Social media marketing for the first time

Are you an aspiring small business owner looking to expand your reach into the unknown realm of social media? Do you not know what social media is and how it can be applied to help your small business to bring in more revenue and build your customer base? These are some of the questions I hope to answer.

Most small business owners are not of the younger generations that the social media phenomenon started in. Most small business owners from my experiences are between the ages of 30 to 50 years of age and may not know anything about social media or at least enough about it to start becoming interactive in it. This is something that you should not be worried about, it should be something that you should be excited about. We will try to lay out a few of the major social media avenues that you can take and how to get started in them. Before we begin laying out how everything works, you need to understand that if you do decided to go down this avenue, do not get discouraged and quit. You will need to stay proactive and be interactive with your followers. We will be using Facebook as our example.

·         Getting started

o    The first steps you will need to take is to figure out which of the social media websites you will be working with. Facebook and Twitter are one the biggest social media websites around. They are easy to setup and get started with.

·         Setting up

o    Your next step will be to create an account in each one of these websites. After you get the initial account information set up, you will need to dive into your page and add content. This content will consist of getting your logo, company description and any other relevant information added to your page.

·         Getting customers to your page

o    After you have everything set up, what is next? Your next setup will be to draw people to you page. This can be down in quite a few different ways. Put your page on your business cards, advertisements and your webpage. In addition you can also offer customer discounts if they “like” your page. Offer your customers a 5% discount or something free, if they like your page. A 5% discount is nothing if you can attract more customers. Facebook is amazing in the sense that friends of friends will be able to see your page, if you make regular postings and keep on top of it.

·         Replying

o    Replying to everything is a good practice to get into. Regardless of positive or negative comments, you need to reply to it. A negative comment that is unanswered is worse than the negative comment itself. If you show to your customers that you recognized the problem and are trying to resolve it they will respect you more for it. When it comes to the positives comments, you also need to respond to these. With both negative and positive comments, thank the poster for submitting a post of your page.

·         Allocating time to your page

o    If you feel as the business owner you do not have time to keep on top of your social media page, you need to assign someone to it. This will ensure your page is getting regular updates, comments are being replied to and probably the most important thing being that your page will grow with regular updates.

·         It will take time

o    Your social media presence will take time. That is probably one of the most important things you need to understand. Your social media page will not be an overnight success, but with time and dedication it can be as big as you can imagine it to be.

·         Expanding

o    Once you become familiar with how social media works, look to expand. Do not only look at the most popular social media sites, but try to expand your reach to the lesser known social media sites. These lesser known sites might climb in popularity and you will be there when it does.

As a final thought, make sure to make customers aware of your social media presence. Give your customers incentives for joining your page through discounts or any other means you see fit. Reply to all sorts of feedback regardless of it being positive or negative. Stay on top of your page, do not let it go into the ground by not keeping up with it. Allocate time to your page by either maintaining it yourself, assigning some to maintain it or bringing in an outside source to keep it maintained. As a general note it is normally better to keep the maintenance of your social media pages in house so that you have full control over it. Your social media page will take time, be patient.

-Travis Sloneker