5 Social Media Pain Points Small Business Owners Face

How effective are your social media campaigns? If your business is like most small businesses, social media management often takes a backseat to your daily tasks. If that's the case, you could be losing out on leads and sales. Why? Because you may be experiencing the most common social media pain points for small businesses: not having enough relevant content, not understanding ROI, not advertising, and not maintaining your business focus. Let’s take a look at some of the biggest challenges that social media managers  face, and let’s look at ways to increase your social media marketing efforts.

1. A lack of relevant content 

Did you know that to stay relevant, your small business needs to post at least once a day on all your social media accounts and, preferably, 6 times a day at predetermined intervals? This is called content marketing, and it’s extremely important for small businesses. Of those 6 posts per day, 4 of them should be useful information that educates the viewer. The other 2 can be direct posts that use hard or soft sell to spotlight your services or products. What this means is that you need to have several articles ready to be shared on your social media. You can curate those articles by purchasing content from freelance writers or from sites that sell premade content. You can also write your blog posts yourself. If you’ve just started your website and your business blog, you can also share links to informative articles from any trustworthy site in your industry. As you add content to your blog, however, you should switch to primarily sharing your blog posts and industry news.

2. The stress of feeding social media profiles

A good rule of thumb is to check your small business social media pages and accounts at least once daily.

Many small businesses forget to monitor their social media pages. This means that they don’t post enough, and they miss out on potential customer interactions and questions. A good rule of thumb is to check your small business social media pages and accounts at least once daily. Since it can be a time-consuming challenge to open all those windows, third party social media management software is available. The best known among these is probably Hootsuite. However, there are others, including Sprout Social, Eclincher, and Monday. These third-party social media software solutions, with the exception of Monday, allow you to schedule and monitor your social media posts and communications, and to write comments and direct or private messages. Monday is a bit different; its focus is creating workflows, but that means that you and your social media manager or team can create a workflow to plan your content and social media posts ahead of time. Then, you can monitor your campaigns.

3. Having a bad ROI 

It’s never been harder to get seen on social media. Even the individuals who have followed your accounts and pages may not see your posts. The algorithms that many social media platforms use don’t allow you or anyone else to see posts in the order in which they were posted. Instead, they’re often shown based on algorithms for relevancy and previous interactions, depending on the viewer’s history. This means that, as a small business owner, you need to know your target audience, the interests of those individuals, and the types of content and posts that would drive them to your business page and onward toward your website. To get started, think about the types of people you’re trying to target with your services and products. What else might they like? For a business that sells dog food, the audience would include dog owners and people thinking of adopting a dog. To increase ROI, you’d want to talk about more than dog food, and additional blog posts and social media topics might include how to adopt a dog, how to care for a dog, and the best toys for every age of dog. The trick here is to get people to interact with your articles. This, in turn, will increase your social media presence.

you need to know your target audience, the interests of those individuals, and the types of content and posts that would drive them to your business page and onward toward your website.

4. Not budgeting for social media advertising 

When compared to other types of advertising, social media often offers the most bang for your buck. This is because advertising on social media can hyper-target to your audience’s advanced demographics, social media activities, and interests. You can also choose your budget based on the advertising funds available or the budget suggested by the platform. In many instances, $20 to $40 is sufficient for a one-week advertising campaign on most social media platforms.

5. Losing your business focus 

In many small businesses, the owners are the face of the company, and those owners may have started off their advertising campaigns by using their personal accounts. The good news is that you can create additional accounts on most platforms that are designed solely for your business. When it comes to Facebook, you can create a business page without having to create a new account. All you have to do is visit the menu at the top of your personal account page and click “Page.” Of course, whether you create new accounts or rebrand your personal accounts, you’ll still need to maintain that all-important focus. This means that you will only create posts and share articles that are relevant to your business and brand, and that you’ll avoid personal posts and rants that could turn off or confuse your current and potential customers. If you think that making the switch from yourself and your life to your business may be difficult, you can always hire a social media manager to:

• Manage your accounts
• Post content
• Interact with your current and future customers

If you want to have a successful business and you want to grow your brand, you’ll have to increase your  social media activities and make sure you’re keeping track of the metrics for your social media campaigns. Now that you’re aware of these social media pain points and you’re deciding to take action to avoid them, you'll ensure that you will hit your target audience, make the most of your social media efforts, and create lasting value for your readers, customers, and visitors — all as you're generating leads.

This communication is for informational purposes only; it is not legal, tax or accounting advice; and is not an offer to sell, buy or procure insurance.

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