Many small businesses dabble with Facebook, maybe Instagram; but quite often, they end up neglecting their social media marketing.

Business owners simply don’t have the time or expertise to post regular engaging content on social media. If you are wondering what you can do to start or improve your social media marketing, then read on!

What are the first steps to increasing your social media presence?

Make sure you look like YOU!

The most important thing is to make sure your business profiles are branded. Use your logo and imagery to represent your business as a profile picture or cover photo.

Know your target audience

Who are your customers and how do you talk to them? What do they like? These are points that you should be considering when posting on social media.

Know what you want from your social media marketing

What do you want to get out of your social media marketing? Do you want to increase your brand awareness? Increase your sales? Lead generation? Sell through social media? Knowing what you want to get out of social media will help you to use it to your advantage.

Check your spelling and grammar

This is pretty obvious but good spelling and grammar looks professional and can help you to keep your followers engaged. A tip is to copy your posts into a Word Document to ensure there are no mistakes.

Get to know your competitors

The good thing about most social media platforms is that you can view your competitors’ social media profiles. Look at what they post, have a think about what they do well and not so well. This benchmarking exercise will help you to identify best practice and improve your own social media marketing.

Know your own social media limits

Don’t spread yourself too thinly by trying to post on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn every single day. Concentrate on one platform to begin with, then, if you have the time and content to effectively post to multiple networks expand at your own pace. Having consistent high quality content on one platform will attract more customers than an inconsistent stop/start approach across multiple networks.

Create a social media marketing strategy

All the above pointers will help you with the foundations of your social media strategy. Therefore, you will be able to start using social media successfully. Of course, if you want to chat about your social media strategy, please get in touch!