8 Social Media Hacks for Small Businesses
No matter what industry you are in, social media plays a huge role in promoting your business. Growing a social media following is a long-term process and is often time-consuming. Here are some simple, easy-to-do social media hacks that will help snowball your social media presence.
1. Use Social Media Micro-Influencers to Help Your Business Get More Exposure
If you are just starting out on social media platforms, one of the quickest and most efficient hacks for increasing your presence is to reach out to already established people on social media. To do this, look for micro-influencers—users with a strong following among your target audience. Twitter is a great platform to start because you can very easily see how influential a particular user is.
2. Schedule Your Instagram Posts
Instagram is a great way to extend your visibility, but editing the photos and coming up with the perfect caption can take longer than we’d like to admit. Editing and writing captions all at once can help you to strike while the iron is hot, and the momentum you gather can help you to come up with caption ideas more quickly. With services such as Schedugram and Hootsuite, you can batch-create and schedule Instagram posts, making them effective social media hacks.
3. Optimize Your Images for All Social Media Platforms in One Go
Every social media platform has different image sizes and requirements, so it can be cumbersome to post across platforms. The good news is, the Resize feature from Canva allows you to create optimized versions of the same image for many platforms, with just one click! Once you have chosen the image sizes you want, all you have to do is click ‘Resize’ and you will have them all opened up in different tabs, ready to use.
4. Schedule Multiple Tweets from New Blog Posts
If your blog does not get as much traffic as you’d like, this neat hack can help. All you need to do is set up a free missinglettr account and connect your blog’s RSS feed to it. When a new blog post is detected, missinglettr will create a number of tweets that focus on different parts of your article, which you can schedule over any period of time. Go through them just to make sure they are all relevant. You can easily edit them to be just the way you want.
5. Get yourself a Social Media Chatbot
A great way to engage with your audience on social media is through great customer service. However, having someone available 24/7 to answer all your customers’ questions and complaints can be very time-consuming, not to mention expensive. A great hack for helping with that is a Chatbot, which you can use for your Twitter and Facebook accounts and program them to solve some of the more common or minor customer problems.
6. Speed Up Your Social Media Following with S4S
Share for share (or shoutout for shoutout) is a technique whereby businesses help each other by posting each other’s content with a particular reference or tag on an agreed upon platform. It’s a great way for businesses that operate in similar markets or have complimentary products to mutually benefit from each other’s social media reach. This hack works on almost every social media platform and it’s completely free!
7. Find the Most Effective Influencers
It’s not always clear how effective a micro-influencer is and you can’t afford to waste time and money on someone who doesn’t deliver. TweetDeck is a great tool to find out exactly how much influence a Twitter user has. When people want to pay attention to what someone has to say, they put them on a Twitter list, but it’s not easy to see how many lists an influencer is on. TweetDeck allows you to find Twitter users and see the number of Twitter lists the person is on. If both the number of lists and the number of followers is high, then you have found a good influencer!
8. Pin to Pinterest Directly From Facebook
Most marketers will agree that it is important to use both Facebook and Pinterest to have a strong social media presence. It can be a challenge to keep them in sync, especially if you are sharing other people’s content on your Facebook page. Here is how you can pin from Facebook:
- Log in to your Facebook account and locate the image
- Click the image once time to display the full-size image
- Right click the image and select “Copy Image URL”(the exact wording varies based on your operating system)
- Log in to your Pinterest account
- Click Add a Pin
- Paste the URL you previously copied
- Select the board you want to add the pin to
- Click Pin It and you are done!
It can be tough to navigate your way through today’s social media, but with a few simple tricks, you can make your business look like a pro! To really grow, try a few out at the same time, as they often complement each other and will help you achieve a greater social media presence.