Social Media for Small Business in 2023

Social media is a powerful tool for businesses of all sizes, and it's no secret that having a strong presence on social media platforms can help drive traffic and boost sales. As we move into 2023, there are a few key social media strategies that businesses should be aware of to stay ahead of the curve.

1. Prioritize visual content. In the coming year, we expect to see a continued trend towards visual content, such as videos and images. Platforms like Instagram and TikTok have already seen a surge in popularity, and businesses should take advantage of these platforms to create engaging visual content that will help them stand out.

2. Leverage user-generated content. Encourage customers to share their own experiences with your brand on social media. Not only is this a great way to build trust and credibility, but it's also a powerful way to get your brand in front of new audiences.

3. Make use of social commerce. Social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook are increasingly allowing businesses to sell products directly through their apps. By leveraging social commerce, businesses can reach new audiences and make it easy for customers to make purchases.

4. Invest in influencer marketing. Influencer marketing can be a cost-effective way to reach new audiences and boost sales. By partnering with influencers who have a large following in your industry, you can tap into their audience and gain exposure for your brand.

5. Use social media to drive real-world engagement. Finally, businesses should look for ways to use social media to drive real-world engagement. For example, they can use social media platforms to promote in-person events or to offer special deals to customers who check in at their physical location.

Overall, social media is a constantly evolving landscape and to stay ahead, businesses should be aware of the latest trends and strategies. By leveraging visual content, user-generated content, social commerce, influencer marketing and driving real-world engagement, businesses can maximize the impact of their social media efforts.

6 Ways of Measuring Social Media Engagement

Social media is a pretty rough monster to get a hold of when you think about it. You have all of these different opinions from people who are constantly bombarding you for any different reason, and one little screw up can cost you a lot of followers, good will, and more. They say any attention is good attention, but that’s only if you can afford to weather the storm of bad attention – such as if you’re a corporation or more.

For those that aren’t Corporations or big businesses, Social Media is often the basis of all your marketing plans and thus, needs to be monitored carefully to figure out what direction you need to focus your attention on, or figure out what works and what doesn’t. It can be difficult though to gauge interest and how well your marketing plans are going though if you don’t know what to look for.

For starters, gaining followers is a good thing, but followers do not equal engagement, because having eyes on your content doesn’t always necessarily mean clicking or buying. Instead what you want to focus on is a number of different things which can include:

-          Followers: As long as you’re gaining and not losing, it’s a good start to focus on.

-          Reactions: how often are people reacting to your content in a positive way? Heart emoji’s, eye emoji’s, or more?

-          Likes / Shares / Retweets: This ties in to the reactions, but gets more mileage because whatever you’re doing is being spread out on an organic level. It’s not just eyes that are looking at it, but other people are also spreading your brand out.

-          Activity: How many people are actively commenting, liking and sharing, reacting and more? It’s usually pretty suspicious – or the sign of a dying Brand – if you have a lot of subscribers but no activity. You’ll usually want to aim for at least 5% - 10% of subscribers who are eyeing whatever you’re doing.

-          Clicks per Post: This is simply about how many people are actively clicking on your links, either to share content, click your profile, or follow any leads you have.

Of course this isn’t a complete list of things to keep an eye on, as each different Social Media Platform is different from each other. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and more all operate differently, and each of them has different metrics to pay attention to.

Another thing to also keep in mind is that social engagement doesn’t constantly need to be on an upward swing. It’s actually relatively alright to – and perfectly normal – to see downward trends happen. In fact, it’s often normal to see an upward trend on marketing strategies and posts hit a threshold, and then dip back down. The key difference is you’re going to want to see if the next upward trend improves over the previous high, or if it’s trending downward. Measuring your Social Media Engagement is something that should be done over weeks or even over the course of several months, up to a year as long as you’re remaining positive.

The Impact of Social Media on Doing Business in 2022

Honestly, Social Media is a huge boon to business. Sure, you can use it to contact family and friends, keep up to date with things in your circle of influence, or your community, but where it really shines is in the ability to actually help your business grow. It doesn't matter whether you're starting out or not, Social Media is extremely important to anything that you want to do business-wise.

With that said on just how powerful Social Media can potentially be for any business from small to large, let's at least step into the actual ways Social Media can impact you if done correctly.

The first major impact that Social Media has is, of course, with Branding. Branding a business in this day and age is a great way for a business to outreach further to customers, clients, and instantly get you recognized. Whether it's through a logo, your products or services, or anything like that, it'll help you stick in people's minds a lot easier and can certainly give you a leg up over competitors.

