Do you actively use Social Media to engage and build relations with potential customers in your town or city?

You are robbing yourself of some great opportunities if you are not taking full advantage of Social Media to promote your local business.

Social Media is a gold mine for small businesses that rely on word of mouth marketing and long term relationships to grow.

Growth of local Business depends on who you know in your community and what’s better than Social Media to get to know more people?

If you are still in doubt and waiting for one final push to start using Social Media, let’s have a look at some examples of local businesses killing it on Social Media.

They are consistent:

Don’t wait to get a lot of fans or followers before you start posting regularly to your Social Media pages.

Just set up a business page and start updating on a regular basis because local customers will prefer to deal with a business that is approachable, both online and offline.

Here’s the analysis of a local business page that offers domestic services like cleaning, gardening, home removals, and the likes.

As you can see, they are posting more than once on a daily basis and they are mixing it up nicely between photos, videos, and links.

It doesn’t have to be your own content.

You can also share great content from web (It’s known as content Curation).

These businesses are also cross-promoting the content between different social media channels.

Cross promotions or Content Repurposing allows you to use one piece of content on many different channels for maximum exposure.

You don’t necessarily need to create unique content for each and every platform.

Just modify it a little bit and use on different channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, or SlideShare.

They are focusing on building relationships:

On social media, put your entire focus on building strong relationships with your customers.

That’s the only way to convert a follower into customer and a one-time customer into regular client.

As earlier mentioned, it’s all about who you know in your community.

The more people you know the better your chances of getting new business from referrals and word of mouth.

Even if they don’t need your services, they will recommend or refer a friend who’s looking for a similar product or service.

Relationship building starts with great customer service.

Smart businesses respond in a jiffy when someone leaves a message or mention them in a tweet.

They don’t mind giving the limelight to their customers by sharing their photos or comments.

Here’s another example.

A happy customer posts a positive review and the business makes the most of it by giving a public shout-out (and highlighting the review in their post).

Another way to build relationship is to encourage your customers to share personal stories, opinions, or ideas.

They are Promoting the business without being too salesy:

You must not think of Social Media as an advertising channel.

However, you can promote your business without going overboard.

Here’s how a local kitchenware business is doing it by sharing special discounts and promo code with their fans.

You can also share the photos from your office or premises.

It will add a lot of credibility and they will be tempted to visit your store or office in person.

Here’s another way of promoting your business.

A professional photographer has created this board on Pinterest to highlight her professional achievements.

You can also use Social Media for recruitment purpose.

In fact, you can save money on job advertisements by posting directly to your social media page.

Similarly, you can announce an upcoming event or sales.

They are showing the human side of their business:

Smart local businesses are not shy of showing the human faces behind their business.

You can do it by highlighting your staff and team members every once in a while.

You can also share personal stories and opinions.

Just avoid political triggers or controversial topics but there’s nothing wrong with sharing your thoughts on a topic which is not relevant to your business.

There’s no need to talk about your business or profession all the time.

You should not come across as a robot.

You can also draw attention to the human side of your business by participating or talking about a local event.

And when there’s a special occasion like Christmas or Halloween, you should be the first to share greetings and best wishes with your customers.

They are trying to engage people:

Social Media is not supposed to be a one-way communication.

It’s a two-way conversation.

You need to engage your customers and encourage them to interact with your posts.

Engagement rate is one of the biggest factors that affect your organic reach.

The easiest way to make them respond is to ask questions.

Even better, you can create polls or surveys to make it easier for them to respond.

Takeaways for Local Businesses:

Hopefully, you have got a good dose of motivation by now.

Let’s recap the lessons that we have learned so far.

