At the sidelines of every social media platform, is a swarm of hungry marketers trying to get a slice of the pie. And no wonder, since 70% of the U.S. population has at least one social networking profile. Social media levels out the playing field for businesses. It’s no longer necessary to be a corporate giant to reach your audience, you just need to commit some time and effort.
This required time happens to be one of the top concerns for small business owners. They feel like they’re in a pickle: not enough time to post updates throughout the day, and not enough money in the budget for a full-time marketing team. Many small businesses elect to hire marketing firms to handle specific duties. These firms offer various packages for more reasonable prices.
Whether you decide to hire out your social media marketing or handle it yourself, it is smart to do some initial groundwork.
Which Networks Should I Be On?
This largely depends on your buyer personas. What are their demographics? Social media use varies by age, location, ethnicity, gender, and even income. If you haven’t defined your personas yet, we strongly suggest you do here! If you market B2B or mainly to professionals, it is very important to have a presence on LinkedIn. For some eCommerce sites, Pinterest can be invaluable. Regardless of your industry, it’s a safe to bet that a large majority of your target audience is on Twitter, and even more on Facebook. Not only are there 1,100,000,000 unique monthly visitors to Facebook, it’s also addicting.
Where else can you find 23% of users checking their account five or more times- every day?! If you’re looking for a captive audience, ditch the newspaper and TV ads, and start posting.
How Often Should I Post?
Use the below info graphic from blog.bufferapp.com as a guide for posting etiquette on different channels.
Not pictured: Instagram (2 posts per day), LinkedIn (1 post per day), and blogs (2 posts per week).
When Should I Post?
Users engage with Facebook and Twitter posts most often from Thursday-Sunday. The beginning of the work week is busy and you aren’t likely to catch users online as often. The best hours for posting are 9AM, 1PM, and 3PM, corresponding with breaks in work and school. This is flip-flopped in the professional world. Posts on LinkedIn fair better Tuesday-Thursday and at 7AM, 12PM, and 5PM according to 16 studies on CoSchedule.
If you market internationally, there is something additional to consider here. Which time zones are your audience in? If you focus strictly on the U.S. and don’t have data yet for unique users, you can center efforts on the largest population: 50% of the U.S. population is in the Eastern Time Zone and a combination of Eastern and Central make up almost 80%.
I Have No Idea What to Post About!
Don’t worry, you’re not alone! We hear this all the time from businesses. When we manage social media marketing for clients, we always start with research on their target audience. After we become acquainted with their buyer personas, we begin listing topics that align with their interests, goals, and concerns. We promote blogs from the business’s website to draw traffic there. Even if they are not producing their own blog content, sharing blogs and related content from other websites encourages audience interaction. The more content is effectively tailored to their personas, the more their ‘likes’, ‘shares’, and followers will grow.
If you’d like more ideas for content to share and use for blog posts, check out the related posts below!
