For women-led businesses, the opportunity to build your brand on social media is invaluable. Social media is a great way to connect with new audiences, develop your brand, and build community with existing customers.
Social platforms also give you the chance to show off your leadership skills and advertise yourself to a consumer base that wishes to support women-led businesses.
But creating meaningful social media strategies takes time and effort. You'll need to build a strategy that works cohesively with the rest of your business model and should create KPIs that bolster your business plan.
Social Communities
Social media usage has skyrocketed in the past decade. Today, web users spend an average of 147 minutes on social media per day. At first, this sounds like we're on the path toward a dystopian Wall-E society. However, many of those users are spending their time establishing meaningful communities and connections online.
As a women-led business owner, you can help build digital communities via social media. Social media gives you a unique opportunity to amplify your voice and show support for communities that need it most.
Engage with your audience by posting materials that support causes you care about. This may be as simple as reposting content that other women-owned businesses share. Alternatively, you can create your own range of posts and content that show support for women-led small businesses.
Once you've posted your content, be sure to moderate your comments. Social media is open to everyone. Unfortunately, this may mean you receive comments that seek to undermine the strength of your community. As the owner of your social page, you need to remove any hateful or intentionally divisive comments.
Add Value
The content you post to your social media channels should add value to consumers' daily lives. Consumers are far more likely to watch and engage with content that works for them rather than hard sales pitches.
Creating social media posts that add value to consumers should be kept simple. Create a straightforward how-to guide for your product or service or give consumers a behind-the-scenes look at your business operations.
For example, if you run a women-led car repair shop, you could shoot a short instructional on how to test for tire pressure at home. A quick, informative video of this kind will stop your audience's scroll and add meaningful value to their lives. This boosts your brand image and may generate new leads in the future.
Prioritize Connection
Your social media presence allows you to build connections with your consumers. But building connections that translate to new leads and sales can be tricky. Folks don't want to see content that looks like a sales pitch and will quickly unfollow if you push your product or service too hard.
You can improve the effectiveness of your social media strategy by understanding current consumer behavior trends. Today's consumers are health-conscious and interested in supporting eco-friendly, ethical businesses. You can use these insights to create posts that show your business to be a healthy, sustainable option.
Creating posts that support healthy, ethical living might be a challenge if your business isn't directly involved in health or sustainability. However, you can still connect with these consumers by attending and fundraising for events that support climate justice or promote mental health awareness. Take plenty of pictures during the event and schedule a few posts over the weeks that follow.
Set Realistic KPIs
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are essential to any good business. They help you keep track of your daily, weekly, or monthly goals and ensure that everyone understands what productivity looks like.
You can improve your social media marketing strategy by setting relevant KPIs for your business. For example, you might set the wider goal of "increasing your brand awareness" and set a more detailed weekly KPI to achieve this goal. Some good social media KPIs include:
- Increase impressions by "x%" every week
- Improve post-reach potential by "x%'" this month
- Increase average engagement by "x" engagements this quarter
These KPIs will help you achieve your broader social goals and ensure that everyone in your marketing team is on the same page.
As a women-led business owner, you may have other social goals that extend beyond profit. While there's nothing wrong with being an exclusively for-profit enterprise, many women-owned start-ups have the aim of furthering a social cause, too. This can be reflected in your social media KPIs. For example, you might include KPIs like:
- Collaborate with "x" women-owned businesses per month
- Post "x" number of posts that support a social cause per week
- Comment on "x" number of posts in support of gender justice
Setting KPIs ensures that you use your voice and platform to achieve social goals like advancing gender justice or promoting other women entrepreneurs.
Conclusion
Social media is a potentially lucrative platform for your small business. However, before you start creating content, you need to build a social media that supports your goals. Ideally, this strategy should push content that builds community, adds value to consumers, and is relevant to your broader KPIs.
This guest post was authored by Ainsley Lawrence
Ainsley Lawrence is a writer who loves to talk about how business and professionalism intersect with the personal, social, and technological needs of today. She is frequently lost in a good book.
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