The Importance of Social Media for Small Business & Therapists
As a small business owner, you live and breathe by the satisfaction of your clients and customers.
Social media is a direct line for you to master that interaction. From the conception of their relationship through to them coming back time and time again, your social media presence is the new constant. The traditional ways to advertise your business are still around, but none carries quite as much sway these days as your social media.
Branding & Your Social Media
Marketing starts with a strong brand. Your social media brand is no exception. It starts with that itty bitty bio you get at the top of your profile and funnels all the way down to each and every caption. Pretty pictures and great information are only a fraction of what social media is meant for. If you haven’t yet mastered this, do not fear. This is where people like me come into play.
Working with small businesses to channel the work they have already done to find their voice for their company into something relatable and digestible is what I do. Voice is at the heart of social media. In writing classes, we all were told about the basic voices that carry across the text.
Now that we are using those voices more frequently, how are we supposed to be able to ‘brand’ the things we are saying?
Branding Goes Deeper Than Your Logo
This boils down to a strong, central brand identity--the whys of what you are doing and the soul behind the company. Small businesses and private practices have the unique opportunity to hone this on a more personal level because the brand itself is so closely tied to the individual behind it all. What you can’t do is let your brand identity become muddled with who you are as a person if the two are meant to be totally different. Take this for example:
You run a therapy practice centered around grief and loss. While you as a person may be bubbly, bright, and the light of the room; your brand has to carry a certain level of understanding for those you are trying to reach. Emojis are a useful tool here if used correctly! There is a time and place for each kind of interaction, but knowing how to deliver those tones is where a social media strategist can be extremely helpful. This also helps to attract the right kinds of clients!
Your Brand is Where You Market From
When you have a solid jumping-off point with your brand, it is way easier to know the answers to some fundamental marketing questions. Your brand already understands who your customer is and why they need what it is that you are offering. This can mean that discovering your social media niche is just around the corner.
Your niche is the small sliver of the larger pool that you are wanting to speak to. If you try to cast your net to cater to absolutely everyone, you are wasting your time and money. Not everyone needs what it is that you are pitching. Let’s cut those people outright from the get-go. I walk with you to talk through who exactly we are building your social media presence to speak to. When you find the people you should be speaking to, it means your dollars for marketing are targeted and well worth it.
Social Media PitFalls
Effective Engagement is Hard
Along with catering to every person on the planet, people tend to make a few social media mistakes. Engagement is arguably one of the most time-consuming parts of running a social media account because it asks you to show up every single day. But if you are not showing up the right way, it is absolutely a waste of your time.
Well, how do you know how to engage effectively?
This comes with experience within social media and a ton of trial and error. If you are willing to put in the time to learn and test your theories on engagement, you can find success. However, being in the growth phase of a small business means that your time is unbelievably short. Sometimes what you would do for your personal account is not going to work on your business account because the industry requires a different kind of interaction.
Why Your Engagement Isn’t Working
Beyond following, you want them to engage with you and eventually buy from you. This means you have to be engaging with them on a regular basis alongside your posting schedule. Engagement is the hardest part of the social media game unless you have some experience with growing accounts to know what works and what is a waste of time. Usually, this involves several kinds of engagement that typically fall into 1 of 3 categories:
Cultivating your current audience.
Reaching target audience members that aren’t following.
Growing your influence in the parallel community.
You can absolutely teach yourself how to do this; but as the owner, your time is better spent on large picture ideas.
Consistency Is More than Posting Regularly
If you want your account to rocket to the moon in a very short time; you have to eat, sleep, and breathe social media content these days. This is not sustainable for the long run though and it will hurt you. When you set up expectations for your followers, you have to keep meeting those or they will stop following. Practical advice that anyone in social media marketing will tell you is to do what you can actually manage, but know that this will match your growth. Starting off with posting 3 times a week is a reasonable starting place for most people just starting out.
If you can’t put that much effort in, then your growth won't be as fast as the others. Posting less is not necessarily bad for your account, but I won’t help you in the long run for the amount of time you may be putting in. If you are just starting out, just dive in and see what you can keep up with!
Why Get a Social Media Manager?
This is where social media managers like me come in! It is literally our job to keep track of how the things we do in each account perform and tweak our engagement to best fit your niche. It will ebb and flow which is freaky to people that have never experienced the wrath of the algorithm. It all evens out in the end if you are doing the right thing and staying consistent.
Our side of things is one part finesse, one part analytics.
We have powerful analytic tools at our disposal; but more than that, we understand how to read the nuance behind the line graphs, pie charts, and bar graphs. By partnering with us, you can funnel your big picture ideas through us to reach the audience you need to grow your business, connect with your community, and grow. It’s often a back and forth ebb of ideas and inspiration that feeds back into the business as well. Social media is full of amazing content creators that are always sparking ideas for my clients and me to push beyond the normal and try new things. If you are interested in learning more about how a social media manager can take your digital marketing to the next level, hit that contact button below for a free consultation with me.
