Social Media Time Savers and Tools for Small Businesses 101

August 21, 2018 • 11 minute read

Running a Business

Article Summary
Social media can be a great tool for your small business. Many of your customers are already on the major social networks like Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter—and it probably makes sense for you to be there too. I know it can get overwhelming so here are some social media time savers.

Here are a couple things you can do to boost sales with your social media efforts:

Align your sales and marketing strategy for the year with your social strategy—a content calendar that incorporates your sales calendar will help
Automate your social media posting with tools like Agora Pulse, Buffer, or CoSchedule to save time and effort

Don’t be afraid to experiment until you find the right platform to reach your customers or the right combination of social media tools. Ask your customers what platforms they frequent and make sure your business is there. You might just be surprised at the value you get from your social media efforts.

Your business knows social media is important, but where do you begin? Digital advertising revenue, driven by networks like Facebook, is expected to increase 18 percent year over year to reach $229 billion this year. Social is where the people are, where they’re consuming media, where they’re interacting with friends and getting recommendations, where they’re looking to discover new brands and products that fit their needs, and so much more.

Where your business spends its time and money can get out of hand without strategy. Here are some ideas for how to focus your efforts on the right networks, using the right tools, to save your business money and improve return on investment.

Use Built-In Network Applications

Even if your small business doesn’t have the budget to work with an agency on social media or hire someone full-time in-house to handle it, the good news is that networks are free and most have built-in reporting tools to provide you with insights. Some, like Facebook, even offer scheduling features.

When it comes to the social media networks your business should be on, here’s a look at some you might consider:

Facebook: The big daddy of social networks, the site has 1.94 billion monthly users, with more than 68 percent of adults using it. Considering its large market share, Facebook should be the number one priority for B2C businesses to have a presence on. You can share photos, videos, text updates, slideshows and more, and schedule posts ahead of time within the Facebook app. The site has rich reporting features built into every business page profile, including info on when your users are on the site and how many people interact with each post.
Twitter: Twitter has 328 million monthly users, which may seem to pale in comparison to Facebook, but it’s important to realize some of the most important people to your brand are often avid users on the network: journalists, bloggers and influencers. The platform gives brands the capability, unlike Facebook, to directly message any user who follows the brand page. This makes it easier for your business to build relationships with influential users and get more press. The network also has a free analytics tool that shows top Tweets and followers.
Instagram: Powered by Facebook, Instagram is key for any visually-minded brand like a restaurant or clothing store. With 700 million monthly active users, businesses that can shine visually through photos or videos should have an Instagram. An Instagram account is essential to brands in verticals like fashion, hospitality, food and beverage, and art, but any business can use the network to show off company culture or re-share posts from followers to engage with consumers. Instagram business users get a free insights tool that shows follower demographics, follower growth and impressions.
Pinterest: Pinterest has 150 million users, and like Instagram, it’s a great way for visual brands to get noticed through "pinning" images on vision board-like displays. The network skews heavily female, with 45 percent of online American women using the network compared with 17 percent of males, so if your brand targets women, you might consider setting up a profile here. Brands with a free business account get free analytics on Pinterest, showing top posts, audience details and stats about your profile.
YouTube: Not everyone uses YouTube in a social sense, but with 1.5 billion monthly users, the power of the channel can’t be ignored. If you plan to produce videos, YouTube is key, because you also get the added benefit of keyword-optimized videos showing up in Google search results, the network that owns YouTube. You can also interact with user comments, comment on other videos to connect with more users and add other videos to your own page to build up content if you don’t produce your own. You can schedule videos in advance through YouTube, and YouTube’s analytics provide insight into demographics, traffic sources and watch time.

A few other social networks your business might consider include:

LinkedIn: A haven for B2B enterprises, LinkedIn is still a good place for B2C brands to have a presence because there are more than 500 million users on the network. You can post business updates, encourage your staff to grow their personal brands by interacting in LinkedIn Groups, and use free LinkedIn analytics to gauge what type of content works best for your business on the network.
Snapchat: If your B2C targets teenagers and millennials, you should consider Snapchat. More than 60 percent of American smartphone users ages 13 to 34 use the social network, which has 161 million users. Photo and video content does well here, which “self-destructs” from the app after 24 hours, making it a great place to share special offers.

