photos straight from general stock agencies where the image has been used many times before.
3) Create Custom Content for Social Media Posts
Social media users want something original and unique, so it’s important to create social media posts that stand out from the crowd. Using general stock images or repurposing content that has already been published diminishes your impact because it feels like you’re trying to sell something instead of offering value. If you’re not an expert at writing unique social media copy, then hire a writer who can help you with your social media marketing efforts.
4) Use Video to Educate Your Audience
People are generally more likely to watch a video than reading text, so using videos can help you connect with your audience on social media. You can also use them to provide tutorials or share short, engaging presentations that will educate customers and drive traffic to your website.
Social Media Manager
A social media manager will take care of all the technical aspects of running your online presence, including managing your content, scheduling posts, monitoring analytics, and keeping track of your social channels. The main role of this person is to ensure that everything runs smoothly so you don’t have to worry about it.
Many social media sites boast audiences larger than most countries so there’s definitely a potential business opportunity here. It’s also a job that requires social media expertise, basic computer skills and good communication.
Social Media Manager Responsibilities
- Manage social network accounts for brands or individuals, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.
- Manage social media campaigns such as contests and promotions to increase engagement with audiences and boost social traffic.
- Liaise with social media advertising agencies to create social ads.
- Post social media updates according to the social media policy set out by the company or client.
- Perform social listening tasks by identifying social trends, topics and influencers.
- Research social audience demographics using web analytics software.
- Create strategies for social engagement with audiences (e.g., social content, social timing).
- Monitor social media networks for brand mentions and respond to comments.
- Record social metrics such as reach, engagement rate and the number of social referrals.
- Schedule social media updates using an editorial calendar.
- Maintain social pages.
- Collaborate with other departments to develop social strategies for company brands or products.
Market research
When we think of social media, we typically think of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter or even social bookmarking sites like Digg. But social media is actually much more than just those things. It’s a way for people to communicate and interact online. Businesses can use social media to create an effective social media marketing strategy that helps them gain more exposure, reach new audiences and socialize their brand.
These small business marketing tips will help you utilize social media research to drive your social networking strategy.
Show your target market that you are active. To be truly effective with social media market research, show your audience that you are active on social media. It will catch their attention, and it demonstrates recent engagement on your part, which is an important factor that shows you aren’t just using social platforms for social media research, but that you’re actively socializing with your audience and potential customers. Social listening is simply monitoring social media sites for mentions of your company, product or service. This can help you get a good idea of what people are saying about you online – both the good and the bad. It can also help you find new customers and followers, and give you an idea of what topics people are interested in.
Create a daily, weekly or monthly series
social media posting or advertising has become one of the most popular methods for brands to connect with their audience. Creating a series of posts that are all on the same topic will give followers more to look at, increasing interaction and getting your message in front of more people.
With social media here are some ideas to get you started:
Daily Series Topics include
- social media channels, social trends, social insights or social predictions.
- Google Media Trends, what’s popular on social media today or current events like Who will win the FA Cup?
- Weekly Series Topics:
- can be social media updates, social media challenges or social media contests.
- Ideas of topics for the weekly series:
- Social Media Updates – what’s new on your social platform?
- Facebook Challenge – how many likes can you get in an hour?
- Instagram Contest – best picture wins a prize.
- Monthly Series Topics:
- can be social media results or social media statistics. Examples of monthly series topics:
- Social Media Results – social media statistics for small businesses by industry
- Social Media Statistics – social media trends worldwide
- Click-through rates – the number of people in a given time frame clicking your opt-in or buy link
Use Social Media To Work For Your Business
Be Social Build relationships
For social media to work for your business, it must be about the social connection and not about where on the internet you connect and what the media is.
The social part of social media is all about building relationships with the people you want as your customers or clients. The process that holds this together is built on four main social behaviours, connection, sharing, participating and showing empathy. Each one of these behaviours needs to be a necessary part of a social action to help build your brand and grow trust among your followers.
You first start by having a call-to-action on your blog article which enables people to ‘connect’ by reading your content which they find useful. This call-to-action works best using social share buttons, such as Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter which can sit with your company contact information and links to your social profiles on your websites at the beginning or end of the article. When a social call-to-action is used, you create opportunities to build relationships with your readers. The relationship starts when they return to your website or blog and click on the social media share buttons even if it’s just one social share button which automatically displays their social handle in the message box before sending to draw in like-minded people who will enjoy and find answers in the content you provide.
