When operating a small business with a small team and (take a deep breath) a small budget, your social media marketing strategy needs to be rock-solid. The glamourous world of digital marketing offers unlimited opportunities and challenges, and you’ll need to work smarter and harder to spread the word about your brand.
Keep breathing. Small businesses have made it happen since long before the internet, and social-savvy modern entrepreneurs are more than willing to share their best advice. After all, small businesses rely on community.
For expert, small business tips, we chatted with Kiana Safari, social media content creator, and Emily Cook, PR and partnerships over at Mala the Brand —a Canadian soy candle company based in Vancouver— to learn how to keep the marketing flame burning.
Key Takeaways
- Choose platforms wisely. Focus on social media channels that align with your target audience to maximize your marketing efforts.
- Engage with your audience. Respond to comments and messages, and use feedback to refine your social media strategy, to ensure content remains relevant and engaging.
- Don’t be afraid to get transparent with your content. Share both successes and challenges openly to build a genuine connection with your audience and enhance your brand’s relatability.
- Invest in tools like Hootsuite to streamline content creation, scheduling, and analytics, making social media management a breeze.
Bonus: Get a free social media strategy template to quickly and easily plan your strategy, track results, and share with your boss, teammates, and clients.
Introduce new people to your brand
All social media channels are designed to show users content that they care about, and it’s easier than ever to share interests, opinions, and (you guessed it) favourite businesses with others.
Marketing on social media brings your brand directly to your customers, and provides them with an accessible way to discover and learn more about you.
Dive into your comments and engage
Especially if your brand is e-commerce-based, you’re likely not getting much face-to-face interaction with your customers. When you use social media marketing for your brand, your customers can engage with you via liking, commenting and messaging you directly—and vice versa.
Learn about current trends
One of the top benefits of social media marketing for small businesses has got to be that trends are born (and blown up) on social media. And being responsive to trends is a great way to set yourself up for success as a business.
This doesn’t mean leaning into brain rot capitalism or only focusing on “what’s cool”—take the underconsumption core trend, for example, which encourages sustainability. It’s simply good business to know what ideas, products, and jokes are popular so that your brand feels current and plugged-in.
Keep up with your competitors
If all your friends (read: competitors) jumped off a bridge (read: got TikTok), would you do it too? Sorry mom, the answer is yes.
To measure up to other businesses in your industry—especially big brands—you have to meet them where they’re at. And often, where they’re at is on social media, entertaining an audience that you have every right to wow with your own original content.
Save marketing money
The bottom line is this: a social media account is free, and creating and posting content on your brand’s social media is a heck of a lot cheaper than buying a billboard or really any other form of advertisement.
Of course, a great social media strategy requires budget, resources and time—you can pay for tools to increase efficiency, budget money for ads that target your ideal audience, enter paid partnerships with creators and more—but it’s still the least pricey way to spread the word about your small business and drive traffic to your website.
Step 1: Identify your goals
Why do you need social media in the first place? Before you create content, be sure that your business goals (and specifically your social media goals) are clear.
Your goals may be related to the points above: increasing brand awareness, engaging more with your audience, learning about trends, or being smart with your marketing budget.
Perhaps your goal is to make a certain number of sales by a deadline, or reach a follower count that you’re super proud of. Whatever your goals, identify them early and continue to revisit them as you create and assess your content.
Step 2: Understand your target audience
Going viral on social media feels good, but the quality of your audience matters a lot more than the quantity.
You want to make sure your content isn’t just reaching general social media users: you should be reaching people who are interested in your niche, and who are likely to support your business.
Apps like Talkwalker are made specifically for social listening and make understanding your audience a streamlined, easy-to-digest process. Learn more about social listening here.
Step 3: Choose the right platforms
Once you know who your target audience is, you can determine which platforms you want to focus on. “We post on Facebook, Pinterest and occasionally Twitter, but we mainly stick to Instagram and TikTok because our demographic is on those apps,” Safari explains.
Below is a quick overview of the most popular social media platforms—for a deep dive into social media demographics, read these 53 stats.
Instagram’s audience skews younger—it’s the preferred platform for 16 to 26 year olds. So, if your target audience is baby boomers, you may want to focus your energy elsewhere.
Source: GWI
Instagram is a very visual app, and photos and videos rule the feed. It uses an algorithm that is top secret (just kidding, we’ll spill).
Instagram is a great platform for small businesses because:
- It offers in-app shopping. Instagram makes it easy for users to buy products they see in your posts, Reels and Stories.
- The platform is visual, which makes it ideal for businesses in the fashion, beauty, travel, and food industries.
- Instagram users are engaged—in fact, 694,000 Reels are shared by DM every minute.
