7 Keys to Small Business Success on Social Media in 2017

The more conversations I have with business owners and managers in Winnipeg who are contemplating advertising on social media the more I hear the same sentiment: “We know there’s something that can be done with social media, it’s where the world is going, we just aren’t sure how to get the most out of it.”

The fact that you’re reading this and that you’re curious about how to advertise your business on social media already puts you ahead of your competition who isn’t thinking about social media as a viable place to advertise. 

Think about how infrequently - thanks to things like PVR, Netflix, and online streaming - you watch traditional tv commercials; and think about what you do in the rare chance (god forbid) that you have to suffer through a commercial: do you immediately grab your phone? These tv-watching habits translate over to all aspects of traditional advertising: radio is losing listeners to podcasts and audiobooks, newspapers are losing readers to Twitter and Facebook posts, and signage like billboards are losing out to people looks down at their phones (drivers are barely even looking at the road let alone billboards).

All that said, it’s a new year and forward-thinking people can get on social media right now and start marketing on some of the most powerful advertising platforms ever invented. Here are some tips to get anyone about to go down the social media advertising rabbit-hole started on the right path:

Pick the right platforms to concentrate on:

When you first learned how to ride a bike you didn’t also try to add learning how to walk the dog with a yo-yo while at the same time doing your parents taxes; you learned these things separately concentrating on one at a time and moving on to the next once you fully understood the first. Similarly, at the outset of getting on to social media it’ll be hard to become excellent on all social media sites/platforms. I recommend you choose one or two social media platforms that offer your business the best return then move on to others once you’ve developed the skill set and a following on the first.

• Facebook - excellent for anyone really, but is particularly useful for businesses whose clients are geographically centralized due to Facebook’s ability to target to specific regions.
• Instagram - If you have a very visual product you should be on Instagram and show it off. Also, Facebook owns Instagram and likes when businesses are active on both. So if you’re on Facebook you should also be on Instagram.
• YouTube - If the industry for your product or clientele can be anywhere in the world. For example, I built the fastest growing triathlon-focused YouTube channel in the world because triathlon training is the same whether you’re in Winnipeg, or Brazil, or London, or San Diego.
• Snapchat - If your clientele are in the 15-30 age range, or if you already have a large following online and want to strengthen that relationship with your hyper-fans Snapchat is a great place to take people “in behind the scenes” and build loyalty.
• Pinterest - If you sell a physical product that is visually appealing and your clientele is primarily female.
• Twitter - If you cover large newsworthy events or are in the news. Also a great place for customer support (beware: if you’re on Twitter for the purposes of customer service you better be prepared to get back to people 24/7/365 within minutes)
• LinkedIN - If you have one individual, a short blond triathlete for instance, who you want to build up as a thought leader in your industry.

Know the type of content that performs well on your chosen platform

In the first few months after starting my YouTube channel I went on Reddit and linked to the YouTube videos I had created hoping hoards of people would see my videos and go to Youtube to watch them; I would gain tonnes of views and a massive fan base. Instead, I got “assaulted” in the Reddit threads, my links were taken down, and any views that did go to YouTube actually ended up hurting my YouTube channel. I didn’t know that putting links into Reddit was a big Reddit-culture faux pas. Just like it’s important to know the acceptable etiquette at a football game vs the theatre it’s important to know the etiquette across different social media platforms.

• Videos that perform well on YouTube won’t perform well on Facebook because over 80% of videos watched on Facebook are watched without sound.
• Heavily graphically designed images that perform well on Twitter won’t perform well on Instagram because Instagram is a little more edgy and not about sales offers.
• Long descriptions with dozens of hashtags works well in Instagram but doesn’t work well on Facebook because hashtags aren’t used for curation on Facebook and long descriptions aren’t often read.

The nuances of each platform are worthy of entire books and they change all the time, so I won’t get into them here. I will say that people need to be conscious of acceptable practices within each culture on the social media platform you choose.

Don’t sell, instead tell the story only you can tell

I firmly believe that humans are not wired to accept advertising in the traditional forms we’ve received over the past 50 years. Humans evolved and thrived through tight bonds with tribe-mates and culture evolved through shared stories around campfires. Thoughts and feelings were shared one on one or one to few, there was never a time when four out of five neanderthals agreed pointy spears were better. This one-to-few model of communication and commerce was the norm for tens of thousands up years; just two generations ago our parents and grandparents chose their butcher, barber, tailor, grocer, based on who knew them best and who they had a genuine friendship with.

