Social Media For Small Businesses

Successful small business marketing on social media today means striking a balance between traditional marketing and posting for the way most people consume social media these days.

It’s not enough to just be sharing your products and services, but neither is it necessarily effective to be jumping on every trending sound.

How content serves brick and mortar businesses

When my husband opened his retail business, I wanted to help in any way I could, and the most obvious fit for me was to help with his social media. I’ve been creating content online since 2016 – first in written form as a blogger and later in short form video on Tiktok. I grew to millions of views in each format and successfully marketed not just my content but both digital and physical products. Over the course of time I dedicated to this, I made over $200,000.00 in revenue so not only was my experience across formats but it was proven to generate income. 

From the start, we shared content across Tiktok, Facebook, and Instagram. We built his business Tiktok to over 2 million views and his Facebook to over 850,000 views in his first year of business. And he brought in three times his predicted revenue goal. We still get customers walking in from 2 states over saying they saw us on social media and made a trip to come by in person. 

While social posting certainly contributed to his initial success, our results can be attributed to these main things:

• The business has a customer profile with high intent to purchase
• Our social media strategy was successful in getting the attention and trust of the right type of customer
• The physical shop and customer experience delivers beyond expectations
• The owners are actively engaged in and giving back to the local community

I bring this up because no amount of social media posting can overcome a lack of customer interest or poor customer experience. Social media is really just one small part of business marketing but can be a very powerful tool for growing a business if you have the in person customer experience to back it up.

My social media strategy in a nutshell

Over the course of several blog posts, I’ll be detailing my style / approach to creating social media for small businesses. But here’s a general framework that I use that can be implemented quickly in any business.

Before posting anything on social media, decide which of the following purposes it serves:

1. Familiarity – the bulk of your posts should be aimed to make you and your business familiar to new customers. These posts include images and video of you, your staff, and the interior of your business. The context for sharing these might include skits, humor, staff intros, or educational posts.
2. Expertise – while this really is a subset of Familiarity posts, I like to separate it out because I think it is so important. In my opinion, expertise posts are best done as face to camera talking videos. These are educational posts that position the owner and/or staff as an expert in their field.
3. Products & Services – the third most common type of post should be an explanation of prodcuts and services. You can do this in many ways – show an in process video, a static image of a product, or a talking/explanation of services video. In any format, the intent of the post is to show off what you make, do, or sell.
4. Reviews & Results – lastly, every business needs to communicate to potential customers that they deliver on their promises. We do this through sharing customer stories, posting reviews, and showing off customers’ results.

If your post fits into one of these categories then it is serving both the business and the customer, and that’s always a good combination. I like to keep the majority of the posts in category 1 or 2 with sprinkles of 3 and 4 in regularly.

Best social media platforms for small businesses

By far, the best social media platform for the majority of brick and mortar businesses in my opinion is Facebook.

I know that a lot of people think Facebook is dead, but it’s actually a thriving community for small businesses. Especially when compared to Instagram, small business facebook pages can get incredible reach and engagement. The local community is usually very engaged on Facebook and the ability to share and participate in groups is highly beneficial.

Additionally, Facebook will distribute all types of posts – photos, status updates, and reels – whereas other platforms have strong preferences for video. Capturing small moments in the shop with an image and short caption often times gets better engagement than overly optimized posts.

A surprising second place platform in my opinion is Tiktok. On Tiktok, videos can quickly reach hundreds of thousands of views from locals and around the country. Even though the people following a business account might be more spread out geographically, that reach will bring in business from locals. As Tiktok expands its features including the new Local tab, businesses can benefit from this even more.

Finally, both Tiktok and Facebook tend to favor a more casual style while Instagram seems to favor highly stylized and aesthetic posts. That may be a natural fit for some types of businesses, but for simplicity and low effort content – Facebook and Tiktok are vastly better.

Keeping up with it all

The key to keeping up with social media content for any business is:

• to remove barriers to creating content
• utilize scheduling tools to minimize time spent posting
• dedicate time once daily to engaging with comments on the platform
• keeping content organized in a calendar or spreadsheet for quick reference

Because I feel like each of those could be its own post, I’ll save the fine details for later. But briefly, I like to break up the work into sessions – ie filming all content in one session, editing and scheduling is another session, organizing and planning is a third session. For me this is the least time consuming way to stay consistent on social media.

Each morning I respond to comments on the prior day’s posts and engage with others online. I only do this once daily – you don’t have to get on 5 times per day to keep up with it.

To stay organized I add all content and some analytics to a spreadsheet once weekly or even biweekly so I can keep track of what has been discussed and what I want to queue up for the coming weeks.

Yes it’s a lot of work, but focusing on finishing one aspect at a time really helps prevent overwhelm. Breaking it up like this works for both social media managers and business owners managing their own socials.

I hope this has helped, and I look forward to continuing to share tips and ideas on this blog.