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.

Good for you because Social Media marketing is worth all the time and investment.

You can manage some of your Social Media accounts and post updates through services and apps, but a dedicated Social Media manager can do a lot more.

Social Media manager will monitor different social media platforms to find posts, discussions, and trends related to your brand or business.

They will come up with strategies to engage and interact with your target audience.

They will keep an eye on the progress through analytics to make sure your social media strategy is on track.

However, you need to make sure that you are not handing over your business accounts to someone who doesn’t know anything about the scope of Social Media and who’s entire strategy is not based on finding random stuff and posting it to your profiles.

What Makes a Good Social Media Manager?

When used smartly, Social Media can produce amazing results for businesses of all sizes.

When used not so smartly, social media marketing can be a waste of time and resources (and sometimes cause massive embarrassments for brands and businesses).

When you are hiring a social media manager, you need to make sure that you are hiring someone who knows how to produce engaging  and conversion-oriented content, interact with your target customers, and use analytics to find opportunities.

A good Social Media manager will be able to come up with social media marketing plan while keeping your goals and objectives in mind.

They will know the right platforms.

They will not be obsessed with vanity metrics like the number of followers or Likes. Instead, he’ll be looking to create content that engages your target audience and converts them into customers.

They’ll know the right tools to make the most of their time

Last but not the least, good social media managers will have the experience of setting up, monitoring and optimizing Social Media advertising campaigns.

In short, you are looking for someone who is good at content creation, curation, analytics, communication, and PPC at the same time.

Someone who comes with this kind of skill set and expertise is not going to work for peanuts.

Before trying to get an idea of how much a good social media manager costs, let’s see how many hours do you need to manage social media for a small business.

Ideally, Social Media marketing and management needs to be a full-time job.

Posting updates, replying to visitors messages and tweets, scanning social media for relevant posts or discussions, creating new content and coming up with ideas, going through competitors’ accounts, doing the outreach, and following up can take an entire day’s work. But that’s for fairly large businesses.

Small or Local businesses have a relatively small audience so we can safely assume that 3 – 4 hours a day are going to be enough.

The below-mentioned costs are created while keeping that time in mind.

How Much a Freelance Social Media Manager Costs?

Let’s start from Upwork, which is one of the biggest freelance jobs portals.

We searched for Social Media Managers and here’s what we get.

A total of more than 31k freelancers with the following price ranges.

• More than 12k freelancers are charging well under $10/hour
• Around 13k are charging rates between $10/hour to $30/hour
• There are more than 3.5k who will work at $30/hour to $60/hour
• And then there’s the most expensive category charging at least $60/hour or more

We filtered the results to get the freelancers with at least 100 hours billed.

As you can see, we are getting pretty much the same results.

Around 8700 freelancers out of 9700 are charging $10/hr to $30/hr.

Let’s use another filter to find the ones with the highest job success rate.

As expected, that takes out a big majority of freelancers offering a rate below $10/hr.

Still, more than 80% of these freelancers fall into “$10 or below” and “$10/hr – $30/hr” categories.

While quickly going through the top-rated freelancers, we can see that most of them are charging at least $20/hr or more.

According to these rates, a decent quality social media manager for your small business will cost anything from $1000 to $2500 per month.

The range is quite similar on other platforms like Guru or PeoplePerHour.

How Much an In-House Social Media Manager Costs?

To get an idea of the cost for an in-house social media manager, let’s look at PayScale that allows you to research and compare average salaries in different fields and professions.

According to PayScale, social media managers in the US earns $46k per year on average. The salaries range between $27k and $73k.

Source: PayScale

It actually conforms to our earlier estimate i.e. $1000 to $2500 per month (remember we were calculating the cost for just 3 hours or half a day’s work).

Looking at “Social Media” marketing jobs at LinkedIn, we can see that the average salary ranges from $40k/year to as much as $200k/year but these are estimated figures coming from the same source i.e. PayScale.

Estimated salary for “Social Media Manager” jobs at Indeed range from $35k to $80k.