• Post great content on a consistent basis.
• Try different types of content that includes but is not limited to graphics, videos, infographic, and links to articles or blog posts.
• Make sure that you are sending out greetings and best wishes on special occasions like Christmas, Halloween, Mothers Day, Valentines, etc.
• Collect social proof while you are at it. When you get a good review or a thank-you tweet from a client, share it on all of your profiles.
• Share photos of your staff, office, and premises to build trust and credibility.
• Encourage them to share your posts with their friends by offering discounts or launching a contest.
• Ask questions, start polls, or initiate discussions to improve engagement rate.
• Respond to all of their messages, mentions, and queries as soon as possible

Do that and you will live happily ever after.

It’s a dream come true for all content marketers (except that it rarely comes true).

It’s frustrating to see people sharing and liking so many things, while you struggle to get any response despite giving it your best.

You read those wonderful stories about successful viral marketing, and think of giving it a try.

You create and publish some content pieces, expecting social media to respond with the same fervor, but they don’t.

You try again, and again, but the audience keeps refusing to respond. Dejected, you look at your content and compare it with some of those widely shared ones, and think … “What in this world is lacking in my content? Even if it’s half as good, it should’ve gotten half of that response? But there’s none. What am I doing wrong?”

Here’s the kicker:

You are not going to find the answers because you are looking in the wrong places.

The secret to share-worthy content is not the quality or originality of the content. These are two important factors, but there are other, more important ones.

Your content marketing strategy needs to tick all the right boxes before your content can start to get the shares that you’ve been looking for.

Want to know which boxes? Keep on reading to find out.

Network – How Big is yours?

Ever heard of Cumulative Advantage?

Or Matthew effect?

Go, give it a read, because it’s the key to Social Media success.

In simple words, it’s about rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.

Wanna see how it applies to Social Media?

Go to your Facebook account and click on the drop down button right next to “News Feed”.

You will see that your News Feed is sorted by “Top Stories”. You can change it to Most Recent, but majority of Facebook users don’t bother with these settings.

What does it mean?

It means that the posts or updates that you get in your newsfeed are not the most recent ones. These are the ones that Facebook Algorithm considered to be the best.

Here’s how Facebook chooses the Top Stories.

“The stories that show in your News Feed are influenced by your connections and activity on Facebook. This helps you to see more stories that interest you from friends you interact with the most. The number of comments and likes a post receives and what kind of story it is (ex: photo, video, status update) can also make it more likely to appear in your News Feed.”

So, a post that generates a lot of interest is considered Top Stuff, and it will get the much needed boost.

An average user has more than 330 friends on Facebook, and we’ve more than 40 million small business pages. Consider posts and updates from all these contacts and the pages that you’ve liked, and things can get quite messy.

Just like SERPs, most people won’t go past a few dozen posts.

You’ve got to get in the Top stories by quickly getting the likes or comments. If you don’t have a strong network to provide this impetus, it will become just another voice in the wilderness.

What you need to do:

Build your network, bit by bit.

Big network means bigger audience and the bigger the audience the stronger the impact.

No Audience, No Applause (Image via: threephin)

Another way to get that early traction is using a platform like buzzfeed.com or some established blog in your industry. Even for that, you will need to build relations with other bloggers or authors to get the opportunity.

Consistency – Start now and Persist:

Talking of the big networks and following, Rand Fishkin, one of the most touted experts in SEO and IM circles, has more than 309k followers at Twitter.

Seth Godin has 534k.

Neil Patel has around 194k.

What does all these authors, and the websites like Moz.com, Kissmetrics.com, or Hubspot.com have in common?

More than anything else, it’s the consistency.

They are consistently producing great content for almost a decade. Even today, they’re more active on Social Media than an average user or website.

Rand Fishkin has seven tweets in the past 24 hours. Neil tweets 4 – 5 times on daily basis. Not a day goes by without a new post on Seth Godin’s blog.

That’s consistency for you.

The audience they have today was built, little by little, throughout these years.

Have a look at Top 50 posts of Kissmetrics from 2012.

Go through these posts and you’ll see that the tops posts have around 20 Facebook likes and 250+ shares at LinkedIn on average.

Compare that with the recent ones and you will see an average post gets more than 200 likes and 500+ shares.

