Social Media Tips For Small Businesses & Bloggers

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When you’re just starting out as an entrepreneur or as a blogger, it can be a challenge to build a good, loyal following on social media. Next to everything you need to do, you have to spend time on creating quality content and figuring out how to reach your target audience. In this small guide, we’ll share our best social media tips for small businesses and bloggers who want to step up their social media game.

General Social Media Tips For Small Businesses And Bloggers

Before we start telling you about the social media we love to use and our strategy for them, we’d like to share some general social media marketing tips with you.

• Determine your target audience and figure out what social media they spend the most time on and how, when and where you can reach them best.
• Focus on creating quality content that provides value for your target audience. Answer questions they might have, teach them new things, inspire and/or motivate them. Keep them coming back for more!
• Be consistent in your branding and the story you tell. Be authentic and recognizable.
• Post consistently and regularly and engage with comments and things your audience post themselves. You don’t necessarily need to pay attention to it every day. You can create a content calendar, create content beforehand and schedule them to go live with services like Hootsuite or Buffer at desired times. This will save you a lot of time.
• Write a good bio that instantly tells your audience who you are, what you do and what you stand for. Make it short, catchy and visually appealing (by using emojis or |’s to separate titles for instance).
• Set goals for your social media, track your analytics and adjust your content by doing more of the things that perform well.

Specific Tips For Different Social Media

Now that we covered the basics that apply to everything you do in your social media marketing, let’s dive a little deeper into specific social media. We love to use Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram for our business. So we’re going to tell you a bit more about each of these so you can get started with your own strategy.

Pinterest

Pinterest was a real game-changer for us. It can be a huge source of traffic to your website or blog if you use it well. Pinterest is a visual search engine where you can find “Pins” on almost any topic that you can collect and save on boards of your choosing. In order to use Pinterest for your business or blog, you need to create a business account, claim your website and write a good bio. Because Pinterest is a search engine, you have to work with keywords. Think about what people could be searching for when trying to find your business or blog and add those keywords to your name, bio and board names and descriptions. Use as many keywords as you can think of.

When you create Pins, make sure they look good. You can use Canva to create beautiful visuals for free. They provide you with free done-for-you templates in the right size(s) that you can alter to fit your aesthetic. Then upload the Pins to (one of) your boards, with a good keyword rich description and a link to your blog post or website.

More Pinterest Tips

• Enable rich pins.
• Always create vertical Pins and don’t forget to add your link to the visual.
• Pin often (aim for 20-50 pins throughout the day, at least half of which should be your own Pins).
• Check your analytics to figure out which Pins perform the best.
• Use Tailwind* to automatically schedule your Pins throughout the times during the day your audience is most active.
• Use Tailwind Tribes* (for free!) and join group boards on Pinterest itself to reach more people. You Pin other people’s Pins to your boards and they Pin yours in exchange.
• Add a “Pin It” button to the images on your website to encourage your visitors to share your Pins. You can do this easily with the jQuery Pin It Button For Images Lite plugin on WordPress.
• Create multiple different Pins for each blog post. We generally create 3-10 different Pins for every post.
• Upload a profile picture of you, not your logo.
• Put your job description in your name. For instance, Maud has “Maud | Life Purpose & Entrepreneur Coach“.

Twitter

For a successful Twitter account, choose a good, appropriate @accountname and write a good, clear bio. Upload a good quality profile picture of yourself. Twitter likes authenticity. So don’t be afraid to show a bit more personal things on there as well as promoting your blog posts and products/services. Twitter is all about engaging with others and building relationships. Make jokes, ask questions (and try to reply to the comments), engage with other people’s content as well and follow people that interest you. Focus on creating fun, quality content. Also occasionally retweet other people’s tweets that are relevant to your following. Tweet regularly throughout the day. We try to tweet at least 6 to 15 times a day and comment on replies and other tweets in addition to that.

More Twitter Tips

• Use pictures in your tweets to draw more attention to them.
• Use relevant #hashtags to reach more people.
• Ask a lot of questions to get people to engage with your content.
• Follow and use retweet accounts for bloggers and entrepreneurs by using their hashtags or by tagging them. (Here are some examples for these accounts: @FemaleBloggerRT, @GRLPOWRCHAT, @BloggersTribe & @InfluencerRT).
• Use the WordPress plugin “Better Click To Tweet” to encourage your website visitors to share your content on Twitter.

Instagram

Instagram isn’t always our best friend. If you already use Instagram, you might have noticed it’s getting increasingly harder to get good engagement without paying for promoted posts. However, Instagram is still a great social medium to interact with your audience and it can still be (very) valuable to your business or blog. Especially as a blogger, a lot of brands that work with bloggers will ask for a good Instagram following. Therefore Instagram can’t miss from our social media tips for small businesses and bloggers guide.

The most important tip I have for you is to use the right hashtags. Aim to use relevant hashtags that are being used between 20,000 and 500,000 times (you can look this up by simply searching for the hashtag on Instagram itself or you can use the awesome built-in Tailwind tool to select good hashtags). This way your content is visible because the hashtag is used often enough, but your post won’t instantly drown because the hashtag is “overcrowded”.

More Instagram Tips

• Comment on other people’s post and like posts.
• Post beautiful pictures and visuals like quotes/pieces of info. (Personal) branding your feed with a theme is great too.
• Follow relevant hashtags to easily find the content you’re interested in.
• Follow interesting people (back). Don’t worry (too much) about your following/followers ratio. Focus on building relationships with people.
• Use all of the 30 hashtags you’re allowed to use on every post and change them up regularly. Don’t use the same hashtags on every post.
• Use the “story” feature for more interacting.
• Reply to the comments you receive and try to engage with their content as well.
• Post once or twice per day on the times your following is most active.

Facebook

We’re a little lazy when it comes to Facebook. Because we like to focus on the social media platforms that we enjoy the most, we usually re-use our Instagram and Twitter content on our Facebook page. Occasionally we’ll post a story or an ad on there to change things up. When you post something on Instagram, you can easily link your Facebook page to your Instagram and automatically post it to your Facebook page as well. We tend to post once or twice a day on Facebook and share it on our personal accounts as well.

More Facebook Tips

• Create a separate business page for your (small) business or blog.
• Create an appealing and professional looking Facebook header and use a profile picture of yourself, not your logo.
• Use pictures and videos as well as text.
• Don’t post whole essays, but rather keep things short and to-the-point. You can always link to a page or blog post on your website if you’d like.
• Create share-worthy content by sharing inspiring stories and creating value-packed posts.

Have Fun!

We hope these tips will help you create a kick-ass strategy to step up your social media game. While social media are a very great resource for your business, it can also be really overwhelming. So, above all, have fun with creating your content. Focus on the social media that you like and enjoy spending time on and remember you don’t have to do it all to be successful. You can focus on growing on one at a time.

Do you have some more social media tips for small businesses and bloggers? We’d love to hear them in the comments below this post!

Cheers,

Maud & Mark

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