How to create your small business social media plan
Social platforms are great way to stay connected to your customers and to build awareness with new prospects for your business. Yet, like many small business owners, you may feel overwhelmed by the task of creating content and constantly posting on social media platforms. That’s where a smart small business social media plan can help.
The right social media plan for your small business will give you a clear set of goals and a roadmap to achieve them. A plan can reduce the time and effort required for small business social media marketing while helping you engage your followers more effectively.
As a do-it-all platform for business management, Thryv offers social media tools for small business that can help you create a superior plan and carry it out with less effort. With Thryv, you can manage your social media like a pro to reach more customers while building awareness and trust.
Setting goals for your social media marketing efforts
A small business social media plan begins with setting goals that will guide your efforts and minimize the time you need to spend on social media marketing.
Goals for your small business social media plan should be:
- Specific. When your goals are clear and exact, figuring out how to reach them becomes much easier. Your goals may include collecting a certain number of followers or reaching a specific number of people in a month. You may also look for a specific number of shares, retweets or brand mentions on social media platforms.
- Measurable. Measuring your progress can reveal which posts, content and strategies are working and which are not. Each platform offers information and analytics that can help you see how well your social accounts are performing and measure engagement with users.
- Attainable. Setting realistic goals is important. Looking for incremental improvement over time is the ideal way to manage social media expectations.
- Relevant. Your goals should be aligned with the values and long-term objectives of your business.
- Time-based. Setting ambitious but realistic deadlines can keep you motivated and help in prioritizing tasks.
Once you’ve established the goals for your small business social media plan, it’s much easier to chart a path to achieve them. Your next steps may involve tasks like:
- Determining which social media platforms are most likely to reach your desired audience.
- Choosing the tools and features on each platform that will best engage your customers and prospects. These may include Facebook ads, Instagram stories, GIFs on Twitter or short videos on LinkedIn.
- Developing a schedule for posting. Building and scheduling posts ahead of time will make sure you can connect with your audience on a regular basis without adding more pressure to your busy day.
- Reviewing metrics regularly. By analyzing how well your posts engage your audience, you can continually improve your skills in social media management for small business.
Realize your small business social media plan with Thryv
Thryv delivers solutions for managing your small business from one centralized dashboard. With tools for invoicing, payment processing, communications, CRM, document sharing, reputation management and social media for small business, Thryv puts at your fingertips everything you need to help your business succeed.
Thryv offers a variety of tools and services that can help you build and carry out an effective small business social media plan.
Consolidate your social media accounts
Thryv’s dashboard lets you connect your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts so you can publish content from one place. With a single click, you can post photos, links and videos to all your social media pages from any device – laptop, desktop, tablet or mobile phone.
Post on a timeline that works for you
With Thryv, you can always post and share instantly to any of your accounts. To simplify your social media efforts, Thryv also let you schedule posts in advance so you won’t have to worry about them during the day. We can identify the top times for posting – when your audience is most likely to engage with your social media pages – and then post your content at the right time to maximize visibility.
Never run out of things to say
When you feel like you’re running out of social media marketing ideas for your small business, Thryv offers a library with half a million pre-written posts that you can customize for your business. We can also analyze posts from your competitors to help you figure out which messages will keep you in the mix.
Track your progress toward your goals
The Thryv dashboard lets you see which posts perform well so you can understand what type of messages, content and tone will reach your audience best. Thryv gives you one place to keep track of your views, likes, shares and reach so you can build a stronger social strategy. You can also see the peak times when each social platform’s followers are online, so you can time your posts to when they are most likely to be seen.
Add social media capabilities to your team
When you want to dramatically increase your presence online with minimal effort, you can opt for a full-service social upgrade on the Thryv platform. Our team of social media experts can handle the heavy lifting of writing posts and preparing unique content each month, using boosting algorithms to grow your influence and your audience.
Additional small business tools from Thryv
Along with social media tools for business, Thryv offers solutions that can simplify and automate many other areas of your small business.
- CRM tools let you nurture and engage customers and prospects with automatic reminders and the right messages delivered at the right time.
- Sales and payment solutions help you get paid faster by making invoices available online and by giving customers more ways to pay.
- Customer communication tools let you reach customers on their preferred channel – email, text social media and more – while tracking all conversations from one inbox.
- Scheduling and appointment-booking technology lets customers request appointments anytime, day or night while synching calendars for your entire team.
- Reputation management tools let you automatically request reviews and monitor comments online, with the ability to respond quickly to protect and build your reputation.
- Marketing automation lets you schedule trigger-based marketing campaigns and automatically send messages that keep you connected to your customers.
- Online presence tools automatically sync your business info across 40+ listing sites – including Google Business Profile – to make it easier for customers to find you online.
- Document storage and sharing solutions help eliminate paper clutter while making it easier to securely share files, edit documents and keep track of the most recent versions.
Why choose Thryv?
Thryv is the ultimate collection of do-it-all small business software. Trusted by tens of thousands of business owners, Thryv offers all the features you need to manage your small business social media plan and your company with greater efficiency and ease.
- One login and one dashboard. As an end-to-end platform, Thryv lets you manage your business without needing to login to multiple apps or bounce between different platforms and browser windows.
- Business tools anywhere you need them. You can use Thryv’s solutions from any location, on any device – mobile phone, tablet, laptop or desktop. With Thryv, the tools you need to run your business are always at your fingertips.
- Solutions that work well with your favorite tools. Thryv integrates seamlessly with the software, productivity tools and platforms are already using – PayPal, QuickBooks, WordPress, Zoom, Gmail and many more. That means you and your employees won’t have to give up the tools you’re already familiar with to take advantage of the powerful solutions on the Thryv platform.
- Worry-free data protection. Cutting-edge encryption technology and customizable account access ensure that your data, your documents and your customers’ information is always safe and secure.
- Unparalleled support – 24/7. Thryv is the only small business software that offers personalized set up and support from small business specialists. With experts standing by 24/7, you can get the help you need any time of day, no matter where you are.
