SECRETS TO

Social Media
Success for
Small Businesses
Establishing a social media So, don’t worry: we’ve done the hard
marketing program is time- work for you. We’ve compiled our top
consuming. And when you’re tips and tricks for getting your social
building a business, you’re program up and running so you can
juggling a lot already. use it as a powerful mechanism to
help reach your business’s goals.
The internet is flooded with advice
to help you with every social media Keep reading to learn how to put
business topic under the sun. But the fundamental pieces of your
knowing which sources are company’s social media
accurate and what to spend your marketing program together and
valuable time researching can add get started engaging your target
hours to your workload. audiences.

W ou:
e
’l
l
s
h
o
w

y
H w s
o e f soci
w r u al
s’ l ads
t f .....& more
o e
e
s d
t s
Introduction
a Secrets to Social Media Success for Small Businesses

n How
d to get
the
o most
u milea
t ge
out of
i your
n conte
nt
y
o Tip
u s
r for
run
f nin
o g
l su
l cc
o es
 Table of
Contents

1 Tailoring a strategy to your

strengths 04

2 Establishing a community 14

3 Choosing the right tools 19

4 Repurposing content 21

5 Building brand awareness +

credibility 24

6 Driving traffic to your website 27

7 Measuring your impact 30

01
Tailoring a strategy to your strengths

Conduct a social media audit

Let’s start with talking about an

often-overlooked step: the audit. A successful audit
This step is critical if your brand
will tell you who
already has a presence on
social. (If you’re not on social yet, your
you can skip ahead to the next audience is, what
section.) type of content they
like (and don’t like)
The premise of an audit is simple:
you can’t form an effective and how active your
strategy without first taking a look brand has been
back at your historical across its channels.
performance.
Back to the Top
4
 To conduct an audit, you can use this template or create
your own. Here’s what it should include:

– Profile information (name and URL)

– Follower count
– Posting cadence
– Audience demographics
– Engagement metrics
– Top performing posts (type of post, engagement, URL)
– Worst performing posts (type of post, engagement, URL)

You’ll need to source this information for each of your

brand’s social channels.

Take note of the data that sticks out to you. Are you
surprised at how many times a video of your CEO’s keynote
speech was
viewed? Maybe you weren’t aware of how young your
audience is, or that a large number of your followers is from a
certain country. This information will come in handy when you
start defining your social media goals, which we’ll dive into
soon.

Tailoring a strategy to your strengths

Secrets to Social Media Success for Small 5
Businesses
Select the right channels
Now that you’ve conducted
your audit, it’s time to choose
which channels to be present
on.

Often, there’s a steep learning

curve as you build your brand’s
online community and get up to
speed with their interests and
preferred ways
of communicating. Over time, you
may find that most of your target
audience is active on a few
channels in particular. This is why,
to start, it’s smarter to focus on Tip:
growing and engaging your
audience on two
to three channels. You can The channels you’re
always expand your presence personally most
beyond those channels in the comfortable with
future, if it makes sense. aren’t necessarily the
ones your customers
prefer.
Tailoring a strategy to your strengths
Secrets to Social Media Success for Small 6
Businesses
Tailoring a strategy to your strengths
Secrets to Social Media Success for Small 7
Businesses
 Before getting up and running on any channel, here
are a few questions to consider:

Is your business B2C or B2B (or both)?

What channels do your target audience

frequent? What are you trying to achieve?

Do you have a budget? If so, what is it?

What channels are your competition on (and which

do they receive most engagement on)?

While there are exceptions to every rule, you can use the
guide below to understand which channels are likely to be a
good fit for your business.

Tailoring a strategy to your strengths

Secrets to Social Media Success for Small 7
Businesses
Facebook LinkedIn

Best for B2C Best for B2B

Facebook is great for B2C and some B2B With more than 260 million users logging into
businesses that can dedicate some dollars to LinkedIn each month, 40 percent of whom
a social advertising budget. While Facebook use the platform daily³, LinkedIn offers
has brands a lot of opportunity to drive website
2.37 billion monthly active users1, its traffic, promote company culture and share
algorithm heavily favors paid business thought leadership
content over organic, making driving an content. In fact, according to one study4,
organic strategy on this channel tough. LinkedIn was shown to drive well over half of all
visits from social media to corporate websites.

Twitter
Best for B2B and B2C

If your goal is to increase brand awareness or

to build a community of influencers, Twitter
could be a powerful marketing tool for your
business. The platform published a study2 that
shows that
Twitter users reward brands that make an effort
to be responsive and share quality content.
How? By engaging in offline conversations on
those topics the brands tweet about.

