Are you curious how social media marketing can help your small business grow?  Here’s how you can generate a huge return on your investment.

Why Social Media?

In a recent study in which Social Media Marketing recently interviewed over 3,000 small business owners, and they found that most of the businesses were being handsomely rewarded for their social media efforts:

• Over 90% of those interviewed agreed that social media was important to them
• More than 88% said that social networks are their main source of exposure
• 72% said they saw increased traffic and subscriptions as a result of social media marketing

But it doesn’t end there:

• 59% of the respondents had created new partnerships thanks to the highly qualified leads they found on platforms like LinkedIn
• 48% have seen improved sales as a direct result of their social media activities
• 58% reported reduced marketing costs.

There are many other advantages of social media marketing. For instance, marketing on a global platform like Facebook instantly gives you additional market penetration. It allows you to move outside your local area and reach a wider audience, leading to greater profits.

Social media also gives you a platform to compete with the big boys. Smaller budgets give small businesses a big competitive disadvantage. Social media marketing doesn’t requirea big budget to go head-to-head with more established businesses as long as you’re smart and social.

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How to Maximize Social Media for Small Businesses

If you’re ready to jump into this marketing channel, here’s what you need to succeed:

Outline Your Goals

Some marketers end up failing on social media is because they don’t set goals. So know what yours are.

What do you want to achieve with your social activities?

Increase traffic?

Grow your online community?

Get leads?

Reach new marketers?

Outlining your goals will help you determine how much time you should spend on social media and even the type of posts you should create.

Measure Your Progress

Using your goals, identify the metrics that you’ll need to improve. For instance, if you’re interested in increasing traffic to your website, measure how many users are visiting your site through your social profiles.

You should also observe which social networks are giving you the most traffic. Fortunately, you can now use analytics tools such as HootSuite to track most of these metrics.

Automate… But Not Everything

Social automation tools can make your work easier. There are even tools – such as Buffer – that can manage multiple social networks on a single dashboard. But don’t rely heavily on these shortcuts. If you do, you might risk losing that personal touch with your followers.

Be There

You should always find time to chat and converse with your followers. Reply to their messages, participate in their discussions, like their posts, retweet their messages, share their videos… just treat them as your friends. They’ll feel happy and appreciated.

Summary

Start applying these tips right away and it will only be a matter of time before you see a lift in your traffic, leads, and even sales.

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