All of this happens in the world of social media, but it isn’t social media or social marketing. It is simple relationship building and making your brand a trustworthy place to find out the necessary information to help their business.
The process for social relationship building is key to any growing business which means you must be actively involved in actively building these relationships on a daily basis by blogging, posting or pinning images, joining in conversations happening on social platforms, following and engaging with potential clients.
Contact
For any inquiries about Social Media Marketing please email
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Run a Contest or Giveaway
Before you get started, consider a social media contest or giveaways as a means to attract prospects looking for a product or service related to the contest. To get a good response you’ll probably need to use paid ads to target your ideal prospect and in return, they will give you something back in the form of information, like a phone number or e-mail address. You should have a marketing strategy in place before you run a social media campaign of this nature because you will need an end date, a planned amount of contestants and whether there will only be one winner or a range of smaller give outs. Also, the information provided will ideally be put into a CRM so you can keep in touch in a consistent manner and nurture those leads so that one day they may become customers or clients.
One social media contest or giveaway is not going to magically bring thousands of new fans to your page overnight, but it can be the first step toward engaging your target market and building relationships with potential customers. As your social media contest or giveaway gains popularity, it can also help to increase brand awareness for your business. So don’t be afraid to get creative and have some fun with your next social media campaign! If you’re not sure where to start, there are a few things to keep in mind when planning a social media contest or giveaway:
Competition Terms and Conditions apply
- – What is the goal of your social media contest or giveaway?
- – Who is your target market?
- – What type of contest or giveaway will be most appealing to your target market?
- – When will the contest or giveaway run?
- – How will you promote the contest or giveaway?
- – What are the rules and regulations and privacy for the contest or giveaway?
- – How will you judge the contest or giveaway?
- – What are the prizes for the contest or giveaway?
- – Will you have multiple winners, or one big winner?
- – How will you contact the winners?
- – What is the end date for the contest or giveaway?
Once you’ve answered these questions, you’re ready to kick off your social media contest or giveaway. Make sure to take advantage of social media by posting regularly before, during and after the contest or giveaway so contestants don’t forget about it or have a chance for a late entry and to see who got pulled out of the hat and won. You may want to do a post about the benefits for the winner and get a short interview or comment. Promote or repurpose the content of your business on as many sites as possible not just your social sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn and Pinterest. This will attract more leads who have a chance to come to your platform and comment, like and share.
Sponsorships are a great way to get social media contests or giveaways off the ground. This can be an up-and-coming social site like Reddit, landing pages with social icons you can easily add to social sites or even a free service that offers social shares for driving traffic. You just have to look around depending on what social site you want to use and explore the options.
Begin Attracting Customers
People may readily access the internet from anywhere at any time thanks to home PCs, laptops, tablets, mobile phones, and even internet-enabled smart televisions. Faster broadband internet connections, new fast connecting devices, and new online applications have all contributed to a shift in how people work, research, socialise, and shop.
A social media content schedule will help you to keep up with interesting and informative news on social media sites. With technology and software automation you have the opportunity to engage across multiple sites simultaneously. But you can’t just create social media accounts and think people will visit them and share like crazy. You need to have a plan, be social, create and also curate interesting posts (or reposts) and engage with other users on social sites like Twitter, Google Business Profile, Pinterest, YouTube, etc. Not just personal, but that is effective in certain cases, but social sites for your business.
If you want to be promoting as a business on Facebook or Instagram you should create a page for your business instead of using a personal account as most startups do. A business page is useful as its there to highlight your brand. Not just a logo or a colour theme, but also an idea of who you are what you can do for companies and how that will make their business better and more profitable.
A lot of people mix business with personal pages content where their friends and family are. It is a good idea to have business type posts, inspiring quotations as well as family stuff on the page, but not images of your family dinner, because when you search out potential clients or prospects and comment useful advice on one of their threads if they find it interesting or thought-provoking they will for sure visit your personal profile to see who you really are and what else you’ve got to say. If you don’t have any of the right content there looking for they will leave without another thought. So, you should post, work or business type posts as well as have an optimised page so no matter where they click you’ll send them to a landing page to temp them to give you their details.
There are many social media platforms that cater to different audiences with different interests, so it is important for businesses to research which social media sites their target market uses and focus their marketing efforts there. For example, if your target market is stay-at-home mothers, Facebook and Pinterest would be good social media sites to use for marketing, as these sites are popular among this demographic. If you are targeting businessmen and women, LinkedIn would be a better social media site to use.
