For those who are small business owners, establishing a brand can leave them with limited resources as traditional marketing can be a drain on their funds. That’s when social media marketing comes in hand. It’s low-cost and gives a direct line to current and potential customers. There is a trade-off though, business owners – like yourself – will save money, but will need to invest more in time. Below explains the basics of social media for small businesses who have limited resources when it comes to establishing and building their brand.

Target The Right Audience with The Right Message

Social media is all about connecting with the right audience for your brand on an authentic level. For a small business owner like yourself, it’s important to understand your current and potential customers. To do that, you must define the right audience that you wish to expose your brand to. For example: if you sell art supplies, you would want to target people who love to do arts and crafts. Once you know what audience will fit well with your brand you will have to create the right message to send out to those people. Your message should have at least three key marketing messages to help define your brand easier to each individual person in that categorized audience. The last step before getting social is to find out what social networks your audience prefers to use to ensure that you are establishing your brand in the correct network.

Start Small with Daily Plans

Social media for small businesses can become overwhelming if not managed properly from the start. So it’s a good idea to have a manageable load at first, which means starting off on one or two networks. These could be popular social networks like: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram. To guarantee success in these networks consistency must be place. This means you have to incorporate 15-30 minutes of social media activities into your daily routine for the first month or two to get familiar with the plan. For example: if you’re on Facebook, comment and link content on different Facebook pages to steer potential customers to your own account/page. For Twitter, try to tweet and retweet at least 3-5 times per day and if you have a Pinterest pin and re-pin 3-5 images daily. Once you become comfortable with the tasks, you can join groups and communities to target specific audiences that will easily take interest in your brand.

Listen and Give Feedback

Social listening is an excellent method to monitor what people are saying about a specific brand. Take special interest in these as current or potential customers could be talking about your brand. If there are any comments or mentions of your brand, whether it’s good or bad, giving feedback lets the current and potential customers know that their opinions are being heard. Another good tactic while giving feedback is to provide quality content that the customers can share with others to help spread your brand onto other networks.

More Exposure with Social Advertising

Being a small business owner puts you in a tight budget when it comes to advertising your brand, but don’t simply dismiss it. There are paid advertising that can bring you more brand exposure for a low-cost. Facebook offers a variety advertising packages like website traffic, audience engagement, and brand exposure. Twitter has two: promoted content or promoted accounts. Promoted accounts increases the size of your Twitter followers while promoted content helps spread your brand across the network to tailored audiences. Other networks have their own packages that can help you spread your brand to the right audiences. So even if your budget is small including a low-cost social advertising into your plan could produce great results.