Social media is one of the fastest-growing platforms in the world. With 3.5 billion active users, the opportunities to grow your business are endless. 

Social media marketing can be intimidating, but is the cornerstone of digital marketing. Businesses that know how to utilize the right types of posts, audience, and platforms can find they build and grow their businesses faster than ever. 

Businesses that use social media not only can build brand loyalty but target new customers by hitting post. 

If you are new to digital marketing or looking to finetune your social media, social media can transform the way you do business. We cover the basics of a social media strategy, and what to post to grow your business. 

Optimize Your Social Media Strategy

Digital marketers know how important it is to have an SEO strategy, but many do not have a social media strategy written out.  Planning your social media is just as important to ensure your social media hits goals. 

 A planned social media strategy will guide your posts, pages, and audience. With a proper strategy, you can easily optimize social pages and posts that hit goals. With the help of a strategy, you can clearly define goals and objectives for better planning and better content as well.

Use This To Outline Social Media Strategy: 

• Clear Goals For Your Social Media. Pick a goal for your content such as; Generate leads/ Traffic/ Sales/ Increase Brand Awareness. 
• Identify Your Target Audience and Customer Profiles: What platforms do your customers use and interact with, and what kind of content they like?
• Focus On the Best Platform For Your Brand: Pick 2-3 platforms to focus on and use to create content for. 
• Types Of Content You will make: How will your content reflect your goals?
• Tracking and Review Dates: How will you track your social performance?

Once you have a clear understanding of the goal of your social media should be, you can further optimize. New marketers will often throw posts into the wild without doing the right research on their target audience. Like SEO you need to do research to find the perfect hashtags, groups and types of posts your audience wants to see!

After identifying your target audience, groups, hashtags it is time to optimize your pages. Similar to SEO you want to make sure that all your information is full of relevant keywords. 

All profile and page options should be filled with the services, about you, and most importantly contact information. When you write your about us section for social media you should include keywords and hashtags if appropriate to begin targeting your ideal audience. 

Now that you have a completed, strategy, target audience, and completed pages you can begin posting on social media! 

Types Of Posts 

Having a Facebook page is essential for any small business looking to use social media to grow their business. Posting the right content on Facebook can make or break your business, and if done incorrectly can hurt your business. 

Many businesses forgot one important factor of social media. It’s Social! While sales and traffic are always key metrics for measuring your social media activity, engagement is how you will find your business.  Likes and shares are a currency all their own on social media. 

There are thousands of guides for social media posts! Thankfully they all fall into one of the following categories. 

Ideal Types Of Posts For Your Pages: 

• Informative Content: This could be content that helps customers learn more about your products, or shares important information. Infographics, fun facts, or other materials that are easy to share and that informative in nature. The goal of this content should be to increase shares! 
• Giveaways/ Contest Content: Who doesn’t love the chance to win something? These types of posts are a great way to find new customers, boost sales, and exposures. Giveaways and contests can explode your exposure and put your brand in front of potential clients. 
• Relatable Content: Behind the scenes, ask anything, or about our team content that helps customers put a face to your brand. These posts are ideal for building a connection and personality with your customers. 
• Sales: Don’t be afraid to share sales, specials, and new products you are launching with your audience. With the right variation in posts your audience will be more receptive to your sales and specials. The goal of these posts are to drive traffic and sales with these posts!

Share your posts with groups and use the right hashtags to get your posts in front of the right audiences. Each platform will vary on what kind of content does best, so don’t be afraid to try new types. 

When posting on social media make sure it matches the goals of your social media strategy. If you need more ideas of types of social media posts you can use, this guide lays out plenty of types of posts to try! 

Use Video to Grow Your Business

More social media platforms are using video to grow their business in an astronomical way. With a personalized feel, video conveys better emotion and captures attention faster than an image. 

Video offers a unique way to communicate with your audience in a way that only your business can! Some of the largest social media platforms only host videos.  More businesses are trying to find videos to grow their business.

Posting the right kind of videos can increase conversions to your business.

Must-Have Videos To Grow Your Business

• Behind The Scenes: Show what a day in the life at your business looks like. This can be a great way to highlight your company culture and personify your brand! Whether it is the CEO or an employee you can learn more about the people behind the brand and how they make your company special. This will give any type of organization a hand-made feel and can be a great way to reach potential
• Product videos: Short videos showing how people use products or services can be entertaining, and interesting to watch. 
• Testimonials: Good or bad, reviews make businesses go round. Testimonials make a review feel more authentic and will build trust in your business. 
• Entertainment: Brands that can be funny and entertaining will see more success with their content than those that don’t. Injecting humor and entertainment to a video is a great way to hold attention and have customers want to learn more about your business. 

No matter your type of video, you should always aim to have your videos short and rewatchable. Similarly, with your posts, each video should have a clear goal and call to action. 

Make sure that your videos are engaging and hold the audience’s attention to ensure your message is shared properly. 

Summary

With the right strategy, you can build your business and drive sales from social media. After optimizing your pages, building your ideal clients, and creating the right posts you can boost your business. 

How To Use Social Media To Grow Your Business: 

• Optimize Your Social Media Pages
• Types Of Posts 
• Use Video to Grow Your Business

How Will You Use Social Media To Grow Your Business?