A Guide to Social Media Marketing for Small Business Owners

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Social media marketing is the process of using platforms to promote products or services, increase brand awareness, engage with audiences, and drive traffic to a website. This includes publishing high-quality content, running ads, responding to comments and messages, and tracking and analyzing metrics.

Social media marketing consists of five main elements:
A marketing strategy will include goals, target audiences, usage of our employment database key platforms, and a content strategy for specific social media platforms. Essentially, it defines why, where, and what a company will publish, as well as what metrics will be tracked.
Publishing is how social content is actually created and delivered to an audience. You'll need to decide for yourself how often and when to publish, as well as what publishing and scheduling tools you'll need to support the process.
Marketing allows you to directly interact with your audience. You can like or reply to comments on your posts, track mentions of your business on websites, and receive and reply to direct messages from users.
All social media posts can be classified as either paid or organic content. Organic content is free to publish and its reach depends on the number of followers and the platform’s algorithm. Paid content (or advertising) allows businesses to use paid platforms to promote their posts to more people and provide the ability to target a specific audience.
Analytics is a set of methods used to monitor the effectiveness of social media campaigns. It involves tracking, viewing, and analyzing metrics including account or post reach, views, engagement, clicks, and mentions.
Pros and Cons of Social Media Marketing for Small Businesses

Marketing is popular among all types of businesses – over 96% of small businesses use social media channels as part of their marketing strategies. Here is an overview of the benefits and some significant disadvantages for small eCommerce businesses:

Benefits of Social Media Marketing
Increase Sales: An effective marketing campaign can generate leads, increase brand awareness, and drive traffic to your website—all of which can increase sales.
High Return on Investment (ROI): Organic marketing can be cost-effective because it costs virtually nothing to post on a social media platform — especially when compared to the relatively high costs and low reach of traditional marketing channels like billboards and print ads.
Improved customer relationships. Companies can use social media to directly interact with current and potential customers, solve their problems, or get immediate answers to any questions. Positive interactions can improve customer relationships and increase brand awareness.
Disadvantages of Social Media Marketing
This can be time-consuming. Building a strong presence on multiple platforms takes time. For example, depending on your goals, you may need to create and publish more than 20 posts per week on each of your key social platforms and dedicate an additional two hours per day to community management.
Diverse and specialized skills are required. The ideal social media manager is an expert (or at least competent) in graphic design, photography, videography, content writing, and customer service. They are also well versed in platform-specific best practices and up-to-date with social media trends. It can be challenging for a small business to meet all of these expectations internally, and outsourcing to freelancers or social media marketing agencies can be expensive.
Will not reach all audience segments. Social media marketing only reaches social media users. If your audience is located elsewhere, you may want to consider other marketing tactics.
Effective content marketing starts with a plan. Here’s how to develop a marketing strategy in six steps:

1. Determine your budget and goals

Creating a social media marketing plan should start with reviewing your digital marketing budget. There may be costs associated with promoting social media posts, hiring an agency or freelancer, and hiring an employee to run social media campaigns in-house.

2. Define your target audience

In order to determine the demographics of active users on each of the most popular social media platforms, you should conduct audience research. Then, determine the target audience for your social media activities. Knowing who is active on each platform will help you determine which platforms your business should be present on.

3. Research competitors

In some cases, you can speed up the audience research process by conducting a competitive analysis. Competitive analysis can also help you identify successful content types, brand characteristics, and posting styles. Competitor research can help you identify tactics that will work.

4. Select social networking sites.

When choosing a platform for your marketing strategy, you need to start with your audience, eliminating any platforms that don’t match your stated target audiences. Then consider the features, display methods, and how certain types of content perform on individual social media platforms. A social media marketing strategy can also include a combination of different tactics for each individual social media platform.

5. Define your brand on social media

While social media content will reflect the core brand style, you may want to slightly alter the visuals, tone, and tone of voice depending on the social media channel.

6. Develop a content strategy

You can use your goals, audience research, and competitive analysis to determine key topics, post types, and frequency, as well as the time of day to post on each platform. One general rule of thumb for an effective marketing strategy is that 80% of your content should entertain and inform, and 20% should directly promote your company.



Social Media Marketing Metrics
Marketing teams use social media metrics to evaluate campaign results and identify successful tactics so they can adjust their strategy to optimize results. Here is a list of metrics that provide valuable insights:

The number of unique users who will see the publication.
Impressions: The number of times a post is shown to users.
Engagement: The number of likes, comments, clicks, shares, or direct messages on a single post or across the entire account.
Engagement Rate: The percentage of users who were interested in a post out of the total number of those who saw it. The formula for calculating this metric is: Engagement Rate = Post Engagement / Post Reach.
Boost Rate: The percentage of followers who shared a post out of all followers. The formula for this is: Boost Rate = Number of posts shared / Total followers of the account.
Click-through rate. The percentage of people who clicked on a link in a post over the entire time the post was viewed. The formula for this is: Click-through rate = # of post link clicks / # of post impressions.
Account Views: The number of people who view the company's profiles.
Audience Growth Rate: A measure of how fast your audience is growing, expressed as a percentage. The formula for this is: Audience Growth Rate = (number of new subscribers in a given time period / total number of subscribers) x 100.
Cost per click (CPC): A cost-effectiveness metric that measures how much a post is paid for each click it receives. The formula for this is: cost per click = advertising spend / number of clicks.
Conversion rate: The percentage of people who take the desired action, such as buying a product or filling out a contact form. The formula for this is: Conversion rate = number of impressions / number of people who take the desired action.
Return on Investment (ROI): A measure of the profitability of a social media marketing campaign. The formula for this is: ROI = Profit Attributable to the Campaign / Total Cost of the Campaign.
Mentions: The number of times users mention the company on the social platform.
Share of Social Media Visibility (SoSV): The frequency of your company's mentions compared to your competitors, expressed as a percentage. The formula for this is: SoSV = (number of mentions of your brand / number of mentions of your competitors' brands) x 100.
Social Sentiment. The breakdown of neutral, positive, and negative reviews about your business. The formula for this is: Social Sentiment = (Total Positive Mentions - Total Negative Mentions) / Total Mentions.