How to Increase your Small Business Online Presence with Social Media

Small business owners deliberately take advantage of social media to increase online presence for their businesses. The vast user bases and sharing capabilities peculiar to social media platforms make them ideal amplification tools to help increase online presence for your business. This is in addition to the fact that a vast majority of consumers rely on social media for product recommendations and actually make purchases based on these recommendations.

Here are five things you can do to increase social media presence for your small business.

1. Be Active on Social Media

This is a given. The more active you are on social media, the easier it is for you to get noticed. To make social media a part of your online presence therefore, the first thing you need to do is to have an active account. That done, you can start publishing high quality posts regularly as well as making well-informed responses to likes and comments on those posts. At the same time, you can reciprocate with liking and commenting on your followers’ posts, answering direct questions/messages, sharing content from other sources, and much more. If you do this consistently, your online presence will increase proportionately.

2. Think more of Audience not just Followers

On social media, your online presence hardly improves with more followers. Rather, it is your following that improves with a stronger online presence. When you think more of your following as a great audience you can market to, you can work to cultivate niche audience of individuals who are interested in what you are offering. That translates into more likes and comments on your posts and more user-generated content to boot. As most marketers very well know, marketing campaigns with user-generated content result in higher conversions rates than campaigns without it. Meaning, user-generated content helps to build your online presence better on social media.

3. Limit the Number of Social Media Platforms you Use

Expert social media marketers always advise marketers to limit the number of social media platforms to only the numbers they can conveniently handle. This is because online presence is all about quality and not quantity. You can settle for the platforms your preferred audience is using, then limit the number you choose based on your bandwidth. If you have just one, two or three accounts with solid engagement, it is much better than having several accounts with weak activity. For most small business owners, the preference is always among the most popular platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube and Pinterest depending on what products/services they are marketing.

4. Make Posts with Emotion for Shareability

If you want to generate engagement on social media, you must make quality posts regularly. Posts that generate engagement are hugely important if you want social media algorithms to locate and display more of your posts in users’ feeds. In addition, quality posts compel your followers to consume your content more and to share it with others widely. To craft quality posts, you can use emotional words and phrases in your captions, use compelling stats, evocative images/photos/graphics and even add emojis for effects. If the posts are easily relatable and link-free such that your followers can consume quickly, it increases their shareability. The more your posts are shared, the better for your online presence.

5. Have Social Media SEO in Place

Some social media sites are some kind of mini search engines in their own rights while relying on keywords in some cases. For this reason, just like the SEO on your business website, you can also have SEO in your social media posts by including your preferred and popular keywords in your profiles and posts on the platforms. You can use many of the same keywords as you do on your business website. But, you may choose to have a preference towards some idea-oriented and lighter-hearted queries because social media platforms are more of the browsing and interactive type of socializing. It is recommended that both hashtags and keywords be used sparingly in your posts to improve your social media presence. If you use them sparingly and focus more on location-based and niche terms, you can manage to increase your visibility to the right audience in their right locations.