Social media presence is not optional anymore, at least not for any business that wants to grow and be successful. While bigger, well-known businesses might have the power and the budget to be able to get a lot more visibility on digital platforms, small businesses can level the playing field with their content, personal touch and how well they know their target audience.
How, you ask? By building a community on social media of course. Keep reading to find out how you can use your community to create a successful business:
-
Contents
Stay Consistent
It’s so easy to get disheartened by social media when things don’t go your way. There will be a test and learn phase with your content but once you know what works for you, you just have to remember to keep up with it. Stay consistent with the frequency of your posts, your brand tone of voice and the information you share with your followers. The more people get used to it, the more likely they’ll develop a sense of loyalty to your brand which is the first step to building a community.
As a small business, you might have less time on your hands to spend on social media but your biggest advantage is that you are your brand. So tell your story, be yourself and people will love seeing the personal side to your brand.
-
Communicate
Start communicating with your audience by listening to them. Listen to their questions, problems and worries to be able to understand them better and create more customised content. By creating relevant content that answers your customers’ questions, gives them advice, shows them you appreciate them, you’ll be encouraging them to keep following you and engaging with your posts.
The ongoing communication you’ll have with your audience will build trust, which will eventually lead to loyal customers.
-
Add Value
Your promotional post that only talks about how good your product is, is not the reason people want to follow you. Sure, you need to do that too, but remember people will only keep following you if you’re providing them with value.
If you own a small business, this should be pretty easy since the business you own would most likely be around something you’re passionate about. Let’s say you own a dog grooming products business, if you keep posting how good your dog shampoo smells or how natural your paw balm is, people will unfollow you at one point because it’s not a piece of information that helps them care for their dogs. However, if you were talking about what would help certain skin conditions, or giving people advice on how to cut their dog’s nails, you would be giving your audience a reason to keep following you.
Once they start asking for advice from you on certain subjects, that’s when you know they look at you as a credible source and that is one massive step towards building a community.
-
Get your audience involved
The quickest way to get people to start feeling loyal to your brand is to get them involved. You can do this by asking them for ideas or creating a competition that requires them to create and share their own content. This would firstly lead to you having free re-shareable content created for you but also when you share user-generated content, that user automatically becomes involved in your brand and even start advocating for your brand.
This is such a simple thing to start doing. Just tell people to tag you in their photos if they’d like to be featured on your page. Once they start doing this, re-share these posts on your stories or simply re-post them to your timeline. This will not only make that specific user have positive feelings towards your brand, but it will also encourage other people to do the same as they’ll know they have a chance of being re-posted by you.
As a small business, if you used to rely on physical events like trade shows to grow your business, you might want to start thinking about switching to the biggest virtual event there is, social media. The good thing about it is that this event can’t be cancelled.
Start building your community on social media with these quick tips, because that community can be worth 1000 events if you use it properly.
Not sure where to start with your social media channels? Or maybe you just simply don’t have too much time to manage your social media accounts? Check out our Social Media Training for Small Businesses and get our expert team’s help growing your business.