TikTok
Almost 30% of TikTok users open the app every day, meaning it’s a great platform to spread the word about your small business—as long as your audience is young. Over 40% of TikTok’s audience is under 24 years old.
TikTok is a great platform for small businesses because:
- It’s a level playing field. You don’t need a huge budget to produce high-quality content.
- It’s all about creativity. If you can be creative and think outside the box, you’ll do well on TikTok.
- There’s a lot of opportunity for virality. If your content is good, it has a chance of being seen by millions of people.
Facebook continues to be the most-used social media platform globally. It boasts over 3 billion monthly active users and over 200 million businesses.
Source: Statista
Millennials make up 31% of Facebook’s audience, so if your target is millennials, it’s a good place to invest some strategy. Facebook users are 56% male, and teenagers are less likely to use Facebook than a decade ago.
Facebook is a great platform for small businesses because:
- There’s a wide demographic range. Facebook users span all age groups, genders, and interests.
- It’s multi-use. You can create a Facebook page, run advertising campaigns across Meta products, track audience data, and create an e-commerce shop all within one platform.
- It can be a one-stop shop. Facebook can provide a full customer service journey, from first touch to final sale.
X (Twitter)
250 million people visit Twitter daily. It has the largest gender gap of any social platform (60.9% male, and 39.1% female), so keep that in mind when considering the gender breakdown of your target audience.
Source: Statista
Twitter is a great platform for small businesses because it’s:
- Twitter is all about engaging in conversation. This can be between you and your customers or you and other businesses.
- Real-time. Twitter is where people go to find out what’s happening right now. This is why news organizations and journalists love Twitter.
- Hashtag friendly. Twitter hashtags are a great way to get your content in front of people who are interested in your niche.
LinkedIn is a social media platform specifically for business. Users use the app to find work, hire new employees, network, and look for inspiration. Most of LinkedIn’s web traffic comes from the U.S., so if your target audience is American professionals, this might be your platform of choice.
LinkedIn is a great platform for small businesses because:
- You can connect with other businesses. LinkedIn is an excellent social networking tool and can easily be used for connecting with others in your community or industry.
- It’s professional. Content on LinkedIn doesn’t lean as humorous or playful as content on TikTok or Instagram does, so it can be a more responsible tool for businesses that want to err on the side of seriousness.
- Potential employees can find you. This platform is built for hiring, and a strong presence on LinkedIn will help potential employees and users learn more about your brand.
Not only do Pinterest users love to find and save new ideas, but they’re also increasingly using the platform to make purchasing decisions—75% of Pinterest users say they’re “always shopping.” Most Pinterest users are between 25 and 34 years old.
Pinterest is a great platform for small businesses because:
- It’s a positive space. 8 out of 10 Pinterest users say the platform makes them feel good. Being present on a positive platform can help your brand’s image and reputation.
- It’s highly visual. People love images because 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual. Pinterest is the perfect place to share beautiful visuals of your products or services.
- You can reach new audiences. Because Pinterest is a visual search engine, you have the opportunity to be found by people who are actively searching for products and services like yours.
Step 4: Scroll, scroll, scroll
The more familiar you are with a social media platform, the easier it will be to brainstorm ideas and create content. Scheduling designated time to research what’s trending (or having a small part of your work-brain turned on when you’re scrolling for fun) will help keep you up-to-date with current language, ideas, and pop culture references.
“Sometimes I’ll find a TikTok [trend] at 10:00 p.m. on a Sunday and decide I’m going to make it next week,” says Safari. “I’m comfortable with it—I’m used to editing, I’m faster at creating, and it’s just easier and more fun.” Content will come more naturally when you really understand the platform, so scroll away.
Step 5: Create engaging content
Content creation is its own beast—content at the core of social media, and it’s what keeps your faithful followers interested in your business. When it comes to creating the type of content for engagement, it helps to encourage your audience to interact with your photos and videos. “We’ll ask for opinions—like, ‘What scents do you want to see next?’ to involve them in the process,” says Cook.
To avoid becoming overwhelmed, manage your time by devoting a specific number of hours or days to content creation. “I batch content,” says Safari, “So I dedicate two or three days to shooting everything, and will use that [content] for the next week or two.”
Speaking of batching content, Hootsuite can help with that. Learn how to tktktktk.
Step 6: Plan and schedule your content
Set your small business up for success by planning your content well in advance. “I was literally working on Black Friday sale copy today,” says Cook (note: it’s July). “Space out what you want to put careful focus on.”
Using a content calendar and scheduling your posts ahead of time will help you stay organized—Hootsuite’s publishing tools can help you work more efficiently.
Step 7: Collaborate with creators and other small businesses
Partnering with other creators and brands isn’t essential, but it is a useful strategy for small businesses. The support of influential people and companies can be very valuable for your brand (think about what food reviewer Keith Lee has done on TikTok). Connecting with other businesses helps you build your community.