And honestly, what better way to improve your branding is improving engagement through social media where you can reply to people, introduce products and services, run raffles and contests or generally just do things that'll help get eyes on you and traffic to your websites.

This leads to the second major impact; engagement. As mentioned above, you can start to actively engage with an audience who in turn will start to engage back with you. This, of course, has two major effects - especially if it's positive. Not only does it establish a relationship between you and the potential customer/client, but if the interaction is positive this can lead them to either retweeting/reblogging/sharing anything that you post, which will further draw eyes to your Social Media Account.

After all, that's the ENTIRE point of Social Media: To be social with other people. By doing so, you've made someone who will think of you positively and come to you first for their needs if they need something that you offer - which creates Brand Loyalty - and also made them want to share that positive interaction with other people who will see that and also want to come and check you out which further drives up engagement and can potentially help you to reach your targeted demographic a lot easier.

The third major way that Social Media impacts businesses are in feedback. Normally, you don't get instant feedback, and when it comes time to analyze your marketing strategies you often need all sorts of information to see if it was effective or not - and to potentially ask customers directly via surveys and all on what you're doing well, and what you're doing wrong.

Not so with Social Media. If you do something wrong, your audience will immediately let you know, and if you do something good they will also let you know. Often you can tell how well received your posts and all on Social Media are via engagement and immediate feedback via comments and all and that often can tell you exactly what you're doing right, where you're going wrong, and can course-correct any marketing strategy on the fly.

Of course, there are a lot of other ways that Social Media helps businesses with growth and all, but these are at least the three major ways that can help out in amazing, impactful ways. In today's modern business world, not having a Social Media Marketing Strategy can seriously be detrimental.

Understanding How to Utilize LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn is a massive Social Media Platform that serves to cater a specific crowd of people. Unlike Facebook or Twitter, or even Instagram, the goal for LinkedIn isn’t merely to form connections with other people, showcase yourself, or even talk about what you’re up to or share fun photos or memes. While you can do that sort of stuff on LinkedIn, it’s more of a website devoted purely for Professionals in many different fields, from Medical, to Business, to Finances, to even Creative.

Of course, what many Marketers who are starting out don’t know is that LinkedIn is actually a very good market to advertise in… provided your products and services fit in overall with what LinkedIn is about of course. After all, you’re not targeting Teenagers, or Grandmothers, or bored Dads surfing Facebook on the weekend. You’re targeting Professionals who are looking to connect with other Professions and improve their resume or look for a job or simply network with other people.

So now, what’s the process for getting started on making ads for LinkedIn that fit with your Marketing strategies? Well luckily, it’s pretty easy, and if you’ve created Facebook Ads it’s pretty similar and just as robust.

For starters, you simply log into your Campaign Manager Account, and creating one is fairly simple. Once you do, it lets you set up a budget that you have, allows you to select goals that you have, and it gives you all the control you’ll need over your marketing campaign, plus tools as well to help you gauge every metric you’ll need to be successful.

From there, you just choose your objectives that you want to achieve with this Marketing Campaign. Are you looking to improve Brand Awareness? Drive traffic to your landing pages? Create lead generations; get people to watch your videos, get job interested job applicants, or anything like that?

This is perhaps the most crucial step to your Campaign because everything here on out is going to be based on the objectives that you want to achieve. 

From there, you can refine your audience down a little bit so your Marketing Campaign can figure out who exactly you’re going to target. In the Campaign manager, you can choose over 20 different attributes to refine your audience, and attributes can vary from Company Size, Schools and Colleges, Skills, Seniority, Titles, all the way down to groups and associates.

Then you just choose how you want your content to be seen: Either in Messages, Advertisement Carousels, Direct Advertisements, Text Ads, or anything else.

Like with Facebook as well, you can even set your budget, your schedule, and further refine when and where you want your advertisements to hit as well as save the Campaign before you purchase the ads themselves so you can come back to it later and refine it even more.

All in all it’s not that hard, and the process is super simple and easy. If you’ve dealt with Facebook Advertisements before, it’s pretty similar, and if you’ve not… well it’ll still walk you through the process. Everything is done in the browser, and you can even go in and edit campaigns already in progress to fine tune every aspect of it.

Creating a social media marketing strategy in 2022

Do you want to leverage digital marketing benefits to boost your brand or business? If so, you need to create a social media marketing strategy.

Defining an effective plan for your business is nothing more than summarizing everything you plan to do and hope to achieve on one or several social media platforms. It includes actions for specific objectives and results analysis to know if your strategies are succeeding or failing.

