An essential guide to social media for small business

Key takeaways

• Publish multiple types of content—like new product demos, tutorials, and user-generated content—to see what resonates with your audience
• If you have limited time, stick to the social media platforms that your target audience uses the most
• Use paid social media advertising to reach even more potential customers and build your audience

Social media for small businesses offers an important opportunity to build brand awareness and connect with potential customers. There are now 4.76 billion users worldwide, and users spend an average of two hours and 31 minutes per day on social media platforms—according to We Are Social’s Digital 2023 Global Overview Report.

Beyond the sheer volume of users, there’s also high purchase intent on social platforms. The Global Overview Report found that 27.3% of users say their primary reason for using social media is to find inspiration for things to do and buy. Another 25.9% are searching for products to purchase, and 22.7% want to see content from their favorite brands.

So social media users are looking for more than the latest memes—they’re looking for businesses and products like yours. You can help them find your business with the right social media marketing strategy.

The tips below will help you build your social media presence, connect with your target audience, and reach new customers—even if you have limited time and a limited budget.

An effective strategy for social media for small business

Social media marketing can help you increase brand awareness, introduce your products or services to local customers, build stronger relationships with current customers, and increase brand loyalty. It’s also an important part of your broader digital marketing strategy and can support your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.

But before you can reap all the benefits of social media for small businesses, you need to set up your social media accounts and develop a content strategy that resonates with your target market and supports your business goals.

While that may sound like a lot to do, any small business can create a successful social media marketing strategy—no matter how limited your time or budget. And regardless of what you may have heard, you don’t need to post every single day to succeed. Just follow these steps.

Step 1: Select the right social media channels

The more social media channels you use, the more opportunities you’ll have to connect with potential customers. But that doesn’t mean you need to create accounts on every platform.

Ideally, you want to keep all your social media accounts active, meaning that you post to them regularly. So if you have limited time for social media marketing each week, focus your efforts on the social media platforms your target audience uses the most.

For example, let’s say you run a commercial cleaning business, and most of your clients are other businesses. You’ll likely want to include LinkedIn as one of your social media platforms since many property managers, office managers, and company decision-makers frequent the platform.

On the other hand, if you run a local rock climbing gym and most of your clients are Gen Zers and younger millennials, you’ll likely want to include TikTok and Instagram in your efforts since they tend to have younger audiences.

The Pew Research Center has a breakdown of the demographics on each social media platform, including by age and education. But demographics aren’t the only thing to consider. Here’s an overview of each platform to help you decide which ones are right for your business.

Facebook has the most active users of any social network, according to the Global Overview Report. It’s also the most used (though least trusted) platform for business discovery, according to the research by BrightLocal. It’s a good place to build a community, advertise your business information, and promote events. Facebook has some of the broadest age demographics, which makes it one of the best channels for connecting with an older audience, including baby boomers.

YouTube is the second most popular platform worldwide. It’s also the second most used (and the most trusted) for local business discovery. Like Facebook, it appeals to a broad age demographic. You can use YouTube to reach users from ages 18 to 65 and up, but this platform is best for companies that have the time and resources to create long-form video content.

Instagram is designed for highly visual content, so it works well for small businesses with a visually appealing product. For example, salons, clothing stores, restaurants, home remodeling services, and auto body shops have the potential to show off their products and services through images or before-and-after photos. Instagram’s demographics are slightly younger. It’s popular with audiences aged 18-49. It’s also slightly more popular with women than men.

TikTok appeals primarily to a younger audience. With 62% of people aged 18-29 using the platform, this is a good option for companies that want to reach a Gen Z audience. You’ll need to create short-form video content, but unlike YouTube videos, TikTok videos don’t need to have a high production value. You can create engaging content without any video editing or audio mixing experience.

X (formerly Twitter) has fewer active users than the platforms above, but it can help you reach an audience of high-income and college-educated users. This is a good choice for companies that are affected by breaking news and current events, like travel agencies, law firms, and medical practices. You can also use it to share educational information in your social media posts, and you can get your Tweets in front of more people using hashtags.

Pinterest is a good platform for companies with a mostly female audience. Fifty percent of American women say they use this platform, compared to just 19% of men. It’s another channel that relies on visual social media content, and shoppable pins make it easy to sell products directly within the platform.