The success in content marketing is not a result of what you produce every once in a blue moon. It’s what you produce on consistent basis.

What you need to do?

Stop wasting time on planning and creating that “extraordinary” content.

Perfectionism can lead to procrastination, and procrastination has kept even the most talented individuals or the greatest of ideas from taking off.

Just get started, and focus on producing good, reasonable content on consistent basis.

Outreach & Promotions

Brian Dean (backlinko.com) is known for using the content to maximum advantage, for example, using content to build links and increase search traffic by 110% in 14 days, or to boost his conversion rate by 785% in a day.

Does he manage to do all that by producing great content? The answer is “No”.

There’s tremendous amount of work that goes into outreach and promoting these posts.

Whenever a post is ready to go out, Brian Dean search for and emails at least 100 people who’ll be interested in that content.

The post is shared with his email subscribers, and followers at social media accounts.

And finally, there’s an outreach campaign with a focus on link building.

That’s the kind of work that goes behind every successful viral marketing campaign. Without any kind of promotion, even the greatest of all contents will fail to takeoff.

What you need to do?

Spend double the time on promotions that you need for content creation.

Get in touch with influencers and ask for their opinion. Contact people who have previously linked to or shared similar content. Submit content on relevant groups or communities (e.g. Inbound.org if your content is about Inbound or Online Marketing in general).

Use different quotes and snippets from your post to promote it multiple times over the next 2 – 3 weeks.

You can also use the paid promotional tools like Outbrain, Taboola, or contentblvd.com.

Trigger the Right Emotions:

People want to present themselves in the best possible way.

Anybody who’s active on one of those social networks (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc) or messaging apps (e.g. whatsapp, snapchat, etc) is looking for the right stuff to share.

Let me repeat: Your target audience is looking for the right stuff to share.

It will be a win-win situation if you can provide them with the right stuff.

But what exactly is the right stuff?

In a recent study, researchers looked into the most shared content from New York Times. They found out that the content that triggers a strong emotion tends to get more widely shared, especially the one that elicits positive feelings.

People will share this information because they know it will bring out some response.

Response is the keyword here because nobody wants to share a dud joke.

So, the right stuff can be anything that triggers a strong emotion like Joy, Fear, Anxiety, Awe, Love, Anger, Nostalgia, or empathy.

What do you need to do?

Create content that makes them feel good and look good (when they share it with their contacts).

For example, have a look at the top 5 most shared pieces of content about weight loss.

Source: Buzzsumo.com

It’s the same research or news at four different sources, collectively getting more than 4 million likes.

Just because it carries a positive feel.

Know your Audience:

I am part of a “relatives group” on Whatsapp.

It’s family, so everybody tries to like and respond to whatever is posted, even if it’s one of those dad jokes.

Today I posted a really good one, and got no response.

Why?

Because the group comes to life at night, while I posted the joke in day time, when everybody was busy at work.

Many businesses keep making the same mistake. They’ll update their page or profile without trying to figure out the optimal time for posting.

It’s so important to know your audience. The time that they are online, the kind of pages that they like, and the kind of content they share. All of this information is critical to your Social Media success.

If you know your audience, you will know what clicks with your users, including the topics or trends which are currently prevalent.

For example, here’s a post that received more than 322k shares at Facebook.

A photographer removes mobile phones from photos to emphasize on people’s addiction to mobile phones, and how it is affecting their family lives.

Image via: BoredPanda.com

The post gets so many shares because it’s something so many people can relate to. Everybody feels that we are getting too dependent and addicted to our mobile phones.

Your content must appeal to your target audience.

If you are targeting doctors or physicians, it will be something like this.

If your target market consists of men between the ages of 35 – 60, you can try something like this.

Just make sure that the topic or content is relevant to your brand or product.

What you need to do:

To get an idea of what your target audience is looking for, you can use Audience Insights feature at Facebook.