But how can you create a winning social media marketing strategy? Read on to find out!

Define digital marketing objectives that align with your commercial objectives.

Every winning strategy starts with clear goals or objectives. Experts recommend following the SMART method, with goals that are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

The SMART goals framework can guide your actions to ensure that your strategy leads to real results, such as improving customer service or generating leads through social media, for example.

Know your audience.

After defining your goals, you should learn as much as you can about your audience. This way, you can create content that people like, comment on, and share.

Knowing your audience is also essential to convert followers into customers. According to social media marketers, you need to know your target customers as real people with real wants and needs so you understand how to target them and motivate them to engage with your content.

Perform competitor analysis.

In addition to knowing your audience, you need to conduct a competitive analysis to understand who your competition is and what they're doing well or not so well.

Such analysis will give you a better idea of ​​what the industry expects from a brand or company like yours, making social media goal setting easier, more real, and more fruitful. It also helps spot opportunities.

Define which platforms to use and improve your profiles.

You must keep in mind that you must define a strategy for each social media platform. For example, Twitter can be an excellent tool to improve customer service while Instagram is an excellent spot to promote makeup services.

Once you decide which social media platforms to focus on, create profiles or enhance existing ones to align with your marketing plan. Remember to include keywords and use consistent branding to optimize your profiles and make them easily discoverable.

Create a calendar with engaging content.

After defining the social media platforms you will use, you must create a calendar with attractive content adapted to each one.

Posting too little or too much content may not have the effect you hope for on your audience. So, you must discover the ideal frequency to publish on each social media and achieve maximum participation.

Track performance.

The last step is to track your strategy's performance. You should not assume that your plan is giving the expected results on the first try. Therefore, as you begin to implement your plan, you must re-evaluate and test.

Some strategies may not work as well as you hoped, and others may work even better. That's what you'll find out with tracking.

Final thoughts.

And that's it. With those steps, you can create a good social media marketing strategy. But keep in mind that nothing is final. Social media platforms change as generations and technology advance. So, save this information! It could be very useful now and in the future.

Four Simple Steps for Creating Great Content in 2022

Even if you are not a marketer, you should know how important content marketing is, as it gets people talking about your products or you if you have a business or want to create a community on social media.

However, if you're new to all this, you've probably wondered where you should start, right?

But don't worry! Our purpose today is to teach you how to create great content. So, read on and find all the tips you've been looking for so much!

What do you want to achieve?

If you want to create great content, you must be very clear about what you hope to achieve. Every content strategy starts with a goal. So, before you start creating content, you need to define if you want more subscribers, hope to increase your conversions, sell more products or podcasts downloads.

Remember that you are free to make any choice at the beginning, but changing things when you have committed to a specific audience can be very complicated.

No matter how much content you create, if you haven't defined a why and for whom, it can fall flat. Therefore, the best tip we can give you is to set your content goal.

Understand your audience.

We mentioned it above but it's worth bringing it up here again: you need to define a for whom. After you are clear about why you are creating content, you need to understand who will interact with, listen to, or see it.

Yes, you can create content about whatever you want, but successful content is not only based on your tastes and preferences but also involves feedback and responses from an audience.

Experts say that the best content is designed to answer an audience's most important questions, especially when the content creator wants to educate or transform them.

In other words, you need empathy and understanding in order to speak directly to your audience and win the hearts of your followers or readers through your content.

Old but gold.

If you think your ideas have run out and you cannot come up with new content, don't worry! You may be are overlooking many resources, including content that you have already published.

Just as you read! Recycling also applies to content creation! And your best piece of content can come from something you've already done.

You can take an old article and update it to add recent information, use footage you've already recorded to create a video with new effects according to new trends, or just create something new from the same topic. You just have to let your creativity run wild!

Brainstorm ideas.

And here's our last tip! At this point, you should know what kind of content you want to create, but what about innovation? Yes, innovation makes content greater. That's why we should be as resourceful as we can.

If you have a ton of ideas and don't know where to start, you shouldn't let that initial excitement wear off. Find a notebook and keep it close to you so you can take note of everything that comes to mind.

Brainstorming ideas can make the difference between an outstanding content strategy and forgettable poor content. Choose wisely!

Final thoughts.

Content is a fundamental piece for the success of all companies, brands and influencers today. So, we must do everything possible to create high-quality content that attracts people and helps us achieve our goals. Are you ready to start with yours?

11 Ways to Use Videos in your Social Media Marketing

People spend a lot of time watching videos online. According to a survey performed by Statista, almost 30% of viewers watched over 10 hours of online video weekly.