Mala’s collaborations with accounts like Jamie Paige Beauty and Glow Recipe have helped the candle company grow. “We have them tagging us on social media, following us, and just inviting a lot more people in that way,” says Cook.
Safari points out that TikTok’s repost feature is great for sharing. “It gives so much publicity to our brand and the other brands and creators we work with—it works really well on both ends, and helps push sales,” she says.
Step 8: Listen to feedback
So you’ve created engaging content—well done. Your audience is responding to you, and now it’s time to return the favour.
Pay attention to the comments, DMs and general reception your content gets. Respond to comments and reply to messages (Hootsuite’s Inbox 2.0 is very helpful for this) and use audience feedback to help inform future posts. Which brings us to…
Step 9: Study your analytics
The best digital marketing hack, no matter the platform, is to use your analytics to inform your social strategy.
How your post performs might surprise you. “We spend so much time on graphics, but lately, our Notes app posts are getting the most engagement,” says Cook. “Sometimes something that takes five or ten minutes to make will do much better than something we’ve done a full photoshoot for,” Safari agrees.
That doesn’t mean you should give up on aesthetics, but it is a reminder to track your analytics and note what kind of posts are most successful, and on which platforms.
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1. Hootsuite
Prepare to be overwhelmed by all of Hootsuite’s efficient social media management tools… then, prepare to be relaxed once you put those tools to work for you.
Hootsuite is a single, superpowered platform that helps you create, publish, and analyze content. The app’s AI features can kick off brainstorming, then the content library (and Canva integration) comes in handy to design and sort all of your photo and video assets.
Hootsuite can schedule posts in advance and recommend publishing times based on your unique business goals.
Once posts are published, Hootsuite’s inbox gathers all your notifications (from all the platforms you’re using) into one place, so it’s easy to manage customers and deal with communication across platforms.
Plus, Hootsuite makes analytics a breeze, too: the app will track all your data and deliver clear, actionable results. For a small business with limited resources, investing in Hootsuite is the ultimate hack.
2. Native platform tools
All platforms come with their own set of publishing and social media management tools. For example, Pinterest can schedule pins to publish for later and TikTok has an analytics section.
You don’t need a third-party app to manage your social media, but as your presence grows and your audience builds, it becomes much harder to stay organized when you’re constantly switching between apps. That’s why Hootsuite exists, after all.
3. Later
Later is a social media management and influencer marketing platform compatible with Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, X (Twitter), Pinterest, LinkedIn, and YouTube. The app’s features include scheduling posts, AI caption generation, and link in bio tools.
Source: Later
If that sounds a lot like Hootsuite to you, you’d better do a side-by-side comparison to see which platform is superior.
4. Sprout Social
Sprout offers social media management tools like scheduling, recommended times to post, collaborative solutions for teams, and URL tracking. It works with all major platforms and comprehensive analytics data.
Source: Sprout Social
Curious about how Sprout stands up to Hootsuite? Here’s your sneaky link.
5. Buffer
Like Hootsuite, Later, and Sprout, one of Buffer’s most helpful features is social media post scheduling. The platform’s “create” tool is useful for planning and organizing your content, and it has integrations for Canva, Giphy, and Dropbox.
Source: Buffer
Buffer and Hootsuite go head to head in this handy chart (and yes, pricing info is included, too).
1. Post transparently
Running a small business comes with struggles, and the social media team at Mala encourages entrepreneurs to share both their difficulties and their successes. “People always share the highlights, but never really talk about what went wrong,” says Cook. “Our community loves our transparency and personal connection.”
Safari points to one of Mala’s most vulnerable videos, in which founder Melody Chen shares that sales have been lower than she’d hoped for. “What we’re trying to push is relatable, and that can get you so much further as a small business owner,” Safari shares.
And it shows, that sincere video earned a ton of support on social media, and scored the brand a local radio interview and news coverage—it pays to be honest.
2. Be hilarious
Take your social strategy seriously, but don’t be afraid to make jokes. “Something that has struck real success for me is memes—even making fun of yourself sometimes,” Cook shares.
A lighthearted approach will entertain your audience and make your content appear less like an ad, solidifying your connection with potential customers (and solidifying your status as “the funny one” in your workplace).
3. Pick your trends wisely
Not every trend is worth participating in, and it’s important to consider your business goals when hopping on a trend. “You have to have meaning behind it,” says Cook. “It’s very obvious to see who’s just jumping on a trend for trend’s sake.”
The above Reel, for example, uses a trending audio that suits one of Mala’s brand collabs perfectly. Even just-for-fun trend posts should contribute to your overall social strategy, so be sure that a trend is a good fit before you invest too much time in it.
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