Twitter is also a great channel for brands to

demonstrate top-notch customer service.
People use it to connect with brands, whether
it’s to air their frustrations or share glowing
reviews.

¹ http://bit.ly/ebook-instagram-users
2
http://bit.ly/ebook-twitter-audience
Tailoring a strategy to your strengths
Secrets to Social Media Success for Small 8
Businesses
 3
http://bit.ly/ebook-linkedin-stats
4
http://bit.ly/ebook-linkedin-company-stats

Tailoring a strategy to your strengths

Secrets to Social Media Success for Small 9
Businesses
Instagram Pinterest
Best for B2C Best for B2C

If your brand is B2C and you aim to connect with Pinterest is also a great platform for brands
influencers in retail, health and wellness, or with products to show off and can be an
beauty, Instagram could be a goldmine for your excellent driver of traffic to your business’s
business. While it can also be a great tool for website. By creating boards that reflect your
B2B brands (especially those that use it for brand and pinning content to those boards that
recruitment), the visual nature of this platform links back to your website, Pinterest can help
plays into the hands of B2C businesses with improve your business’s SERP (search engine
products to share. results page) ratings.5

Jump to social ads

5
http://bit.ly/ebook-pinterest-google-ranks

Tailoring a strategy to your strengths

Secrets to Social Media Success for Small 9
Businesses
Set goals & define metrics
Now that you know which social channels you want to build your brand’s
presence on, it’s time to set measurable goals to work toward. If your
team is focused on driving awareness, reducing churn and increasing
sales,
you may want to consider goals like increasing customer engagement
on social by X%, generating X number of leads, and driving X% of traffic
to the company website.

Here are some common metrics to consider when

setting your social media goals:

Engagement Clicks

Reach Followers

You shouldn’t feel you have to set your entire strategy for the year
ahead. Instead, you can start with a few focused goals and then add
more to the mix once you’ve gained momentum.

Tailoring a strategy to your strengths

Secrets to Social Media Success for Small 10
Businesses
Establish tactics

No strategy is complete without having a firm handle on how to

tactically execute it.

This is where the results of your content audit really come into play. For
example, if the audit revealed that your Instagram followers engaged most
with posts about your brand’s products, you might want to consider using
that channel to debut a new product or line.

Sustainable clothing retailer Everlane does this really well.

Tailoring a strategy to your strengths

Secrets to Social Media Success for Small 11
Businesses
They used Instagram Stories to tease out the launch of their line
“ReNew.” The campaign was simple and effective. Why? It gave their
followers a much-anticipated preview of Everlane’s latest line. Plus, they
tied the launch to the brand’s mission to be a leader in sustainable
fashion. Overall, it was straightforward and very on-brand.

Let’s say you’ve identified that one of your goals for Facebook is to use
the platform to establish your company as a thought leader in its space. A
tactic you might use to meet that goal is to publish a monthly Q&A series
featuring employees in your organization discussing topics pertinent to
your industry.

Tailoring a strategy to your strengths

Secrets to Social Media Success for Small 12
Businesses
Your tactics should tie to at least
one of your social media goals
(but ideally multiple), be realistic
Tactics
(not aspirational) and set your
are the “how” of the
social media strategy into motion.
social media
strategy.

Tailoring a strategy to your

mistake of not defining what they
strengths will help you get
are and which metrics you’ll use
really clear on what you want
to measure your success. This is
to
key!
accomplish, which channels
you’re going to use to do it and
And finally, keep in mind that some
the steps you need to take to get
of your success will come down to
there.
trial and error. Don’t be afraid to try
Remember: you can engage your
new tactics to reach your goals.
target audience more effectively if
Like Everlane, look for ways to
you don’t spread your social
engage your audience while
media team too thin. So, don’t
showing off the best aspects of
feel you need to be on every
what your brand has to offer it.
channel to start. Instead, consider
why your business is on social
and decide which channels are
most likely to help you reach your
goals.
Speaking of goals, don’t make the
Tailoring a strategy to your strengths
Secrets to Social Media Success for Small 13
Businesses
02
Establishing a community

Often, brands forget one crucial Depending on your objectives

aspect of social media: the for social media, establishing
social part. If you’re guilty of and
this, it’s time to shift your maintaining a community can be
thinking. Instead of approaching more valuable than vanity metrics
your channels such as the number of likes your
as message boards for one-way posts get
communication, try thinking of or how many followers your brand
them as forums to engage your acquires. Why? Because when you
audience. This teaches you what’s invest in growing a strong
top of mind for your consumers, community that engages with your
including: brand on social media, you’re also
building trust between your brand
What content they engage with and its customers and prospects.
What topics they’re interested
in learning more about
What questions they have
about your brand or industry
Back to the Top
14
Every action your brand takes on social—from likes and shares to
comments and follows—contributes to how your followers perceive it. If
people like the content you’re sharing, or have had positive interactions
with your brand through your social channels, they’re more likely to speak
highly of your business and recommend it to others.