Now that you have a better idea of what networks you could be on, here’s how to use these networks to boost revenue.

Get Organized to Align Social with Sales

Top brands save time and money by aligning marketing strategy with sales efforts. It seems like a no-brainer to tap into sales objectives and campaigns to power marketing, yet some brands lack a social strategy and then wonder why they’re not getting results.

A content calendar can help streamline your efforts. Agora Pulse and other similar tools, offer a free editorial calendar template. You can map out your entire business year with your sales team in the room. Discuss product launch dates, plans for holiday specials and seasonal trends where certain products should be spotlighted. Use the calendar as a guide to plan your social content, but be flexible enough to adjust content by checking in with sales on a monthly basis.

One brand that boosted its sales initiatives with social is a company I worked with as a consultant a few years ago. They were a local nursery trying to compete with much bigger big box store competitors. They had been in business for many years and had amassed a very complete catalog of advice they shared in article form with customers who visited their store. When I advocated sharing the advice on social media with an offer to meet with a gardening expert who could help them with their particular landscaping or gardening questions, they were not only skeptical, but they though they would be giving away what set them apart from the big box—real, honest to goodness, expertise.

They decided to give it a try. For the next three months we promoted this advice via their blog and their Facebook page. We included an invitation to come into the store and visit with one of the gardening experts about their yard or their garden. The education content shared on social media was so successful, they had to make managing that effort a full-time job for one of their employees—they had that many people visiting the store with questions and ultimately becoming customers.

They have since expanded this effort on Instagram with beautiful images of flowers and garden plants with tips for planting season and other useful information.

Automate Social Media Posts

Instead of your social media manager, or whoever’s in charge of social at your startup, having to manually log in to every single social network to post, schedule them all at once in one tool. This way, if you want to have an editor or second pair of eyes view them, they can do this all at once.

Here are three social media automation tools you might consider:

Agora Pulse: AP is a great tool that we use here at OnDeck. We love it because it’s such a simple, intuitive platform. You can use it to easily schedule posts for all of your social channels and listen to conversations happening around your business or industry. Their measurement tools are straightforward. Most importantly for a small business owner, you do not need to be a social media maven to utilize this product.
Buffer: Similar to Agora Pulse, this social scheduling platform allows multiple users to access various channels and messages within one platform. Besides the scheduling, Buffer has stellar analytics that track engagement, impressions and account performance. The free platform allows two profiles and 10 scheduled posts per profile, while paid accounts increase the more users and platforms there are.
CoSchedule: In addition to offering a social media scheduling tool, CoSchedule enables article scheduling and blog post management, plus scheduling for marketing projects. It provides more transparency into the various arms of a marketing department, to help you align your strategy. Plans with social scheduling start at $40 per month.

Using fewer tools for scheduling and reporting saves more of your team time. But how do you know what to pay for?

Social Media Shopping Tips

The great news is, all of the tools mentioned above, and many more, offer free trials so startups can see what works best for their team and business needs. Take advantage of these trials by having your employees test them out. Pepper customer service members of each tool with questions as they come up, so you can see how responsive they’ll be when you have problems in the future and how much help they can offer. Before you start the trials, come up with metrics you’ll use to measure just how much time your team is saving, through ease of use and troubleshooting.

Ask your staff to reach out to their personal contacts or use forums like LinkedIn Groups to ask others in your industry what they’d recommend. Make social media tools a topic of conversation at your next industry networking event.

You can also request a consultation with each tool’s sales team, so you can explain exactly what you need and see what they offer you. Signing up for a tool can bring it significant revenue over time, and they want your business. Don’t be afraid to let each one know what you want, and have them get to work to show you how they’ll make the tool work for you.

Continue to ask for input from your team members who end up using the tools once you’ve signed up, so you can switch services if something is not working. As people get used to working with a tool, they may come to accept frustrations that could be costing you money, so regular check-ins can help keep your team — and your wallet — happy.