Maintaining an active social media presence is paramount for helping local businesses connect with their ideal audience while increasing profits and attracting new customers.
However, developing a robust social presence takes time, effort, and consistency.
Moreover, crafting social media content that drives engagement can be challenging, especially while extinguishing daily fires when running your business.
Consequently, many local businesses avoid utilizing social media due to perceived difficulty; nevertheless, implementing an effective social posting strategy is easy if you do it smartly.
In this post, you'll learn smart social posting strategies to help build a loyal customer base, reach prospects in your local area, and create engaging content that exceeds the competition.
With these strategies and tips, you can maximize your social posting efforts and ensure targeted exposure for your local business.
Research relevant hashtags
Hashtags can significantly increase the reach of your content when posting on social media platforms; thus, ensuring the appropriate use of hashtags allows maximum exposure for your organic posts and helps users discover your brand.
With this in mind, you'll want to not only choose popular hashtags but also remember to include more specific hashtags.
Therefore, considering search terms your audience commonly uses will help them discover your posts and brand.
Specifically, on Instagram, you can add a long list of hashtags to the comment section of your post; however, limiting your hashtags to a maximum of 3-5 per post is best for keeping them free of spam.
Gather and use soft content on your channels
Collecting and posting soft content on your social media channels is a necessary part of a smart social posting strategy for your local businesses.
Notably, examples of soft content include:
- Case studies
- Testimonials
- Employee announcements
Soft content generally receives more engagement than standard sales posts, showing your audience exactly how you can help them while delivering insight into your business.
Keep your posts simple
Local businesses often attempt to make their posts stand out via over-the-top visuals; however, being excessive is usually a turn-off for customers.
Hence, crafting simple posts with relevant graphics is often best.
Similarly, you should avoid overloading image posts with text, ensuring no more than 20% text on the graphic.
Encourage engagement in your posts
Algorithms ultimately decide who and how many people see your social media posts, preferring posts with significant engagement.
With this in mind, you can encourage your fans and followers to engage or interact with your content in multiple ways, including asking questions at the end of your post, publishing sharable content, and responding to comments.
You can also boost engagement and access a wider audience by running competitions and giveaways that ask your audience to like, comment, and share your post in exchange for a chance to win.
Focus on one platform
Trying to build a presence on multiple social media platforms simultaneously is tempting; however, it potentially doubles, if not triples, your workload.
Instead, determine where your prospects and customers spend most of their time and focus your efforts on that platform.
For example, do they casually use Facebook, or are they professionals that regularly network and communicate on LinkedIn?
After mastering one platform, you can expand your presence into others.
Utilize automated posting
Again, consistency is necessary for achieving meaningful results from social posting; however, time is a limiting factor and is among the greatest challenges local businesses face when implementing a smart social posting strategy.
As previously noted, the more you post on social media, the more engagement you will receive.
Likewise, customers prefer local businesses active on social media; therefore, daily posting will attract a wider audience.
With this in mind, finding the time to implement and maintain an effective social posting schedule can be daunting; nevertheless, hiring a social media manager or utilizing tools to automate are excellent solutions.
Tools including HootSuite, SocialBee, Buffer, and SocialPilot allow you to create and manage posts while scheduling them to publish automatically on specific dates and times.
In conclusion
Social posting can be a powerful tool for promoting your local business.
Nonetheless, achieving success requires a proper strategy and willingness to commit the time, effort, and resources necessary to create content that engages and meets the needs of your target audience.
Crafting content that resonates with your audience can also help expand your reach, build lasting relationships with consumers, and position your local business as a trusted source and authority within the community.
It's time to get out there and start connecting with your customers!
The possibilities are endless – what story will you tell?
Talk Soon,
Erik
We implement creative, results-based digital marketing strategies for local business clients.
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