LinkedIn has the highest percentage of high-income and college-educated users of any social media platform. It’s typically used by B2B companies. But it’s also a good choice for companies that sell business-related products to consumers, like business-casual clothing, continuing education, skills training, networking events, and more. You can post short- or long-form written content on LinkedIn.

Nextdoor is a niche social media platform, but it’s a good option for local businesses. This platform helps you reach a hyperlocal audience of people in your neighborhood. Many users share recommendations for local businesses, like cleaning services, auto repair shops, or hair salons. By creating an account, your company can interact with potential customers who are looking for your services and current customers who are championing your business.

Step 2: Set up your social media accounts

Once you’ve decided on the best social media channels to support your marketing efforts, you’ll need to create your accounts. The process for creating business accounts is simple, but there are best practices that will help your company stand out.

Use the same username across platforms

You don’t want potential customers to wonder if they’re looking at the right social media account. By keeping your username consistent, you’ll build your brand and assure users they’re looking at the right company.

Let’s say you run a dog grooming service called Dirty Dog Groomers, and you’re based in Austin, Texas. The usernames “dirtydog” and “dirtydoggroomers” are taken on Instagram, so you decide to go with “dirtydogATX” to incorporate your name and location. You’ll want to use this same username on your other accounts too.

Include your business information in your profile

Listing your business’s location or service area, website, phone number, hours, and other contact information in your social media profiles helps potential customers learn more about your company. It also helps with your SEO efforts. Again, make sure the information is the same across all your accounts.

Use the same profile picture and header images

Another way to keep your online presence consistent and assure customers they’re looking at the same company across different platforms is to use the same profile picture and header images. Your company logo makes a good profile picture and helps visually connect your social media accounts with your company’s website.

Step 3: Set measurable goals

Like any part of your marketing plan, your social media campaigns should have a goal. Social media can serve a lot of purposes. It can increase brand awareness, build relationships with your customers, and drive traffic to your business website. But you’ll only know if you’re meeting your goals when you can measure them.

So instead of setting broad goals like “increase brand awareness,” set specific and measurable goals like “gain 100 new followers” or “make 500 impressions with this month’s social media posts.” There are a lot of metrics you can use to measure the success of your social media campaigns, including likes, shares, follows, reach, engagement rate, and conversion rate.

Be realistic about your goals based on where you are in your social media marketing journey. If you’re starting from zero, then your goal may be to get your first followers. Once you’ve built your following, you may want to change your goal to increasing your engagement rates or driving more traffic to your website.

You can look at the social media accounts of businesses like yours to determine which goals would be realistic for your industry.

Step 4: Create engaging content

Once you’ve set your goals, your social content will help you reach them. People will follow, like, and share your content if they find it engaging. So you need to create high-quality content that resonates with your target audience. It may take some trial and error to find the content that works best for your brand, but these tried and tested techniques will help you get started.

Create a content calendar and post on a regular schedule

Posting regularly signals to social media platforms’ algorithms that your accounts are active. This helps your posts and accounts come up in users’ feeds. You don’t have to post every day—you just have to be consistent. So choose a schedule that works for you. You may want to post two or three times a week, once a week, or even once a month.

Once you’ve decided on your schedule, create a content calendar. This tells you what type of content you plan to post and when.

With a content calendar, you can design your social media posts ahead of time. If you have the budget for social media management tools, you can also schedule your posts to go live at a specific time, or you can manually upload posts on the scheduled day if you’re not ready to invest in software.

Consider your brand personality

As you decide what to write and show in your posts, think about your company’s branding. If you have an exciting brand personality, you may want to follow social media trends and include jokes and memes in your posts. But if your brand is built around competence, you’ll want to focus more on facts, figures, and tutorials. Caring brands will want to post heart-warming content.

Your social media posts are a reflection of your brand, so they should demonstrate your personality to help you connect with your customers.

Try different types of content

Social media posts not only come in different formats—images, videos, graphics, and text—they also include different types of content. You can show product demos, infographics, tutorials, memes, user-generated content, and interactive content like polls and giveaways.

