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Conquering Common Social Media Marketing Challenges

If you’re a small business owner, you know just how important social media marketing is for your business. Not only is it one of the cheaper marketing options available, it is also the one that is likely to drive the most engagement with your audience. However, if you've had a tryst with platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, you will be aware of how tricky they can be at times.

Social Media Marketing and Small Businesses

Though social media is a great way to advertise and market your small business, it can also be time consuming to manage and requires a lot of resources to generate useful leads. Most small businesses call it a day after setting up pages but it takes much more than that to get some results. All your social accounts have to be active, so you’ll need to share unique, interesting content frequently.

Apart from the sheer investment of time required to stay relevant on social media, it also demands immense effort. Creating original content requires skill, technology and of course, funds. Though it is theoretically possible to get your page up and running without paid options like Boosted Posts, they help drive traffic to your site and generate leads. When all this adds up, as it inevitably does, a social media marketing campaign quickly goes from something you would do for your business in your spare time to something that is a full time job.

But it doesn’t have to be difficult time sucker. As social media marketing has evolved, so have the tools that marketers use to manage it. Now, all for a successful small business social media campaign is the ability to analyze key challenges and find the right tools to help you get your marketing campaign on track. 

Identifying key challenges

  1. Curating Relevant Content: Content creation can be a challenge, and it's absolutely essential for you realize that a lot of content is curated not created from scratch. While original content is necessary, curating relevant content can be an excellent way to reach out to your customers. The key here, is finding good content. Simply surfing the internet until you find an blog or article to share can be frustrating and yield little results. So, you need to find a more efficient way to curate content.

  2. Managing Multiple Platforms: Social media marketing campaigns need to run on multiple platforms simultaneously to widen your reach. In order to be successful, your brand needs to be on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram or other platforms that are suited to your product. So you need to find a good social media management tool.
  3. Maintaining Consistency: Consistency is absolutely essential for social media marketing. Lots of information floods your audiences' Notifications so inconsistency can leave you forgotten. To leverage social media for your business, you must maintain a consistent schedule, define and stick to your subject matter and respond to your audience quickly.
  4. Improving Engagement: Improving the level of engagement with your audience on social media is a constant challenge. People tend to get bored easily in today’s world of overstimulation, and it is essential to shake things up every now and then to keep them interested.
  5. Measuring Returns: You can't determine whether a social media campaign is productive unless you are measuring it. Though social media platforms often come with a set of analytics, you’ll need more. You’ll need analytics that work across social media platforms to translate the effects of each on the bottom line of your business. It's only when you can measure your social media efforts that you can optimize them to be successful.​​

Find the right tools

Now that you’ve identified some of the challenges that your business may be facing in the realm of social media marketing, you'll need some tools to tackle them. In the world of social media automation, there are many tools available to help make managing your social media marketing campaign easier. Here are a few tools that can help.
 
  1. DrumUp: A web and mobile content curation tool, DrumUp offers an easy and effective way for you to find relevant content for all your social media accounts. All you need to do is enter the keywords related to each account, and let DrumUp find you some good content. The best part about DrumUp is that you can schedule the content for posting on to multiple social media platforms from within the app itself.
  2. Canva: Canva is an easy-to-use design interface that lets you create social media visuals. From infographics, Facebook covers, Pinterest images to quotes and more, Canva offers individual design elements that you can put together to create your very own, unique visual. It also offers premium design options that you can purchase for a dollar an element.
  3. PowToon: PowToon lets you make videos with an easy-to-use video editor and lots of footage to choose from. It's an ideal aid if you seek to establish a presence on video platforms like YouTube, or Vimeo. PowToon lets you create videos that can revolutionize your business’ image online for a relatively small investment in terms of money. 
  4. Followerwonk: Followerwonk is a great way to learn everything about your Twitter followers. Much more than an analytics suite, Followerwonk lets you know who your followers are, what they like and dislike, what influencers you should be following, how to increase engagements and more. 
  5. Easel.ly: Ease.ly is an immensely useful tool that lets you create infographics and images to post on your social media accounts. Considering the fact that visual content receives higher engagement than plain text, a simple easy-to-use visual content creation tool is a must for any small business.

Social media marketing can be difficult and requires effort and investment, but it isn’t impossible, and the return on investment for a well-executed social media campaign can be phenomenal.

This blog post was contributed by guest blogger Jessica Davis of Godot Media. Godot is a leading content services firm. Her areas of interest include technology, science and fashion.