Choose your target audience using the options in the sidebar.

As you can see, there are plenty of options to zoom in on your target audience. You can choose from locations, age groups, genders, and even interests to pinpoint your audience. If you already have a page with more than 1000 likes, you can find similar information about people connected to your page.

For any given audience, you will be able to get the insights like industries that these people are working in, relationship status, pages that they are liking in great numbers, device that they are using to log on to Facebook, and Frequency of Activities.

That’s just Facebook, but it will give you an idea of what your target audience is looking for on social media.

You must also observe and interact with your target users to know their likes and dislikes.

Presentation

Did you know that visual content is 40X more likely to get shared on social media?

Adding images to your Facebook posts will result in 2.3 X increase in engagement, and 150% increase in Retweets when you’re using images in your Tweets.

Have a look at this post that got over 350k shares and 27k likes.

They did it by asking female graphic designers in different countries to edit a person’s photograph and make it more attractive, while keeping the local perception of beauty in mind.

It resulted in 18 variations, with each one being strikingly different to another.

Quite a novel idea, but it wasn’t unique. They pretty much copied it from another widely shared post at Buzzfeed.

If it was an article or post that talk about beauty perceptions in different countries, it wouldn’t have gotten half of those shares. It managed to do so good because it was visually engaging.

Apart from the visual appeal, your headline can also play a big role in presentation.

There’s a reason click-bait sites like Buzzfeed gets millions of users on daily basis. They just thrive on catchy and compelling headlines, without worrying a lot about the originality, size of the content, and SE optimization.

What you need to do:

Focus more on visual content like images, infographics, memes, or presentations.

This article talks about the psychology of clickbait in detail. You don’t really need to copy this model, but you can take a leaf or two from its book.

Going through the headlines, you will find a lot of ideas and patterns that you can use in your headlines.

For example, here’s a screen shot from their homepage.

See that heading about Marbled Planters? We can borrow the idea and use it for this article.

e.g. “These Actionable Tips are guaranteed to make your Content Go Viral”.

Share-worthy content or viral marketing is not about luck.

It’s more like science. Following the above mentioned guidelines will not guarantee, but it’ll certainly improve the chances of your content going viral.

Simply having a lot of followers or fans is not enough. You need to make sure that users are interacting with your brand by liking, commenting, or sharing your posts.

You must use Engagement rate as the metric to evaluate performance at social media.

Remember, we are talking about meaningful engagement. Techniques like click bait, sensationalisation, or hoax stories can be counterproductive.

So what’s the secret of high engagement rate?

Here are 7 social media hacks to boost your engagement:

1 – Videos

Everyone loves videos. It’s the easiest way to digest information, so engagement rates are usually phenomenal. The Facebook team realised this too, so they decided to give any video uploaded to Facebook way more exposure than any other type of post. Then they went one step further and made videos auto play when people scroll over them.

Most videos on Facebook are of a viral sensationalist nature (like in the screenshot below), but the algorithm still favours videos in general. Out of all the types of content you can share on Facebook, a video is by far the type that will consistently trump any other in terms of engagement.

2 – Polls

Create a poll to know their preferences, likes, and dislikes. You can ask them to choose between two different options (relevant to your business). Apart from the engagement, it will also give you insight into their preferences that you can use for product creation or marketing.

3 – Quizzes & Questions

The easiest way to make someone speak is to ask for their opinion.

Quizzes can also work equally well.

4 – Feel Good Posts

Humorous or feel-good posts are often shared the most. Any post, quote, or message that makes your target audience smile will get a boost in interactions.

You can ask them to like or share the posts but remember that Facebook and some other platforms don’t like pages that explicitly ask people to like or share their posts.

Besides, ending all posts with a request to like or share the post will make you look desperate.

Instead, wait for the right content, for example, a post with a tip or information that will be of help to their friends, or a heart touching message like the following.

5 – Identify the best time to post

People will usually like & interact with a post in their spare time. During work, they are too caught up to comment or share, even if they like the post.

