You’ve planned your social media strategy and allotted a designated budget, but you feel the results could be better. You may be learning and exploring the dynamics of social media. It’s easy to become lost in the maze of platforms and metrics.

If a social media manager is out of your budget, or you would like to explore what you can do independently, this blog will walk you through some key ways to determine whether your small business’s social media marketing is at its best.

It is important to remember that much of the conversation happening on social media echoes conversations within your business, just online. Conversations, engagement, goals, and a solid sales funnel are still the framework for doing business.

Goal Digger

Has your small business set goals? The first thing is establishing and evaluating your small business goals at set periods. We’ve chatted about SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) and how they are the foundation for your social media strategy.

Set up a social media calendar, preferably monthly but at least quarterly, to track your social media metrics. Track your follower growth over time, focusing on organic growth. Assess the reach (number of times unique users view) and impressions (overall number of views) to determine how visible your content is.

Content Counts

Are you posting engaging content regularly? Add a social media posting schedule to your calendar. Regular and frequent posts will help increase your visibility and engagement.

Analyze whether your social media users like, comment, share, or mention your content. Are your followers generating conversations? How do those conversational engagements unfold? How can you keep your social media post active, lively, and help with analytics to boost visibility?

Looking at your social media feedback and analytics will help you establish what content best reaches your target audience. Having a solid idea of your customer persona will guide you to build a social media presence with relatable posts. Experiment with videos, images, blogs, and other content formats. Monitor the results to determine what your social media audience prefers.

Connecting Community

Is your small business building a loyal community? A community can be global, local, in-person, or online. Listening to your social media audience and offering timely responses is a must. Your small business social media can provide insight, education, and address concerns to build a community around your brand.

Social listening in areas including your business or industry can be critical to your social media followers. Tracking trends, responses to current events, mentions, hashtags, and keywords give your small business powerful tools to create a sense of community and visibility. Connecting with others in your industry can also benefit your business by collaborating with influencers or forming partnerships to increase your social media traffic.

It’s All About the Bottom Line

Is your social media presence increasing your sales? Track your social media impact on your business objectives (landing page traffic, sign-ups, purchases, downloads, etc.). If it doesn’t provide enough ROI for your small business yet, don’t worry - it can take time. Instead of trying to do everything, pick a few platforms that will best engage your target demographic.

Build quality content that can cross-post to multiple sites without increasing your workload. This might look like creating a YouTube video that you can feature in Instagram Reels, Facebook posts, and Twitter posts.

Remember your local audience on social media. Location-specific ad targeting and geotagging can help you reach media users in your area. Creating content with local stories, news, events, and local hashtags can help your small business brand within your community.

Whether you are trying to convert social media users locally or globally, featuring user-generated content, testimonies, and reviews catches attention and leads to sales.

These four focus areas can help you determine if your small business uses social media to its full potential.