Small businesses need to use social media to grow. But in an ever-changing Internet landscape, it is increasingly challenging to know where to start and how various tools can fit into an emerging “user-to-user” marketing mentality. Following are seven effective steps small businesses can take to harness the power of social media and better grow their enterprise.

Knowing your audience is a key aspect of effective communication. It is necessary to understand the type of people you are trying to reach and then consider their specific needs and concerns. To do this well, you need to collect data about your audience. By doing so, you might uncover surprising similarities or differences between your target audience and yourself or the group you are representing.

Prior to completely immersing oneself in the realm of social media marketing, it is vital to first have a clear understanding of one’s target audience. Market research should be carried out to identify the demographic makeup of the ideal customer. Seek to understand everything possible about this group, as it relates to using social media. Once market research is complete, brand managers can utilize the newfound knowledge related to their consumer base in order to structure an effective “content strategy.”

Ensuring that your brand is uniform on all platforms is key.

It is very important to maintain an equally identifiable brand across all social media. The way your brand is presented on social media platforms should be recognizable by the audience who uses those platforms. Effectively fostering brand recognition entails maximizing coherence and minimizing dissonance between the brand presentation on one platform and its presentation on another. Trust that is built up around a brand appearance on Facebook, for instance, could be widely undercut if the same brand used a different identity on Twitter.

Crear contenido atractivo: La importancia de entender a tu audiencia.

Cuando se trata de crear contenido para tu negocio en línea, hay un factor que no debemos pasar por alto: la audiencia. No importa qué tipo de contenido crees, siempre es fundamental tener en cuenta quiénes son las personas que lo van a consumir. ¿Por qué? Porque, al entender a tu audiencia, podrás crear contenido 100% enfocado en sus necesidades, problemas, deseos o inquietudes. Y eso, en el mundo del marketing online, es fundamental para no solo conseguir la atención de tu público, sino también para mantenerla a largo plazo.

If you want to make your audience sit up and take notice and, better yet, engage with your brand, then producing fantastic, meaningful content is a must. The rawest way you can possibly start to do that is by producing materials you can give away. Things you “just” produce and distribute for the hell of it, because there remains some part of you—the first half of your life, say, or just all of your life—that remembers the first fires we started on this planet, and the second rule we created for ourselves, out of everything we didn’t give away: Tell a better story.

Using visual content:

Social media platforms are very receptive to visual content. Among the different kinds of content available, high-quality pictures and videos of something that a business wants to focus on are likely to catch attention. In the social media feeds that appear while users are transitioning from one thing to another on the site, something that really directly engages the viewer is going to perform better and have a higher chance of being clicked on and interacting with.

Capturing the Potential of Video

The influential power of video on social media is evident. People watch videos more often and for longer durations than they read text or look at still pictures. That is why video is such a great tool for content marketing, especially on social media platforms. It is capable of capturing our attention, holding it, and delivering a message in a way that words and pictures alone cannot. It also has the added benefit of being very shareable.

Connecting with Your Audience:

When it comes to social media, it’s crucial to remember just how social it is by nature. It’s not enough to just put content out into the world for people to consume; you have to actively engage with your audience if you want to take your brand to the next level. Whether it’s through prompt and thoughtful comments, direct messaging, or simply giving someone a mention, engaging with your audience is the key to building the kind of relationship that makes them want to come back for more.

Strategic Implementations of Hashtags

The reach and visibility of your content on social media platforms is massively influenced by hashtags. Relevant research can determine the hashtags that work best for your industry, someone as an individual within that industry, or for your target audience, and just incorporating those well-researched hashtags alongside your posts can yield massive results in terms of exposure to communities you might not yet be a part of.

Allocating resources to paid advertising is a smart move.

Even though it is important to have organic reach on social media, it is still a great idea to boost your efforts with paid advertising. That is because the fact of the matter is that standard posts that you put up on any platform are only reaching a fraction of the people who follow you. So it doesn’t matter if you have great content and a great following. If you are trying to make an impact, then you have to pay to play. And we don’t mean reach-verse-vanity metric paid campaigns. We are talking about amplifying your story to the right folks.

Taking a close look at performance metrics …

Keep a close eye on the figures that indicate how well your social media campaigns are working, and then do two things: one, figure out what the numbers really mean, and two, apply what you’ve learned to your next set of campaigns. Are the campaigns really getting the message across—that is, are they working—from the viewpoint of the media mix, the message, and the target audience?

Keeping Up to Date and Changing with the Times:

As social media trends and algorithms continue to change, it is important for marketers to keep pace. What was a strategy two years ago may no longer be sufficient. It may even be doing you a disservice. And even though platforms like Facebook and Instagram are making it harder to reach your core audience, your brand can’t forsake these outsized social networks because of their sheer scale. Luckily, Sprout Social can help you navigate these choppy, uncharted waters.

Small businesses can establish an active online presence, interact with their audience in real-seeming ways, and steer big, unfakeable benefits toward their unfakeable bottom lines by following some pretty simple yet compelling rules of the road. That, anyway, is one way to sum up what our panel of experts—from HubSpot, Social Bakers, and The Big Know—offered in the way of advice for social media marketing by small businesses.