One of the best tips for social media marketing is to focus on quantity.
Now I know what you’re thinking…
You’ve read and have probably been told that quality is greater than quantity.
Here’s the thing – without quantity you’re going to have a difficult time getting to quality.
If you’re just starting out with social media you don’t know what the heck you’re doing. By posting a lot of content you’re learning what works and what doesn’t.
And the more content you share the more content there is for your audience to discover and engage with.
But let’s say you’re a small business with limited resources. Having one of your employees spend 10% of their time working on social media is probably all you can afford.
How can that person (or someone in a similar situation) manage social media?
Here are some tips…
1. Focus On Video, Photo & Audio
If you’re short on time you need to find little cheats everywhere. Little ways to save time over and over so that it adds up and you can find the time to create more.
With smartphones you have the ability to take pretty good video, photo and audio.
Allow yourself or your employee to use a smartphone to create and upload content to social platforms.
Let’s say you’re a restaurant. You have the hostess or the person at the counter in charge of the social content. Make sure they have their phone with them at all times. Have them take a second here to snap a pic of a plate coming out. One every hour. Also have them take a pic or a short video when the place gets crowded. If you have an event today have them do a quick video or audio recording describing the event and post that.
2. Customer Questions
One of the big struggles with social media is figuring out what to post.
A simple solution for that is to focus on customer questions.
Whoever the person is that’s in charge of social media for your small business needs to get in the habit of listening to every customer question. Then using that to create social media content.
Let’s say you own a massage salon. The person at the counter is in charge of social media. Every time a customer calls in and asks a question and the person provides the answer have them take care of the work regarding the customer then go on their phone and post the answer.
For example:
Just had a customer call in to ask about our pricing. We have a sales this weekend for $99 massages and we also have punch cards available. Buy 9 massages and get one free.
Or something like this:
A customer came in today for a massage and asked if they came back if they could have the same masseuse. The answer is YES! You can request the same masseuse for all your visits.
3. Engage When Customers Post About Your Brand
This might take a little encouragement to get going. You could approach your best customers (or those that use social media the most) and ask if they would be willing to post about their experience on social media.
Then engage with them in all the usual ways. Comment, share, like, etc.
The goal is to make people feel encouraged to post about your brand. One of the reasons people will post about a brand is for the interact with the brand. If people see that you’re interacting with others on social media they’re more likely to start interacting with you.
This takes effort on your part especially early on to get it going, but in the long run you save time because you’re taking advantage of user-generated content. Your fans are publishing content to social media and that’s content that you won’t have to create.
So instead of your team taking photos or the food your restaurant creates your customers will be doing it for you.
Or you could obviously have both going on at the same time for even more content.
One last thing to consider on this one is to search social media for the influencers in your community. See who is posting about your city, town or whatever. See how many followers they have. Then start interacting with them. Just casually at first. “Hey, we love Eau Claire too. Great pic!”.
Then slowly build the relationship to where you offer them a free meal or a free product or whatever.
Conclusion
Social media is a commitment. It can greatly impact a small business. It takes commitment and effort, but there are ways to integrate social media into your everyday business activity. The couple tips above are some great ways that small businesses are finding ways to use social media to grow. You can use them too.