Looking at all these figures, we can come up with a fairly accurate estimate of the cost though your actual cost will differ depending on your goals and objectives.

Remember that someone working at a relatively low rate of $1000/month or less will only be able to do the basic stuff like content curation, responding to direct messages or mentions, and coming up with monthly reports.

You cannot expect the advanced stuff like conversion oriented campaign, influencer outreach, measuring and establishing the ROI of different campaigns or social listening.

Conclusion:

It’s your call and it’s your money but in case you are just starting and looking for a way to maintain a social media presence, you will be better off using a tool than hiring a social media manager.

Go for a dedicated Social Media manager only when you are looking to take it to the next level.

As earlier mentioned, content for “traffic generation” will be different than the content intended for “lead generation”.

You can choose from three different types of content.

 

Your own unique content that you will CREATE

Great content from others that you will CURATE

Some of your best performing content that you will RECYCLE

An ideal content marketing strategy will have a mix of all three types.

Content Creation:

You can create content in many different forms.

Blog Posts & Long Form Content: It includes your blog posts, articles, and some detailed guides or eBooks thrown in, every once in a while.

Write a short preview and include a call to action that directs the users to your website for the complete post.

You can also post the complete articles on platforms that allow long-form publishing, for example, LinkedIn Posts or Facebook Instant Articles.

Short Updates: Give a quick pro tip; ask questions, give a shout out to some customer or partner, or comment on a recent news or development from your industry.

Graphics: The easiest way to create a graphic is to take a quote or tip and use tools like Canva or Snappa to create a visually attractive post.

You can also use product photographs or pictures from some recent event.

Graphics have much better organic reach but that doesn’t mean you should keep posting images because “reach” is not the only thing you’re looking for.

 

Videos: Producing videos doesn’t always need a huge budget. You can use the following methods to create videos without breaking the bank.

• Whiteboard lectures
• Using tools like animaker or videoscribe to create simple animated videos
• Using a screen capture software like Tinytake to create “how to” videos
• Using slideshows or presentations as videos with voice over

Promotional Posts: When you are providing lots of good, useful content, your target audience won’t mind getting some promotional posts every once in a while.

However, keep the mood and style of the platform in mind while creating a promotional post.      

Content Curation:

Your followers will appreciate if you are sharing some great content from the web (which is, of course, relevant to your niche).

Sharing third party content is important because it gives you an opening to engage and network with influencers or bloggers.

In addition to that, looking at the response will give you an idea of the content that works well with your target audience.

You don’t need to spend extra time searching for the right content.

 

Insert Screen Shot & Text about Jarvis Chrome Extension here

 

Right Places to look for Curated Content:

Start from following the influencers in your niche.

They are known as influencers or power users for a reason. They know how to engage and influence their target audience. Following influencers and bloggers will give you a lot of ideas and inspiration for content creation.

You can also follow your competitors or relevant businesses.

Similarly, joining some relevant communities or groups will give you plenty of ideas to talk about.

Buzzsumo is another option to find relevant content that has been shared and liked the most on social media.

Content Recycling

When you don’t have time to create unique content, you can reuse some of your old content, ideally after a little bit of recycling.

Repurposing allows you to use the same content on many different platforms.

For example, you can create slideshows or videos by using the content of a guide or tutorial. Slideshows works really well on LinkedIn and Google+.

You can also use quotes and excerpts from your old posts.

Pro Tip: Use Social Media Analytics to identify content that received the most clicks, likes, or comments, and recycle. Content recycling ensures that your best content will get maximum exposure.

We recently did a couple of studies on how Startups and B2B companies are using social media.

It seems that majority of businesses are starting to acknowledge the power of Social Media.

We found that most businesses have an account on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram

However, setting up a Facebook or Twitter profile is just the first step.

You will need to put some effort to reach your target audience. They are not going to come to you.

Hundreds of businesses are trying to get their attention. You need to give them what your competitors are not.

