How Small Businesses Can Keep Up On Social Media

Social media is a vital tool for small businesses looking to build brand awareness, connect with customers, and drive growth. But one of the most common questions small business owners face is: "How often should I post?" Most social media experts recommend once a day or even up to 5 times per day! Who has time for that?!

While that might be great for a mommy-blogger or big name brands, small businesses are more likely to irritate their followers by pushing that much content about their products and services. Also, it's down right difficult to come up with that many new ideas! Especially if you have other responsibilities in your company.

Let us map out a plan that is not only more reasonable but will help make your social media easier to manage in the long run.

How To Start: Finding the Sweet Spot

There are two factors to consider with social media posts: FREQUENCY and CONSISTENCY. Pushing content every day for a month (frequency) will not do you any good if you burnout and the account is stagnate the next 6 months (consistency). First focus on what you can do sustainably for the entire year because consistency is more important. Don't worry if the number you land on seems low compared to what the "experts" are recommending.

Instead of killing yourself to try and post something everyday because that's what they say is best, just focus on what you CAN do. If you can consistently post once per week, it shows both your followers and the platform algorithms that you're a stable business. Posting once per week, is about 50 ideas you'll have to come up with for year. This can also sound like a lot, but there are ways to make that number a lot easier to hit. For example, there are 10 major US holidays that are "gimmes" to that take very little effort!

Building a Content Library

Besides the quick and easy "Happy [fill in the holiday here]!" content, here are some other prompts to help you come up with ideas to fill your social media schedule. Before reading the list, try to think in terms of sustainable, "evergreen" content — meaning ideas or themes that can be used over and over again. (More on that in a bit.)

1. What You Sell: This may seem obvious but talk about your products and services. What might not be obvious is how granular you can get with it. Instead of one post saying that you sell lawn care equipment, make that post about one specific model of lawn mower. Then, you can hit each of your other models in future posts.
   
   You might even want to start a "Monthly Product Spotlight" series. Not only does featuring a product or service take care of a post this week, building in the theme of doing so every month will make it easier come up with an idea the other 11 months of the year.
   
   
2. How Their Lives Will Improve: Talk about the lifestyle benefits of choosing your business. Will it save them time and money? Create a post showing a nice family vacation that they can afford after. You don't always have to show your product in order to sell your product. These kind of "fluffy" images play really well on social media and stop scrollers.
   
   
3. Testimonials & Reviews: Nothing beats a happy customer! Make sure your share those comments on your social media. They're very influential to future buyers and is a nice shout out to your crew.
   
   Don't feel like you're limited to sharing Facebook reviews only on Facebook. Feel free to share positive comments across platforms, from third party websites, or even hand written Thank You cards.
   
   If you're in the service industry, you can also share pictures of your job sites to show a job well done if you don't have a lot of clients providing feedback.
   
   
4. Meme & Conversation Starters: When in doubt, share a meme!  Lighthearted content, when appropriate, can make your brand more relatable and shareable. Especially if you can find ones that are related to your industry. You can also run silly polls, quizzes, or questions to engage your audience directly. For example, a pet store could ask, “What’s your pet’s favorite kind of treat?”
   
   These polls may have little to nothing to do with what you offer, but it shows that you care about the lives of your customers.
   
   
5. Upcoming Events: This could be promotions and clearance sales you have coming up, or limited/extended holiday hours to lead up to the previously mentioned "Happy [fill in the holiday here]!" Whether it's something happening in your business or one of the superficial "National Area Rug Day!" kind of celebrations.
   
   Don't forget to use your own holidays as well. When is the anniversary/birthday of your business? Do you close for inventory every year? Have a cafe? Create "Matcha Mondays" where you share a picture of a matcha drink you offer — silly holidays like this don't have to be EVERY Monday, just as long as it happens on a Monday.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle... REPOST!

The best part about consistently creating social media posts, even if it's not a lot, is each piece of content is helping your future self. It's easy to fall into the mindset that each post needs to be something NEW. That's not true!

Social media posts are more like little billboards. People online are speeding by barely registering what they're seeing unless it's interesting enough to stop the scroll. Highway billboards also only get a split second of a driver's attention, but driving by it on a daily basis builds recognition and retention. Don't be afraid to reshare the same post to accomplish a similar repetition online.

For example, if you're running a weekend sale, feel free to post that announcement every day leading up to the sale AND through the weekend.

Having a busy week and can't meet your one post per week goal? Grab one of those "evergreen" product highlights from earlier in the year or do a throwback to an old customer testimonial. It's still good content that helps your followers and they're likely not going to remember it as strongly as you do.

Even those easy holiday posts get even easier if you want to repost the same "Happy Mother's Day" image every year.

The more unique content you make, the bigger the library you have to pull from when times get tough or people go on vacation. If you keep your manageable workload to creating of 50 post per year, over time you can increase your frequency to posting to twice per week by supplementing with existing content.

Remember: if Taylor Swift can reuse content, so can you!

Small Business Social Media Made Easy

Like most things, social media for your business needs to fit YOU. Stop comparing yourself with the big dogs dominating the space and focus on what you can realistically manage. Staying strong and steady while working smarter by reusing "evergreen" posts will get your social media accounts healthy in no time.

If you need more help, Graphic Haven can help bang out some of those reusable content images and captions to build your library faster. Check out our Basic Social Media package, or reach out for a more customized request.