It's a huge number, right? And that also means we can use videos in social media marketing to create a successful strategy and achieve our objectives.

But do you know how to use videos in social media marketing? Don't worry! That's what we'll learn here. Keep reading!

Define your goals for video marketing

When we are creating a strategy, there's the need to set goals. So, the first step to start using videos in social media marketing is to define the objectives you hope to achieve.

Ask yourself "what do you want your online videos to accomplish?" at the beginning of your social media undertaking and create audiovisual content that helps you achieve such purpose more easily.

Choose the platform of your preference.

Each social media platform has its own video format. For example, TikTok has only one video format while Facebook relies on several types of videos.

Therefore, if you want to use videos in social media marketing, you must choose the best platform for your brand or business. At this point, it is also important to consider your goals.

If you plan to increase your sales number, what is the platform that would help you the most? Would it be Twitter or Instagram?

Select the types of videos.

In addition to choosing the perfect platform for your marketing strategy, you must also define the best type of videos.

Yes, there are many types of videos with different purposes and all of them can support your overall content strategy. However, you must choose the one that benefits your business or brand the most.

Videos for social networks could be educational, behind-the-scenes, interviews, entertaining and testimonials. The right video is the one that best supports your key goals.

Plan the content production.

There's nothing more important than planning! If you want to create good videos, you must plan your content well. Keep in mind that a good content production plan can save you money and time, as well as bring you closer to your goal.

Regardless of the video type you choose, you must know how it will be created, filmed, and edited. And you have several options for planning: you can hire an agency or production company to help you relieve stress.

Promote your videos.

Once you have the videos ready, it's time to schedule and promote them. Some platforms have publishing options, such as YouTube, which includes tags, playlists, categories, and privacy settings.

Also, remember that videos can be uploaded to various networks several times depending on your social media schedule. Leverage such opportunities!

More tips for using videos on social media:

·         Analyze and understand metrics, including watch times, view counts, and so on.

·         Produce multiple videos in a single film recording session and promote different clips or cut multiple videos for promotional teasers.

·         Think big when producing and promoting videos.

·         Plan post-production and know all the details, including captions, texts, overlays, call-to-action screens, music, among others.

Best ways to build brand awareness on LinkedIn

Every business needs a presence on social media, whether it is new to marketing or has been operating for some time.

However, when it comes to social media, there's one platform that is often overlooked by marketers: LinkedIn.

It can be a bit confusing, as a fine line separates it from the personal and the professional, which makes posting appropriate content a challenge.

However, we have some tips for you to leverage LinkedIn and build brand awareness there. Find them below:

1. Create quality content for LinkedIn

LinkedIn has over 100 million users in the United States alone. So, can you imagine how difficult it can be for someone to find your content?

That's why you should represent your company in the best possible light, posting information that potential customers will find attractive and positioning your brand as a leader within the industry.

Experts say businesses should include a link, an image, or a video in their status update to get more likes and engagement.

Also, specialists recommend brands have varied content, adding interviews with current employees or leaders, insider looks at the company, career opportunities, fun facts, and quotes.

2. Participate in LinkedIn groups

Businesses or brands that actively participate or contribute to LinkedIn groups typically see four times more views on their profiles.

While it's easy to join a group and just read others' posts without commenting or participating in discussions, group contributions can organically increase views on your personal profile and brand page.

3. Motivate employees to engage with your content

Your employees are your business's biggest fans. Therefore, one of the best ways to build brand awareness on LinkedIn is to motivate them to engage with your content.

According to marketing experts on the platform, a brand's employees are 70% more likely to engage with its posts.

If your employees and your brand share a story at the same time, you'll see how the visibility of your brand or business increases organically.

4. Understand the difference between personal and professional

Finally, if you want to build awareness in your business, you must learn to differentiate the personal from the professional.

People use social media on a personal basis to relax, keep in touch with others, find information about personal interests, read entertainment updates, and more.

However, professional social media users use platforms to find updates or details about careers and jobs, stay connected to brands, and monitor current business affairs.

Keep that in mind!

Final thoughts: Why should I consider optimizing my content on LinkedIn?

LinkedIn can become the perfect platform to share content about your brand or business. Actually, that's what users expect from what brands and professionals post and say there.

People who use LinkedIn usually have a professional mindset that prepares them to consume brand or business information and other commercial content. Therefore, you can leverage all its benefits and create content that resonates with your audience to take your project to the next level.

Four Ways to boost your organic traffic on Instagram

Instagram's algorithm can be difficult to understand, but it doesn't have to lower your organic reach and engagement.