Not Paying attention to their Engagement Rate

Nobody likes Spam be it the users, search engines, or social media platforms.

This is why Facebook and other social media websites are continuously upgrading the algorithms to weed out spam and overly promotional stuff coming from businesses.

It’s hard for them to distinguish spam posts from the useful posts that users want to see.

They use a simple yardstick.

Anything that is liked and shared by users is considered quality content and anything that fails to get any like or interaction is considered spam or low-value.

If you are a small business who wants to take full advantage of Social Media, you need to post content that engages your target audience.

It needs to be something that they will like, or share, or comment upon.

Also, make sure that you are mixing it up.

Something cute or something funny will usually get more likes or shares but you cannot keep posting the random stuff like that.

Make sure that you are posting stuff that will generate leads every once in a while.

Buying or Getting Irrelevant Followers:

We just talked about algorithms.

These algorithms have resulted in significant drop in organic reach of business pages. On Facebook, your organic reach can range from 2% to 20% depending on the number of fans or likes your page has.

Interestingly, organic reach is better for pages with lesser likes.

Pages with more than a million likes reached just 2% of their followers while the pages with 50k likes can reach more than 9% of their followers.

Buying Facebook fans in bulk or using spam tactics to get more followers, even if they are not your potential customers, is a waste of time and money. It will only result in your organic reach getting wasted.

For example, have a look at following business page. It’s a small local business and the likes are mostly likely purchased because there’re absolutely no likes or shares found on any of their recent posts.

No Commitment or Consistency:

Going through the Facebook pages of some local businesses, I see many that haven’t been updated for months (or years in some cases).

When you are starting on Social Media, it’s important to keep it updated on a regular basis. Ideally, you should update your Facebook page at least once and Twitter accounts 3 – 4 times every day.

If you cannot commit to that many, try to post at least 3 – 4 times in a week.

A Facebook page that hasn’t been updated for a couple of years will look really bad if some of your target customers take a look.

Not Using the Right Tools

You might think that these digital marketing and social media tools are only for large businesses.

Actually, it’s the opposite that’s true.

Social Media tools like Jarvis are actually intended for small businesses that don’t have the time or resources.

The right tool can shave loads of hours required for managing and updating social media profiles.

The right tool can help you achieve a hell lot more in much less time.

Poor Automation:

At Jarvis, we strive to make your life easy by allowing you to find and share engaging content with your social media followers.

Having said that, we always advise our clients to be mindful while scheduling posts.

For example, you should be careful while scheduling the same post for Twitter and Facebook because both these platforms require slightly different formats.

Similarly, you cannot put Social Media on Auto-mode and forget.

Use the tools only to save time on finding and posting content but keep an eye on your analytics to identify the right type of posts. Make sure you are responding to users’ comments and messages.

Not knowing the Nitty-gritty:

Social Media websites keep making changes and adding new features on a constant basis.

An average user of websites like Facebook or Twitter doesn’t need to stay updated with all these features.

But you must know the nut and bolts of using Social Media for business purpose.

Small things can make big differences.

For example, if you are starting your tweet with a mention, it will appear in the feeds of people following you and the user that you’ve mentioned. If you want your tweet to be seen by everyone, add a dot or period before the mention in the start.

Similarly, you need to learn the art of using the right hashtag. Don’t try to stuff your message with trending hashtags. Just a couple are enough and they should be relevant to your message, as well as business.

Hiring Social Media Managers who are not competent:

We’ve recently done a post on how much a social media manager can cost.

The average cost for a social media manager who can help you make the most of Social Media will cost at least $1000 – $2500 per month.

You will find plenty who are ready to do it at much lower rates, however, their entire action plan will be limited to finding relevant news and stories and posting it to your profile.

This is something you can do easily with the help of Jarvis. If you are looking to hire a Social Media manager, make sure that they have sufficient experience of content creation, social listening, inbound marketing, and customer relationship management.

Most small businesses make the mistake of choosing a freelancer with the lowest bid.