Including a mixture of content can make your feed more interesting to your followers. As you start building your social media strategy, experiment with different types of content to help you find what resonates most with your audience.

Repurpose your content for different platforms

When you’re running multiple social media accounts, reusing content across different platforms can make your content creation process more efficient. But you should keep each platform’s purpose in mind.

It’s easy to turn TikTok videos into Instagram Reels and to reuse Instagram stories on Snapchat because these formats are similar. However, it wouldn’t make sense to try to reuse this type of content on Twitter. If you make a long-form YouTube video, you can pull a small clip of it to use on your TikTok or Instagram, but you won’t want to post the whole video.

Rather than expecting to upload the same exact piece of content to every platform, look for ways that you can adapt your content so that it fits naturally with the format that works best for each social media channel.

Partner with influencers

You don’t have to create all of your content yourself. Social media influencers already make engaging content and have an audience. If you partner with an influencer in your industry, they will promote your brand to their audience. The price of partnering with social media influencers varies based on the size of their following, but you can find them at all different price points using an influencer marketplace.

Monitor the success of each type of content

Once you post content, track its performance. Some posts may get hundreds of likes but very few comments. Others may get fewer likes but more comments and shares. And other posts may get very little of either.

Every piece of content you post is a chance to learn more about what your audience wants to see. Once you know which types of content perform better, you can create more of it going forward and improve the success of your social media campaigns.

Step 5: Try paid advertising

If you’re struggling to gain followers and wondering why other companies have so many, the answer is simple: paid advertising. Social media ads and promoted posts can help you gain followers quickly. This type of advertising is also a budget-friendly option for small businesses.

Most social media ads, including Instagram and Facebook Ads, are pay-per-click. You only have to pay if a user clicks on your advertisement. So your ad may display hundreds of times, but if only one user clicks on it, you only pay for the one click.

You can also set a monthly budget. Once you hit your budget, your ad will stop displaying for the rest of the month. Social media advertising is also cost-effective because you can set it up using very detailed targeting and audience segmentation.

For example, imagine you run a bakery in Cleveland, Ohio. You can set your social media ads to target people who live in Cleveland and are interested in food-related social media content. This helps you efficiently reach the audience that’s most likely to follow your social media accounts and buy from your business.

Step 6: Build a community

Social media is about more than getting followers and driving traffic to your business. This is a chance to build genuine connections with your target audience. When customers feel a connection with your company, they’re more likely to become repeat buyers and promote your business to their friends and family.

Your social media channels give customers a chance to connect with your business by commenting on your posts and messaging you with questions or concerns. Show you care by responding to as many customer comments and messages as you can.

If you’re able to respond in real time, you’ll show that your company provides excellent customer service. But if your schedule doesn’t allow for that, set aside time to check your comments and messages regularly. Building relationships with potential customers will help you get the most value out of your social media marketing.

Step 7: Analyze and adjust your strategy

Social media marketing is an investment of both time and money. To make sure you get the best return on your investment, you need to track your results.

Social media platforms have built-in tools to show your follower growth rate, impressions, traffic, saves, comments, and reach. For small businesses with limited budgets, these built-in tools will be enough to help you get started. If you have room in your budget, you can also invest in social media marketing tools that help you schedule posts in advance and show you all of your social media analytics in one place.

As you monitor your social media account’s performance, compare your metrics to the goals you’ve set. If you’re not reaching your goals, you may need to post more often, try different types of content, rethink the platforms you use, or invest in social media advertising.

You can also use your metrics to see which posts are performing best. That can help you determine which types of content to make more often.

As your social media marketing efforts evolve and you meet your initial goals, set new goals so you can continue to engage and grow your audience.

Be more social

You can grow your customer base using social media for small businesses. You simply need a strategy that works with your busy schedule and budget.

When you have limited time and resources, you may not be able to post every day, spend big on advertising, or respond to every comment in real time, but you can create a schedule that works for you. Choose a sustainable schedule that allows you to post regularly and stick to the social media platforms that appeal most to your target audience.

Even if you grow your social media presence slowly, it will still have an impact on your digital marketing efforts. Social media marketing improves your SEO and helps your business come up in search results. Learn more about small business SEO to keep improving your marketing strategy.