You’ve probably heard a lot of jargon in your search for small business marketing tips.

“Marketing hacks”

“Overnight growth”

“Growth hackers”

“Get an insane amount of social media followers – I’ll show you how.”

If you’re serious about establishing and growing your business’ social media, you’re going to need to be more strategic than that.

Social media marketing for business can be filled with temptations for growth hacks, like buying social media followers. Here's what you should do instead. G...

Why It’s a Bad Idea to Buy Your Social Media Followers

The benefit of using social media for your business is that you have a platform to connect with your audience. Making a sale could take anywhere from six to eight “touches” – or connections – with the brand.

And, loyalty can have a huge impact on whether or not your customer purchases again.

So growth hackers make it seem like you’re casting your net wider – meaning more opportunities to touch your customers. Many of these so-called “growth hackers” may recommend buying your followers. This can be done by using a bot or other automated follow/unfollow system, or you can buy them on sites like Fiverr.

While this is understandably tempting — wouldn't it be cool to have 20,000 Twitter followers? — avoid it.

Avoid it because here's a dirty little secret: The number of followers doesn't mean anything if they're not your target customers. That's right. Twenty thousand Twitter followers, Instagram fans or Facebook followers do not add value to any business if they're not who you're trying to target.In short, social media followers should be qualified leads for any business’ sales funnel.

Your social media is waaaay at the top of your sales funnel. So if you want your social media to eventually make you a sale, you want to make sure the people following your accounts will want to buy your car/make-up/services/hardware/whatever it is you sell.

The downside to buying your social media followers includes:

They're probably fake. Usually, you’re paying for either a bot (read: code designed to hack social media sites) or you’re paying people with fake Instagram and Twitter profiles to follow your business’ real account.
Even if they aren't fake, they're probably not your target customer, which means they probably won't engage with your content anyway. With most of these bots and paid followers you don’t get to choose who follows you. It’s a numbers game – $5 for 1,000 followers. This includes other fake accounts. If you want people to share, retweet, read, consume your content – which you do, as a business owner or entrepreneur investing time and resources into your marketing – then buying your followers is not a good idea.
Real accounts – who may be your ideal customer – will spot your fakery and choose not to follow you. Which means you lost the chance to get a follower to form a relationship with.

Here’s What You Can Do to Grow Your Social Media

Social media marketing can be used effectively for your small or medium sized business. It can take some time and elbow grease, yet you’ll be gaining an authentic audience to connect your brand to. In the long-term, your social media followers can be an asset for future sales.Here are tips for growing your social media, the real way.

Do a Social Media Inventory

Organic social media growth does take an investment of time and energy. Luckily, you can get started by taking inventory of your current social media presence. Ask yourself:

Am I on the networks where my fans and customers are? If so – wonderful! If not, find out which network your customers are on based on what you know about their demographics and behaviors.
Am I on networks that my customers won’t be? If the answer to that is “yes,” think about shutting it down or decreasing your investment in that social media channel.
Are my profiles optimized so my customers can find me? That means using the right keywords, clearly explaining what your business offers, using your company logo in your profile photo and/or cover photo and designing your cover photos so it’s clear what your business sells. Hubspot explains how to do this across social media networks including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram.

Concentrate on Your Content

What, exactly, are you posting to Facebook, Twitter or Instagram?

Is it content you want to shout from the rooftops – or content that your followers would find valuable? It should be the latter.

Take a hard look at what your posting and consider if a customer would want to read it, share it or comment on it.

An example of bad social media content can be found over on the McDonald’s Facebook page. While this is a megabrand and well-established, their Facebook page is totally self-promotional. This leaves fans feeling like it’s just another television advertisement and not a brand interested in what they actually want.

This use of social media calls out the trolls, the unhappy customers and people looking for some sort of response from McDonald's.

Wendy’s, on the other hand, mixes their social media content with straight promotional and value-adding content. Fans find this interesting/funny/intriguing and engage in a positive manner with the brand. Case in point: this partnership with Jay Bilas, an ESPN basketball analyst, during March Madness.

See the difference in customer engagement with the brands? That’s why the type and topic of the content matters. Beyond the topic or theme of the content, consider the medium. You have a lot to choose from – videos, photos, infographics, compelling text – so make it a goal to find out what medium your audience prefers. Test, test and test again until you find out what gets the highest engagement.

Paid Advertising

The beautiful thing about social media advertising? The barrier to entry is low. Gone are the days when your business would need piles of cash just to get some local advertising.

The scary thing about social media advertising? It’s easier than ever to do, if you know how to do it. And if you don’t, you could blow through your budget quickly. Here are some quick tutorials for various social platforms.

Give ‘em a read and you’ll see that the ad managers are designed to make it accessible for small business owners, medium sized business managers and entrepreneurs to dive right in.And with this type of paid marketing, you’re given the power to target your specific customer segment. That way you’re getting the right eyeballs into your sales funnel.

Partnerships

This is a super simple way to use social media for your business: just contact your friends at other businesses.

See if they want to do a joint promotion or a cross-promotion.You can give their business a shout-out on Twitter or Facebook – giving them access to your established network – and they can do something similar in return, exposing your brand to their established audience.Social media partnerships are like every other partnership in life: they’re mutually beneficial and everyone wins.