Various studies have proved that engagement rate is usually the highest on Saturdays and Sundays, but it can differ from one platform and target audience to another.

The best way to figure out the right time is to post at different timings and use analytics to find the best time.

You can also get an idea of the best time by going to Facebook Insights and clicking on “Posts”.

It will tell you the days and the times when the maximum numbers of people are online, so you can post your best content at those days and times.

Once you’ve figured out the right time, all you need is a tool that allows you to schedule posts.

Jarvis can do that for you (and a lot more).

Just click on Schedule, and choose the timings that you want to use.

6 – Post more Often

Most online businesses are targeting users in different regions parts of the world, so you should try to post more often to ensure that you are reaching out to users in different time zones at their own peak time. Don’t treat this as an excuse to go and send out an update every 5 seconds. There is a balance to be maintained. Try post as much as possible without making your followers feel like they are being spammed to death.

7 – Say Thanks

The key to improved engagement is remembering that it’s not about you or your business. It’s about your target audience and what they are looking for.

Make them the center of attention and they will be compelled to respond.

A small business has its own advantages and disadvantages.

One of the biggest drawbacks is the lack of funds and resources to spend on organic marketing techniques that will take quite long before they start producing results.

Small businesses need a healthy cash flow right from the word go.

They cannot wait for months to see some results.

When they are investing the time and money in a marketing strategy, they want to see quick results.

Precisely the reason many small businesses don’t invest on Search Engine Optimization or Social Media Marketing because it can take months before you start to see some returns.

It’s easy talking about quality content and being patient and persistent with your social media campaigns but as a business, it totally makes sense if you are looking for some quick ways (AKA Hacks) to grow your Facebook page.

So we’ve created this list of 7 tried and tested hacks that will bring maximum results in the least possible time.

Keep in mind that we are talking about the real likes from your target customers. If you are looking only for numbers, you can go and purchase thousands of followers for just $10 or $20 dollars but those are good for nothing. In fact, they will do more harm to your business.

Also, we’re all for playing it safe so we will not recommend using a black hat technique that involves a script or deceives users into clicking on the Like button.

Preparation:

Before we get down to those hacks, let’s see how to prepare your business page to get maximum results from the techniques mentioned below.

Invite your friends & Contacts to Like your Page:

It always stumps me to see a business page with 10 or 20 likes.

Facebook has more than 1.7 billion active users as of June 2016. More than half of US population is on Facebook. Surely, the owners will have friends and contacts who are using Facebook. There’s nothing wrong in sending them an invite and requesting them to ask their friends to like your page. Not only you will get your first batch of likes, your friends or family members are more likely to Like or comment on your posts that will boost your organic reach.

Populate your Page a little with good Content:

Before inviting your friends (and their friends) to like your Page, it’s important to have your content strategy in place. You don’t want to risk losing your first few likes due to an empty page with little or no content.

Invest a little on Facebook Ads:

I know that you’ll not be reading this post if you’ve had the budget to spend on FB advertisements. Still, I’ll advise spending a couple of hundred dollars to get some of your target customers to like your page. You can target your potential customers to precision and have 1000 likes or so will help when you are about to use one of the following hacks.

And let’s get started with the hacks.

1. Like Exchange:

Link exchange used to be a commonly used method in the early days of link building.

The technique is obsolete because Google devalued links from irrelevant websites or sites exchanging links with each other.

However, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be using the same technique to get some free exposure on Facebook.

It’s simple.

However, you should better have around 500 – 1000 likes before starting (that’s why I suggested using FB Ads to get some Likes).

Search for businesses who are complimentary but not your direct competitors.

Make sure that their target audience is somewhat similar to yours.

A veterinary doctor can get in touch with a local pet shop. A caterer can join hands with a DJ. A car wash business can try it with an automotive repair shop.

Shortlist the ones having a similar number of followers or likes.

A Match Made in Heaven?