In fact, you can grow your follower base if you understand and leverage how the new algorithm sorts users' feeds.

Do you want to know how to do it? That's why we are here. In this post, you can find the best ways to boost your organic traffic on Instagram.

So, let's get started.

Experiment with different types of content.

In addition to photos or images, Instagram allows its users to post videos. However, many people constantly overlook this resource, missing out on all the benefits that clips offer to drive organic traffic.

Social media marketers say that photos tend to get more likes than videos, but that doesn't mean they're better. Videos generate on average twice as many comments as photos, meaning that they also generate interaction and engagement.

In other words, you can post both videos and photos to boost your presence on social media. But remember that those pictures and videos you upload to your Instagram profile must be creative!

Promote engagement with contests or question sessions.

There's a very useful tool if you want to motivate your followers to interact with your Instagram posts: call-to-action. That's why giveaway contests have become so popular and can be so effective in driving traffic to a brand or business.

You can use call-to-actions like "tag a friend" or "vote for your favorite," for example. In less time than you think, you will see your giveaway posts generating much more comments than the usual posts.

But you shouldn't overuse contests. We recommend doing a giveaway contest with call-to-actions once every few months to keep your audience expectant and excited.

In addition to call-to-actions, you can also ask questions. Leaving a box with questions in your stories or writing a question in your feed's post can help you generate more interaction and get more clicks.

Leverage Instagram stories

Over 60% of marketers use Instagram but only around 15% use its stories feature.

However, it's essential to know that stories are a prominent element in the Instagram app – sometimes they are even more important than the feed. Therefore, if you haven't tried them, you're likely missing out on many benefits that the social media platform can bring to your brand or business.

Stories allow you to stay on top of your followers’ feed, thus drawing their attention much easier. Also, if they see your stories, the algorithm can help your Instagram profile rank higher in users' feeds.

Other ways to boosts your organic traffic on Instagram.

-        Use curate user-generated content.

-        Use live video to appear first at stories feed.

-        Use Instagram ads if you have an Instagram Business Profile.

-        Create Instagram-specific content.

Final thoughts.

Instagram is considered among the best tools to build a strong audience and community for your business. Even if you're not a marketer, you've likely seen how important this app can be in helping brands and companies grow and succeed.

So, why not take advantage of all the benefits that Instagram promises to increase your organic traffic and take your project to where you want it to be?

How to Create Blog Content for Local Customers

Before technological advances brought us the Internet and social media, local businesses used to advertise their business in local newspapers, yellow pages or by handing out flyers with their details.

But times have changed and search engines have become the main tools to promote nearby products and services.

That means all local business owners should put in the time and effort to create quality content that gets them noticed.

However, it's not a guessing game. There are some useful tips and advice that you can follow if you have a local business and want to increase your customer base. For that reason, we created this little guide to explain how to create blog content for local customers. Welcome!

Think of the community beyond what you sell.

If you want your business to thrive locally, you need to show that you're involved in your community and know what's going on there. It depends on the niche your business operates in but you can try to include something about local news or local sports teams in an authentic way.

However, you have to be careful, as being spammy is very easy when you produce random local content. So, you have to make sure to adapt your texts to your business effortlessly. And remember that you should write not about what interests you but about what interests your audience.

You can also ask for support from local guest bloggers and contributors to post content on your website. Besides being a good idea for adding content, it can help you expand your audience to the contributor's audience.

Practices you cannot miss when creating local content.

Creating blog content for local clients also has its technical side, which means you have to implement some practices like

- Keyword research: Keyword research can be a game changer for local businesses.

If you want to leverage all the benefits that the Internet and search engines offer, be sure to add local keywords to your blog content. You should add local keywords in areas like title tags, meta description, body copy, anchor text, bold and italics tags, URLs, texts in images and H1 tags.

- Link building: Link building has also changed over the years. Getting inbound links from businesses in your community, such as chamber directories or local strategic partner pages, can get your blog and business to the top of search engines.

- Snippets: Finally, there are snippets. If you use rich snippets, you can help Google find geographic information about your business, customers and reviews. In this sense, they help users find your website when search engines refer a local place.

Include reviews if possible.

Many content creators neglect reviews but they can improve any local SEO strategy.

If you put consistent effort into getting reviews from happy customers and include them in your blog content, you can build trust among your potential customers and arouse curiosity among internet users who want to know what you offer, thus increasing the number of clicks your site receives.

Final thoughts.

Creating local content should be a priority for various reasons. For that reason, we recommend you put in some time and strive to make your local content better in order to take your business to the top. You will see results in less time than you think!