Last weekend my friend and I spent Saturday morning walking at a nearby park. During our walk, she told me she’s been volunteering for a non-profit and offered to manage their social media. But after she started working on it, she realized that it was a lot more involved than she realized.

And she’s right!!

Many business leaders think that managing social media for a business is the same as a personal account. You just post a picture every once-in-a-while right?

Wrong!

Your business needs a social media plan. You need to have a strategy behind what you’re doing, a content calendar and a plan for when you’ll post. 

How to Get Started

Before you start a social media campaign you need to determine your goals. What do you want to achieve? Do you want to….

• Create a connection with customers and potential customers?
• Get your message in front of more people?
• Drive traffic to your store?
• Drive traffic to your website?
• Promote a sale or event?

It’s important to establish your goals so that your posts can support those goals. For example, if you want to drive more people to your website, then you want posts that include links that push people to your website.

If you want to drive traffic to your store, you might want to show specific products that are in the store and encourage people to visit the store before the items are gone.

There needs to be purpose and intention in your social media. Just randomly posting won’t help you and will likely make you feel that social media is a waste of time. But a program that is well thought out can reap big rewards!

Next week I’ll be sharing more tips on how to use social media to grow your business.

About the Author: Meg Huwar is a small business marketing expert and Principal of Brand Accelerator. She and her team work with companies who want to market their business but don’t have the time, experience or staff to do it themselves. Meg can be reached at mhuwar@thebrandaccelerator.com or 412-848-8822.