By Courtney Deighan, Altitude Accelerator Communications Intern

Last week, Altitude Accelerator held a “How to Promote your Product” seminar on “Jump Start your Digital Marketing” as part of our Expert Speaker Series. Amarpreet Kaur gave an informative presentation centred around social media techniques for start-ups and small businesses.

Here are Amarpreet Kaur’s 10 resource-packed social media tips for small businesses:

1) Plan and define your target audience.

Any small business should seek to align their social goals with their business objectives. In addition, your target audience is key to deciding which social media platforms to implement. After choosing a platform, it is essential to build strategy around your content. Hootsuite, Buffer, and the like are excellent programs to utilize for this.

2) Match the tone of your business.

Your voice on social media should match what your brand sounds like. To decipher this, think about your business’ culture, the type of person you wish to attract to your page, and what conversation you will bring to social media.

3) Aim for engagement, don’t try to sell.

For this tip, one should focus on the customer and the content they expect as a follower on social media. To do so, ensure you share interesting and relevant content. It was found 85% of users find visual user-generated content more influential than brand photos or videos.

4) Use social media to get people to your website.

If your audience is enjoying your social media posts, they will likely visit your website. Hence, for every call-to-action that your business has, there should be three corresponding blog posts, articles, or visuals/infographics. Use Snip.ly to add your call-to-action to every post on social media.

5) Use hashtags.

Daily hashtags are essential to boost engagement and visibility. So, be specific and cater hashtags to the social network that you are using.

6) Optimize Optimize Optimize.

This step is all about creating a working interactive environment for your followers. When posting on social media, it is important to optimize the image size of the photos you are posting for the platform you are using. Additionally, your website should be optimized for mobile consumption.

7) Break through the noise.

In order for your social media to have a have a substantial impact, you need to find the times that those encompassing your target market are most active and what topics or keywords are shared the most. This will require some research, but will allow for your business to be noticed among competitors.

8) Use your creativity.

Visual content is more likely to be shared on social media than other content. In effect, use your creative side to develop infographics, images, gifs, videos, and more to keep your audience engaged.

9) Measure and track using analytics.

To see if your strategies are working, one can track various metrics such as reach, site-traffics, leads generated, conversions, revenue generated and more. Use these metrics to determine if you are on the right path to increasing your brands awareness and reaching your business’ objectives.

10) Learn more.

Lastly, utilize resources such as Hootsuite Academy to acquire a deeper understanding of social media strategies. Seeing as consumer preferences can differ based on the platform, training is available for each social media network.

Have an innovative idea? Discover how Altitude Accelerator can help your start-up fast-track your business to market. Apply for Incubator now!