Social media is much more like the butcher and the barber of two generations ago. People choose to follow and purchase from companies that entertain them, make them laugh, inspire them, stand for something, inform them in unique ways, or even interact with them one-on-one. Gone are the days when the biggest ad budgets won the war of market share; if that were the case tiny little Dollar Shave Club would not have taken 1 billion dollars worth of market capitalization away from Gillette five years after starting in an apartment.

So, when advertising on social media don’t make the information you put up to be of a pure selling nature. Think about entertaining your followers, engaging with them in the same way you would a friend, and telling the story about you and your business that only you can tell: don’t make this storytelling the polished tv-version, make it the real version that’s off the cuff. People will feel like they know and trust you if you show them the real you. 

Go manual, do things the hard way

Did you launch your company or take on the position you’re in because you thought it would be easy, or because you thought that the greater the challenge the great the reward? Most likely the latter. Social media needs to be approach with the same dirt under the fingernails approach, it will get you better results.

Don’t pre-schedule posts with automated services, social media sites have become so intelligent that they know when a company has done this and they punish those companies by showing those posts to fewer people.

Don’t take generic pictures and images for your posts, conceivably all companies in an industry could grab the same Clipart photo and no one will stand out. Custom design your images so they look like you, sound like you, and feel like you. You’ll stand out from the crowd and the social media sites will reward you.

Become an artist and a mathematician

Should you a) have the most creative social media content that stands out or b) be better at the tools and tactics than everybody else? YES!

Super creative and put together the absolute more unique pictures, graphics, songs, videos, memes, gifs? Well if you don’t know how to use the advertising tools and strategies those creative pieces might be a tree falling in the forest.

What about a company that is very data driven and knows the exact way to leverage the social media advertising platforms, how to ad buy, how to target, the optimal length/tone/structure of posts? You can have the best placement of your ads in the world but if the content isn’t compelling it won’t engage viewers because they’ll just keep scrolling through social media until they find a post that is entertaining.

So do both: create really unique content AND get to know the ad platforms extremely well. The YouTube Dashboard, Facebook Insights/Business Manager/Ad Manager, Instagram Analytics will all be your friend. Constantly check into what posts are working and what aren’t, what strategies cost more and which cost less, which posts get engagement and which get views.

These days you need to be an artist and a mathematician.

Become amazing at Facebook advertising

Gary Vaynerchuk is the CEO of Vaynermedia, a digital marketing agency with over $100M in revenue. He always had a good sense of how the internet would change the world and when Google Adwords first came out he bought the word “wine” for 7 cents per click to his father’s liquor store website; he ended up growing his dad’s company from a $3 million to a $65 million dollar business. Today, there is so much competition for the “wine” keyword that a click costs nearly 300 times more than it did when Gary bought it; it’s so expensive that Google Adwords is basically cost prohibitive for many businesses.

Facebook advertising is in a very similar situation to where Google Adwords was in the early 2000s. While many companies know about Facebook advertising the Fortune 500 companies are still debating and under-investing their ad dollars into the platform. This means that competition is still quite low for advertising space on Facebook and some ads cost 1/100th of what similar viewership would cost in traditional advertising. This won’t always be the case; as they always do the big companies with their big budgets will eventually realize the immense power of the Facebook advertising platform and they will invest heavily driving up costs for everyone.

We are in the golden era of Facebook advertising, jump on the opportunity now!

Start now and get good later

You can study baseball for decades and know everything about the game a human possibly could, but until you get into the batter's box you won’t know how to hit a baseball. Social media is the same. So don’t think too long about how and where to be one social media, just start, now!

People worry that they’ll do the wrong thing or say the wrong thing on social media; I guarantee you will! Remember the faux pas I had on Reddit? Major blunder right? Well, two days later it was forgotten, my wife still loves me and my parents still talk to me. It didn’t matter.

I’ve seen companies doing more than a half dozen incorrect tactics on social media who weren’t getting very good results, three weeks after making changes to a system that worked and Facebook had quickly forgiven them and began showing their posts to 10 times more people. 

Social media platforms and followers have a short memory, so don’t stress about being exactly right before starting. Just be respectful of other people, interact on social media the same way you would a sassy aunt: respectful but still fun.

I hope these tips give you some helpful food for thought everyone, have a great 2017! - Taren