Once you have decided which social media sites to focus on, you can create social media accounts for your business. Before you start creating content, it is important to know how social media sites work. Each social media site has its own optimal social networking conventions and etiquette. It is important to be aware of them so that you are not considered a novice when engaging with other users on social networking sites.
You should also familiarise yourself with social media marketing tools and strategies. There are many social media marketing tools and strategies that can help you to improve your social media marketing efforts. For example, scheduling tools like Hootsuite can help you to schedule your posts in advance so that you do not have to worry about posting content at the last minute.
Post About Industry Hot Topics
The audience you attract could be relevant to a specific niche, company, or even just a specific business idea you’re thinking about. It’s all up to you to research each industry you want to market to and create an irresistible offer for your target market for you to post or use paid ads. Some businesses operate within a small space so they know where to find their audience to show them an offer that is congruent with the niche and each sale has a high lifetime value making the business very profitable and one that can grow. Others don’t really know who their audience is so they can’t pinpoint a great offer for that industry.
Businesses need to make social media marketing a priority to diversify their traffic sources. Having social media followers, that can help you generate targeted traffic for your business because it helps expand your online presence and grow your brand.
Spy on the activities of the big companies in the industry you want to emulate
Social media marketing for small businesses can be extremely effective when done correctly. However, it’s important to understand what strategies the big players in your industry are using so that you can emulate their successes.
By using competition analysis tactics, you can measure engagement and success of their campaigns to attract, engage potential clients then build relationships with them with the aim of increasing sales.
This will help you to better understand what content is resonating with your target audience and how you can improve your own social media marketing strategy. Additionally, it will show you what tactics aren’t working for your competitors and give you the opportunity to capitalize on this.
So, how can you go about spying on your competitors?
There are a few different ways that you can do this. Firstly, you can use social media monitoring tools to track mentions of your competitors on social media. This will give you an overview of what people are saying about them and how they’re interacting with their audience.
You can also use social media listening tools to track the content that your competitors are sharing. This will help you to see what type of content is responsive to their audience and how you can adapt your own strategy to better align with theirs.
Finally, you can use social media analytics tools to measure the engagement that your competitor’s social media posts are receiving. This will give you an idea of what types of social content are getting the most attention from their audience and allow you to compare social media
reach between competitors.
This will help you to adjust your social media strategy so that it is more engaging and successful. It can also highlight which channels
your competitor’s social media posts are resonating with, allowing you to take a similar approach on those.
Social Media Advertising Specialist
A social media advertising specialist can help you create and implement a marketing strategy for your small business that gets results far quicker than other online marketing efforts.
By targeting the right audience and engaging them with relevant content and a great offer, paid social media ad specialists can help you attract potential clients and build relationships with them to get them to trust and recommend your digital content. Your freelancer or digital agency should have a thorough understanding of social media engagement and analytics to help your business take full advantage of the campaign and its targeting. Ideally, several ads will be created and tested in the market to find a winning formula. In each iteration, one part of the media will be changed and compared to the previous successful ad like images, headlines or body text, you may want to try short versus long-form video ads.
There is no one answer and the only way to find a winning combination is to test multiple ads and work through by adding more ads until you find that winning formula. There is of course a shortcut if you only market to one specific segment of a market and you already have a lot of data to start getting a successful campaign going faster.
However, most small businesses don’t have that luxury so the social media advertising specialist will need to help you build customer personas. Once you know your customer persona, you can start targeting social media ads to those people specifically. Your agency should be able to help you target your ads on common popular platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram.
Once you have ads running, it’s time to shift your focus back to social media engagement. To build relationships with potential clients and get them talking about your company online through social sharing. You may want to base your PPC campaign on a very successful social post or one of your blog posts as a start. The thing is even PPC need time to build up data so you can make these assumptions as mentioned above and realise there is no quick fix. With paid ads, you still have to spend some money to acquire the necessary data to start split testing the media even before you get any opt-in to your forms.
Innovative Business Offering
In today’s digital age, social media has become an essential tool for businesses of all sizes. Not only does social media allow businesses to connect with current, past and potential customers online, but it also provides a platform for businesses to share their unique stories and brand with the digital world online.
For small businesses, social media can be an especially valuable tool for marketing and building relationships with customers. In fact, social media is one of the most cost-effective ways for small businesses to reach a large number of people easily. And, as social media platforms continue to grow in popularity, it’s becoming increasingly important for small businesses to have social media marketing strategies in place.
If you’re looking for some innovative social media business ideas for your small business, here are some strategies to help you connect with customers and build relationships.