Look at the likes, comments, or shares on their posts to ensure that these likes are real.

Now get in touch with an offer to share each other’s business page with your followers.

The exchange will benefit both businesses.

2. Conduct AMAs:

Cameron, one of Jarvis founders, recently did an AMA session on Reddit.

AMA are received quite well in online communities, especially if you are targeting B2B audience.

AMA or interviews can serve another purpose. Invite influencer or power users from your industry for an interview or AMA session at your Facebook Page. If they agree, they are likely to share the event with their followers and your page will get some free exposure.

Again, your profile needs to have some following before you can convince any of these guys.

3. Post Content that Engages People:

The only legit way to hack Facebook to give your page more prominence and exposure are to improve engagement rate on your posts.

If your posts are getting a lot of likes, shares, or any other form of interaction, your post will be featured more in people’s newsfeeds.

Not to forget that when someone likes a post, their contacts will see that post in their feed.

So how do you post content that will get the desired response?

The easiest way is to find relevant content that is being shared a lot on Social Media and posting.

That’s something Jarvis can do in seconds.

Go to Discover section and type a keyword in the Search bar. Jarvis will give you the hottest and the most shared content on any given topic in seconds.

You can edit and add any of these posts to your library and it will be scheduled to go live at a specific time.

You will need a premium account for that but you can go for a free trial to see this feature in action.

Also make sure that you are trying different types of content (e.g. quotes, images, videos, links).

Again, Use Jarvis to create categories and post one from each of these categories one by one.

Go to Insights section to identify posts that worked the best and add similar stuff to your library in Jarvis.

Don’t fall for Clickbait or excessive posting because the Facebook algorithm can detect and take care of both.

Also remember that these posts will usually not convert or add to your bottom line. Your entire content strategy shouldn’t be based on the same type of content.

4. Strike while it’s Hot:

In other words, when someone likes your post, invite them to like your page straight away.

Facebook allows you to invite friends to like your page. You know that, right?

What you don’t know is that it also allows you to invite anyone who has liked your post to like your page.

Once you’ve started to post engaging content and your posts are getting a lot of likes, you should start sending invites to all of those people.

Click on the Like icon under the posts.

A new window will appear. You can simply click on the Invite button right next to people who have liked your post and it will send an invitation.

The invite button will not be there if they’ve already liked your page, so you don’t need to worry about irritating your existing fans.

5. Comment on other Pages as your Page:

Another built-in feature that you can use is to like and comment on other pages as your Page.

Find Facebook pages with a similar set of the audience as yours (shouldn’t be your competitors for obvious reasons).

Now like these pages and start commenting on these pages every once in awhile. Make sure that you are adding to the discussion and not posting spammy content from your business profile.

At the moment you cannot join or participate in a group with your business profile. However, you can create your own group if you want to use Facebook groups for promoting your business.

6. Cross Promote:

You don’t have to keep your Facebook page promotions to Facebook platform. Make sure that you are using other mediums to market your Facebook Page.

Share your Facebook Page on your visiting card along with your website or email address.

If you are a local, brick and mortar business, you can use signage or flyers to invite walk in customers to like your page.

Share Facebook page in your email signatures and also use a Facebook Page widget on your website.

Make sure that you are offering an incentive or benefit to all these users for liking your page.

For example, you can share special discounts with your page fans from time to time.

7. Pop Ups:

Pop-ups or Welcome Mat seems to be the rage these days.

Most businesses use them to get subscribers.

Hardly any business tries to work that hard for getting the followers on Facebook.

Building a fanbase on Facebook is more beneficial in many ways.

It’s much easier to reach and engage people through Social Media as compared to Email that has a measly open rate (~ 20%).

Use Popups or Welcome Mats on your website or blog to convert visitors into your Facebook fans.

Remember it takes at least 6 – 7 contacts before a sale is finalized. If you can get your site visitors to like your page, it’ll be easier for you to follow up and convince them into making a purchase.