Dos
Do answer questions people have about your

business Do offer value with every post

Do follow back your most loyal audience members

Donts
Don’t be tone deaf when responding to
customer complaints

Don’t just focus on selling your products or

services Don’t go dark or only post sporadically

Establishing a community
Secrets to Social Media Success for Small 15
Businesses
 Be proactive.
With the right tools, you can scan
the channels you’re on to
discover people talking about
your brand and industry. (We’ll
discuss tools
in more depth later.) This allows
you to proactively jump into those
conversations.

A proactive strategy might

include sharing a coupon code to
thank your customers for using
76% of consumers your brand’s products or
services.
are more likely to It could also involve scanning
buy from a brand your social monitoring
they feel connected streams for industry-related
chatter and
to on social media hopping into relevant conversations
than its competitors.6 to share your business’s unique
point of view. Or, you could answer
questions people have about your
products or services.

Establishing a community
Secrets to Social Media Success for Small 16
Businesses
 6
http://bit.ly/ebook-sprout-social-insights

Establishing a community
Secrets to Social Media Success for Small 17
Businesses
Embrace user-generated content. Have a strategy for dealing with
negative comments.
There are so many creatives and
thought leaders active on social Of course, part of building
who would be more than happy for relationships with your online
your brand to share their photos, community includes being receptive
videos and testimonials, among to feedback, criticism and problems
other `types of content. related to your company’s products
or services. While there may be
To get started sharing user- plenty of people online who will sing
generated content (UGC), make praises about your business, there
sure you’ve defined who your will undoubtedly be those who are
brand’s ideal content contributors not happy with something about
are and what kind of content you’d your
like them to contribute. Being very brand. This can be intimidating, but
clear about what kind of UGC it’s actually a huge opportunity.
you want to share on your social
channels will help to ensure the People expect brands to provide
quality of your content remains support via social media. In fact,
high and suits your brand. 42 percent of consumers expect a
response from a brand within an hour
Don’t forget to give credit to the of contacting them through social.7
creators! This helps build goodwill
between your audience and brand
and is really important to 7
http://bit.ly/ebook-social-response-time

remember when sharing UGC.

Establishing a community
Secrets to Social Media Success for Small 17
Businesses
When it comes to dealing with negative comments on social, don’t
overthink it. Consumers want to feel like they’re engaging with real people
on the other side of their screens. If you receive a complaint, respond to
the customer as you would if they were approaching you with their problem
in person:

Listen carefully Take it offline

Try to understand the Ask to discuss the
issue and put yourself problem in more detail
in your customers’ in a private message.
shoes.

Decide if you’re dealing with an upset customer or

troll Unlike upset customers, no amount of customer
service will satisfy a troll.

Establishing a community
Secrets to Social Media Success for Small 18
Businesses
03
Choosing the right tools
Your business may be on the small side but its presence on social
doesn’t have to be. Investing in the right tools to help you execute on
your social strategy is key to making sure it’s not. Luckily, these tools
don’t have to cost your business an arm and a leg. Here are some of the
ways they can help your business out on social.

Creating quality graphics

1 If your design team is stretched (or if it doesn’t exist) you can
still create visuals for social that have a consistent, on-
brand look. Visme offers design software anyone can use
to create infographics, social cards and data visualizations
to help your business stand out in your followers’ feeds.

Back to the Top

19
 Highlighting your brand in every communication
2 You spend hours creating and scheduling content to share with
your followers. Don’t you want to know if it’s working? Bitly
helps you go beyond vanity metrics by revealing important
insights that help you understand who’s engaging with your
content and on which channels and devices. Plus, you can use
custom branded links—links that replace the “bit.ly” with a
domain that better suits your business—so every link you
share is a powerful asset for your brand.

Managing your workflow

3 Between creating content, writing posts, posting, responding
to questions and measuring performance, keeping up with
the
demands of social can be a very tedious, cyclical effort. Using
a social media management software like Sprout Social can
help you save time by enabling you to schedule your posts
and easily create detailed reports.

