How to Effectively Use Social Media to Market Your Small Business

This article was contributed by Sierra Smith as part of the Aspen Fellowship. Sierra will be receiving her Bachelor of Business Administration from Loyola Marymount University in 2023.

Social Media is one of the most popular ways to stay interconnected all over the world. It allows us to connect with people who share similar interests, hobbies, and mindsets. Social media also helps us develop relationships, network job opportunities, and promote businesses. In today’s society, it is almost impossible for one to have a business and not use some form of social media marketing as a component of business strategy. Now most of us know how social media helps with brand awareness, advertisement, and reaching larger demographics, but social media can also be used to effectively market your small business. However, many business owners don’t know how.

After surveying a group of 25 small business owners I noticed a commonality between the challenges they were having. The most common challenges were, “engagement amongst followers through social media platforms”, “what content would be most effective”, and “how to effectively use the different social media platforms.” After listening and discussing with the business owners I decided to solve one problem, to answer the question: “How do small businesses effectively use different social media platforms to market their business?” This is a loaded question, so we’re going to focus on three of the most popular platforms in social media today, Instagram, Facebook, and Tiktok, to help you find which platform and which content works best for you.

Using Instagram to Market Your Small Business

There are a few key points to successfully market your small business on Instagram. The first thing to do is to create an Instagram post. Your Instagram post should include a picture of your product or description of the service you’re offering, the product being used by a consumer, quotes, employees, or anything that relates to your business. Your post should always include your location, a caption (longer caption to educate or short caption to drive traffic to things such as business websites). You can also use hashtags on posts, but many business owners did not find that hashtags were useful for driving consumer traffic. Your Instagram should also have a theme such as using the same filter on each post and creating a color scheme (typically the business’s colors).

This article first appeared on the Inspired Marketing, Inc. website. Click here to read the entire article and see a sample social media content calendar https://monday.com/templates/template/65396/content-calendar you can use for your business.