- – Post a relevant photo on social media channels one that grabs attention
- – Ask questions in social media posts to encourage social conversations
- – Sponsor social contests or giveaways to increase engagement levels
- – Incentivise social media users to post reviews about your business by offering a special bonus
- – Monitor social media chatter to see what people are saying about you, then take the right course of action to fix any issues if needed
- – Respond promptly to comments and reviews on social media channels
- – Post content that educates users about the benefits of your product or service
- – Share photos and videos that give a behind-the-scenes look at your business
- – Host social media chats with industry experts to provide valuable insights to followers
By implementing some of these social media marketing strategies, you can connect with customers and build relationships that will help your business grow. So, what are you waiting for? Get started today!
Social Analytics Specialist
Google Analytics is an online traffic monitoring and reporting service offered by Google. And as a social media marketing specialist for small businesses, one of the most important things to focus on is analytics. There is other software to provide a useful analytics package but most of them use an API key and use Google data anyway. By using Google Analytics, and it’s free, I can measure and compare the performance of social media campaigns to help optimise them, there’s also Google ads including YouTube and the display network. This not only improves the effectiveness of the campaigns but also helps to attract and engage potential clients. Without spending money on ads and gathering the data produced you are then in a much better place to start testing to improve your Digital marketing overall.
Google Analytics data can be broken down into sessions and users. For social media marketing, you’ll want to look at the number of users or unique visitors. Sessions are a little more difficult to track because it includes all the page views on your website for that time period but if you’re looking at social media traffic only then it’s not as important. If social networks are adding that much value then you may want to look into tracking social media sessions as well.
How does social media fit in with Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a very traditional and standard way of gathering data and this is why social networks can be useful if you know where to make changes and improve performance, it brings more innovative business strategies to the table. Methods of social media marketing include social ads, organic (SEO), press announcements (PR) and other business intelligence like Geo-Location, Demographics and the technology that accessed your content. The more potential clients for your business who are engaging with it on social networks, the more likely you are able to attract them through a marketing funnel and convert them into customers.
Google Analytics will show you how social campaigns interact with your website traffic which social sites direct people to visit your website and how well social media is working for you. It can also show you the bounce rate or how many people visit one page on your website or platform and then leave without visiting any other pages. You can enhance the resulting data by upgrading to the Google Data Studio and combine with Google Tag Manager for amazing flexibility to record and produce detailed client reports.
You can see what social networks are sending you the most traffic and then focus on those sites to increase your marketing efforts. You’ll also be able to see which social media content is being shared the most and what’s driving people to your target site which might be a landing page away from your website.
With this data, you can start to build effective social and marketing strategy relationships with potential customers on social media. You can see what they’re interested in and craft your marketing messages around those topics. You can also post helpful blog articles, infographics or images that will attract their attention and keep them coming back to discover more useful content.
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FAQ
Most frequent questions and answers
How to Use Social Media for Small Businesses?
Enable Ads – The company’s social media feed will show up to its viewers as a paid ad, making it more noticeable and likely to get a click.
Use Hashtags – Use hashtags associated with the industry you specialize in. “#” followed by popular terms utilized by people in the niche. Engage With Others – Interact with users on social media sites like Twitter or Instagram who might be potential customers. Write original content for your blog on topics of interest to your followers, which can make them want to click through and learn more about your products or services. Collaborate With Influencers – Contribute guest posts on blogs that target businesses of similar size or industry
How is it best to, maximise exposure for my business across my social media?
There are a lot of things you can do. First, understand your brand and choose a few social channels to focus on. Choose the network(s) which you find most effective for establishing a strong presence and investing time in cultivating relationships with community builders, influencers, moderators and other relevant brands. Join conversations that show interest in related topics as it is now more important than ever to respond quickly to comments or questions from potential customers. The key thing is consistency. Planning an editorial calendar will help with that as it highlights who you need to react or post about at specific times so you don’t have to fall behind on posts or take too much time away from worrying about scheduling posts across different platforms.
Which social media ideas catch your eye?
If you’re trying to find how social media could help your small business, the answer is simple: talking with your customers. Develop a targeted audience and be as authentic as possible. Build an email list from those who have signed up for updates from your company’s website, then use that list to provide subscribers with content that they will enjoy. In order to grow a community on Facebook or any other social site, it’s important not only to network but also to understand segments of the population and what they want from you as a small business owner. This kind of understanding should ultimately lead to smarter marketing campaigns and better branding efforts in online channels, all of which could increase growth and branding efforts without having increased costs or pressures on limited resources.