Like everything about life these days, the small business landscape is constantly in flux and you have to keep your finger on the pulse in order to pivot quickly in the direction that things are moving. For example, do you think your social media strategy designed three years ago can still cut it today? Certainly not, because so much has changed since then. We look at some of the key factors which may prompt you to reassess the social media strategy of your business so that you can grow from strength to strength over the coming months and years.

Affordability

Small businesses, especially those in the initial stages of their existence, are almost chronically short of cash. For this reason, they can’t afford a large social media marketing budget. Instead, they make do with spending the least amount of money possible and hope to get as much mileage as possible out of that shoestring budget.

The question is, is your small business still locked at that stage where you can’t afford to inject a little more money into your social media strategy? For example, paid adverts can get your content seen by more people and that could widen the pool of potential business leads while also boosting engagement rates.

If that is so, reassess your social strategy and see where an injection of a little more cash can go a long way in helping you to attain the objectives of your small business.

Conversely, if your small business has fallen on hard times due to supply chain constraints, the pandemic or any other factor, does it make sense to retain that large social media strategy budget? Reassessing your strategy would allow you to adjust your spend so that the business can survive the “drought” and bounce back stronger when conditions are better.

In short, it is important to periodically reassess your business’ social media strategy and align that strategy with the current financial health of your business.

Opportunities for Creativity

New social media marketing trends keep emerging and fading away. Similarly, user patterns on different social media platforms keep evolving. For example, TikTok is now a more prominent platform for businesses and yet a year or so ago it was seen as a platform for teens to share their latest dance challenges.

You may therefore need to reassess your social media strategy with a focus on finding out where new opportunities to let your creative juices flow as you make your business to standout from others in your industry.

Newer platforms like TikTok present more opportunities for the expression of creativity, and the huge user numbers of this platform are testament that small businesses that get their act together can reap the benefits of reaching wide audiences with creative content.

Where is Your Target Audience Chilling Out?

In marketing, you go where your target audience can be found rather than waiting for them to come to you (which will never happen!). This factor brings us to another compelling reason why you need to reassess the social media strategy of your small business.

Have there been shifts in the socials preferred by your target market? If so, which platforms now hold them spellbound? Find out where your audience is hanging out and tweak your social media strategy to align with the changed preferences of your target demographic.

For example, the usage stats of Facebook have been declining lately while those of Tiktok are rising sharply. The implication of this alone is that your business needs to take the platform with growing user numbers seriously without leaving the existing dominant platforms like Facebook.

Your small business doesn’t need to have a presence on every social media platform out there. Just choose a few that bring the most results for your small business or promise to deliver the results that you want and focus on those. Speaking of results, the next parameter of your social media strategy is also crucial.

How Easy is it to Measure the Results of Your Social Media Activity?

Every effort expended should produce the desired result. This goes for your offline networking activities as well as social media activities.

Do you know which socials bring the most visitors to your website? Do you know for how long each new visitor remains on your site before moving on? Do you know how many of those new visitors become paying customers? Which types of posts do your customers or community engage the most with? Which content types (video, memes, photos, etc.) attract the highest numbers of likes?

You need solid answers to the questions above and so many other questions about the results produced by your social media activities. If you cannot answer those questions definitively, your social media strategy is in need of reassessment because you can’t afford to keep throwing darts at a wall in the darkness hoping that some will hit their mark.

A number of social media platforms, such as Facebook, have dashboards where you can track different metrics of your social media accounts. You can also leverage the capabilities of your customer relationship management (CRM) software to get insights about how you are doing in attaining the key performance indicators (KPIs) of your business’ social media presence.

In short, reassess your social media strategy and ensure that it is possible to track different metrics so that you can be sure that what you are doing is working, and you can also identify what isn’t working so that the necessary changes can be made without further waste of time, money and other resources.

In closing, your small business needs to have a deliberate strategy to guide what you seek to attain by being on social media and how you are going to attain those outcomes. That strategy should ideally be written down and reviewed periodically so that the needed changes to it can be made as and when the situation demands. For example, if you discover (from the data availed by your dashboard) that LinkedIn isn’t bringing in any return on investment while Twitter and Instagram are killing it, there is no harm in reducing the attention you allocate to LinkedIn and then devote more resources to the platforms which are working for you. Have fun as you use social media more consciously for the benefit of your small business!

To Your Success,

Jairek Robbins