SMALL BUSINESS TIP #15: How To Use Social Media When Starting Your Business

Few better tools give more value to new businesses than social media. But, how to use social media when starting your business? In this post, we’ll give you the answers.

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Know Your Target Audience

When marketing your business on social media, an ideal scenario is to hit all the right categories. This will allow you to target specific demographics that best describe your ideal customer. But, how would you know who your ideal customer is?

In marketing, there is a strategy called “buyer persona.” A buyer persona is the ideal imaginary customer you create to explain better how your ideal customer behaves and uses your product or service. It is a tool that goes hand-in-hand with social media marketing.

Prospective entrepreneurs must get to know their target audiences first before using social media to market their products and services.

Once you do that, the next step is to get your product on social media and start advertising. Luckily, social media platforms allow you to create advertising campaigns based on specific search parameters.

Add the parameters of your ideal customer, such as age, gender, interests, etc., to advertise accurately to the right audiences.

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Engage With Your Customers

The most successful brands frequently interact with their followers on social media. Interaction on social media is one way to generate more engagement, and engagement helps create authentic relationships with your clients.

The better the relationship between your brand and your clients, the easier it is to turn clients into brand advocates. Ultimately, the more you engage with your clients, the more sales leads you generate.

Authenticity and engagement are crucial components of a successful social media strategy, as it is the only way to get quality clients on board.

Create Customer-Specific Content

You won’t always advertise your products and services on social media. Quite the contrary. You will fill most of the publishing gaps with content.

As they say in digital marketing, “Content is king.” So, regardless of your industry, you want to create quality and customer-specific content that resonates with your followers.

Moreover, you’ll want to create a content-publishing calendar in advance. The calendar will outline when to publish content and what pieces of content to publish. That way, you will always know when to publish and can generate the content beforehand. You can even go months in advance when generating the ideal content and be prepared for any scenario.

If you look at the most inspiring people on social media, they always create content that their followers are interested in. It’s the only way for their followers to stick around. Your goal is to do the same.

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Use Hashtags & Similar Components

Each social media platform has unique components that allow us to find pages or accounts that best resonate with our interests. For prospective entrepreneurs looking to utilize social media to grow their businesses, these components can make the difference between success and failure.

Most of you are familiar with the concept of #hashtags. But, did you know that different social media platforms have similar components that act the same way as hashtags?

Here are the components you need to know about regarding various social media platforms:

• Instagram – Hashtags
• Facebook – Groups
• X – Hashtags
• LinkedIn – Hashtags and Groups

By properly utilizing these components, entrepreneurs can grow their social profiles and attract more potential customers over their brand accounts.

For example, the simplest way to use hashtags is to add the hashtag to the company profile bio and each post. That way, the specific content or the profile will appear on searches for that particular hashtag.

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Focus on Visuals

People indeed use social media to stay up to date with news and stories from friends and family. But, they also use social media for fun. So between cat videos and news reports, your content will also appear.

The trick to make any follower interact with your post is to make it interesting for them to click on it and expand it. The best way to do that is by using visuals.

Captivating visuals are more beneficial than you could ever imagine. Whenever your followers see an accompanying photo, they’re more likely to interact with your post before moving on to the next thing on their feed.

You have a small window to captivate your audience before your post gets lost in the feed. Relevant and captivating visuals in your posts grab attention and entice people to interact with you.

The Benefits of Social Media When Starting A Business

Now that we’ve discussed how to use social media, we will end this guide by outlining its benefits for your new business.

Social media offers businesses the possibility to connect with anyone using these platforms. Therefore, the possibilities for growing your business on these platforms are endless.

Here are the benefits you need to be aware of when starting a new business:

• Attracting customers
• Receiving customer feedback
• Building loyalty
• Increasing market reach
• Access to international markets
• Ability to conduct market research
• Develop your brand

Conclusion

We hope you have a better grasph on the correct ways to use social media when starting your business now.

The biggest benefit of social media is the unlimited potential reach it gives businesses. This reach results in followers. If you do your marketing right, every follower across your social channels can be a website visitor and even a paying client.

All that’s left is to curate your social media strategy to grow your social profiles and reap the benefits.

Author Bio

Erik Bergman co-founded Catena Media and helped grow it to over 300 employees and a $200 million valuation before stepping away to start Great.com, an iGaming organization that donates 100% of its profits to environmental charities. In addition to running a successful online business, Erik also hosts the Becoming Great podcast, shares entrepreneurship tips with his more than 1 million social media followers and contributes to sites like Entrepreneuer.com, Business Insider, Foundr, and Forbes.