10 Social Media Hacks For SMEs

In this era of digitalization, businesses of all sizes are transitioning from traditional to digital marketing to increase visibility and generate better ROI by gaining new prospects and leads for the business. In addition, social media marketing services have become a new norm for brands to showcase their products/services to a vast audience.

Over 4.2 billion users are active on social media, contributing to over 50% of the world population using social media. By establishing your brand's online presence, you can reach billions of people and skyrocket your profitability charts. Social media is like new opportunities for businesses of all sizes to grow exponentially; however, large-sized enterprises can allocate a large amount of investment into their social media marketing strategies. In contrast, SMEs have limited resources to invest huge budgets on social media marketing services.

To understand how small businesses can make the most out of their limited resources, we interacted with some social media marketing agencies in Houston to know their social media success recipes.

7 out of 10 social media services providers believe that before beginning social media marketing, it is crucial to find out the platform where your target audience lies most and what branding strategies you can incorporate to grow your brand's image exponentially.

Here are the best 10 social media hacks for small businesses-

Social Media Plan

First things first, deciding on the right platform to connect with your audience is necessary. Further, you need to create a solid social media plan as publishing posts without planning leads to nowhere and turns out to be a total waste of time and effort.

To create a strong social media plan, you need to start with measurable goals and objectives such as:

• Brand awareness

• Website traffic

• Community engagement

• Building customer loyalty

Create a social media calendar for the month and create posts that generate customer engagement. Follow the 80-20 Rule of social media while preparing the calendar; Focus on what your viewers want from you rather than knuckling down on what you want to showcase.

Carry out an audit of your competitors and fathom out the strategies/ approaches used to stand out from the crowd.

Schedule The Posting

After creating your posting content, you need to publish it on different social media platforms. But imagine the hours spent while publishing posts manually on each platform every day. Social Media agencies in Houston use social media management tools to schedule content ahead of time and save hours. It allows your team to post outside of business hours and delivers the necessary consistency.

Such tools also provide you additional features like analytics that allow businesses to track and monitor social media from one dashboard. Most social media platforms give you integrated analytics tools, while Facebook allows both the analytics and publishing tools within the app.

You can use the saved time to buzz around promotions and efficiently increase brand awareness.

URL tracking

While sharing a link on your social media profiles, you must ensure that the URLs are trackable to measure how effective your specific strategy is working out. By incorporating this hack, you will learn more about your audience and the kind of content they prefer.

You can use bitly for Google's campaign URL builder- both the tools are free and make it easy for you to implement URLs with UTM parameters to track the link's performance.

Geo-Targeting

Most businesses, primarily product-based brands, focus on targeting a specific demographic such as age criteria, interests, or audience based on the location. Geo-targeting helps you reach people using their IP or home addresses. Most platforms allow you to perform the location filter application by assisting you all the way.

Suppose, if you want to target a particular Zip code in a city, all you need is to enter it, and you will find a narrower audience while running any social ads on a small budget.

Keyword Monitoring

Keyword monitoring on social media points out any mentions of your compiled keywords on different platforms. Such keywords mainly include the company's name, products, services, and even the organization's executives.

Compare the mentions for the past month with the current and ensure to engage with them quickly as possible.

Collaborate With Micro-influencers

Collaborating with influencers is expensive, but SMEs can leverage micro-influencers to present the brand most effectively. Micro-influencers are individuals whose following base lies between 1k-10 million and are considered experts in their domain. Therefore, a successful collaboration enhances your brand reach and engagement rates.

Maximize Conversions With Contests And Giveaways

For brands to succeed, they need to convert their viewers into customers. There are two most effective methods you can try to drive higher conversions on social media.

First, use a strong and appealing call-to-action in your posts to encourage followers to take the required action for the product or service posted. Second, tried and tested method is to organize content, giveaways, and offer discounts. Everyone loves giveaways and discounts, no matter what business you are running. They are fun and entertaining both for the organizing team as well as your viewers. For contests & giveaways, you can directly ask your viewers to tag and ask three people to follow your brand.

Pin To Pinterest Directly From Facebook

Facebook and Pinterest have millions of active users per month, and both platforms can go hand-in-hand.

Here's how you can easily pin from Facebook:

• Log in to your Facebook account

• Open the image you want to pin

• Copy Image URL

• Log in to your Pinterest account

• Click Add a Pin

• Paste the copied URL

• ‘Add the Pin’ to the board you wish to

• Click Pin It to pin

Use The Power Of #Tag Challenges

Hashtags play a crucial role in highlighting your content on top and directly influence visibility. Similarly, the Instagram audience is active in creating #tag challenges while creating a short video and nominates you to follow the trend. Businesses can benefit from the ranking hashtags while creating content.

Speed Up Your Social Media For S4s

Share for Share or S4S is a popular technique used on social media where businesses share each other's content by using specific tags. It speeds up the social media following as brands of the same niche promote each other's content. The best thing about the last hack is it delivers beautiful results on every social media platform and is cost-free.

Conclusion:

It can be challenging for small and medium-sized enterprises to navigate their way through social media, but with hacks mentioned above can help your brand grow seamlessly. Furthermore, you can implement a few hacks simultaneously as they complement each other and once you got into the swing of things, all you need to do is keep refining what you're doing.