As a small business owner, you may have heard about the power of social media to help you grow your business. However, simply posting social media content frequently isn’t enough to give you new customers and improve your bottom line. What makes social media marketing effective for small business owners is building relationships, setting measurable goals, understanding how to handle a social media crisis, and practicing patience. We’ve gone more in-depth with each of these social media marketing tips.

Never Underestimate The Power Of Relationships

Customers need to feel some type of connection with a company they do business with today. Your social media manager should make it a priority to connect with your target customer base. This means responding to every post, comment, or direct message that’s sent to you, whether it’s positive or negative. You can also pull back the curtain on your business a bit and show the human side of things. Signing your name to a reply, using emojis, posting videos of yourself talking about a product, and other similar strategies are examples of how you can build relationships with your customers.

Set Measurable Goals

Goal-setting is a critical piece of social media marketing for small business owners. You can’t expect to post social media content and gain thousands of new followers overnight. It’s a process that requires thought, effort, and execution to be successful. With any given marketing campaign, you can set a goal for the number of impressions you receive, comments, likes, mentions, and any other statistic you believe is most beneficial for your business. Setting goals with deadlines can help you decide which strategies were most effective so you can make adjustments along the way.

Know How To Handle A Social Media Crisis

No matter what business you’re in and how great your products or services are, you’ll never be able to please every customer. A social media crisis can start with an unhappy customer, a mistake you made in your social media content, a situation that occurred at your business, or many other situations. Putting together a social media crisis plan that involves swift action, admitting mistakes, apologizing, and offering to remedy the situation is the best thing you can do. Disregarding the comment or arguing your point will do more harm than good, so always keep that in mind.

Be Patient And Enjoy The Process

Even if you put together the best possible campaign with your social media manager, the end results won’t happen overnight. When you put forth the effort to build your customer base by creating relationships and measuring goals, the rewards will come eventually. Tweaks and adjustments will likely need to be made along the way, but the important thing is to be patient and enjoy the process since you’ll be learning as you go.

Blazing Social can help small business owners with the social media content they choose to share on various platforms. Every post on social media should be meaningful and be designed to move you closer to achieving your goals. Our goal is to make social media marketing easier for you, so contact us today to see how we can help.