Tapping into the power of social ads

4 Marketing campaigns tend to prioritize the bottom of the funnel
— but building brand awareness is just as important. With
AdRoll Attract and look-alike audiences, you can target upper-
funnel prospects by serving ads to users who have yet to
interact with your brand on your social channels, such as
Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

Choosing the right tools

Secrets to Social Media Success for Small Businesses 20
04
Repurposing content
Creating content consistently and audience?
frequently enough to fuel your
social channels is a challenge for
organizations of every size, not
just small businesses. When you
spend time creating something,
you want to get as much mileage
out of it
as possible. How can you do
that? One way is to find new
methods of sharing it out with
your audiences.

Start by understanding what

you have in your content stack.

Consider the following

questions: What kind of
content do you have?
Do you have more blog posts
or how-to videos?
Which pieces of content have
received the most
engagement since they were
first shared out with your
Answering these questions will your blog posts, videos, guides,
help you understand your infographics and other material.
options for repurposing Don’t be afraid of being a little
content. The results of your repetitive, but do make sure that
social media audit should help you offer new value with every
you out here. piece of repurposed content you
share.
Finally, know your aim.
Repurposed content should Here are four ways you can
help you get new eyeballs on breathe new life into your content.

21
 Turn quotes into visuals.
“
If you’ve interviewed someone for a blog post or case study,
why not take their most powerful quotes and create a series of
graphics to share on social? Research has consistently shown
that social media posts with visuals get as much as 2.3 times
the engagement than posts without visuals.8

Trim videos down to short snippets.

Attention spans on social can make it difficult to engage your
followers with long videos. So, take your full-length videos and
size them down to shorter, easy-to-digest snippets. You can
use them to promote the original video, or roll them out as a
separate series. (Don’t forget to add subtitles!)

8
http://bit.ly/ebook-blog-traffic

Repurposing content
Secrets to Social Media Success for Small 22
Businesses
 Convert a blog post into a webinar.
Take your best-performing blog posts and turn them into
webinars. Blog posts can make excellent webinars since
they tend to narrow in on one topic in particular, covering it
from multiple angles. You can even invite other brands to
co-host and co-promote a webinar with you.

Use internal data to create case studies.

If your brand markets to other companies, chances are
your audience is hungry for fresh data to inform their own
content creation and business strategies. If it markets to
consumers, facts and figures can help provide people with
information they need to move along the sales funnel.

Repurposing content
Secrets to Social Media Success for Small 23
Businesses
05
Building brand
awareness +
credibility
Whether it’s an explicit goal of
yours or not, being on social is
an opportunity to build brand
awareness. But being present
on social typically isn’t enough
on its
own. Here are some ways you
can help your brand stand out as
a credible leader in its field.
Back to the Top
24
Brand every touchpoint. Use consistent branding
across your profiles.

Take advantage of custom

No matter which of your social
branded links. With the power to
channels a person visits, they
make sure your brand is seen
should feel like they’re all owned by
whenever you share a link, they
the same business. Keep the look
help businesses build brand
and feel of your social media
awareness. And, since your
profiles consistent so your
customers know they can trust
audience knows they’re in the right
your branded Bitly links, they’re
place.
34% more likely to click on your
links.⁹

Develop a unique brand voice.

There’s no need to sound like your

competitors on social media. In
fact, doing that could more harm
than good. Don’t overthink it. Keep
your voice simple and always
remain true to your brand.
9
http://bitly.is/branded-links

Build brand awareness + credibility

Secrets to Social Media Success for Small 25
Businesses
Join industry conversations. Experiment with paid social.

We’ve mentioned this a few times Invest in an advertising budget to

now. Whether it’s an organized help maximize the reach of your
tweet chat on Twitter or an content and business. It often takes
informal conversation on some fine-tuning before you reap
Instagram, taking part in the benefits of your dollars spent,
discussions related to your but, once it does, paid ads can be a
business can help position your powerful way to find new followers
brand as an expert in its field and and introduce them to your
boost its credibility and brand business.
awareness by exposing you to
new and relevant audiences.

Build brand awareness + credibility

Secrets to Social Media Success for Small 26
Businesses
06
Driving traffic to your website

Channels such as Facebook and daily active users on Facebook

Instagram have made it easier and Instagram alone, there are
than ever to broaden your reach plenty of opportunities for brands
and find more consumers. They to stay
help brands engender trust by top-of-mind.11
engaging audiences in meaningful
two-way conversations. If you’re considering advertising
on social, here’s the rundown on
With native formats and mobile- the kinds of ads you can place.
friendly user experience, social
platforms have become some of
the best places to advertise online.

People spend, on average, two

hours and 22 minutes on social
networks.10 With there being nearly
2 billion

10
http://bit.ly/ebook-global-social-report
11
http://bit.ly/ebook-dustinstout-social-stats
Back to the Top
27
Types of social ads

Single-image ads Carousel ads

These are the most common format

These do a brilliant job of helping
on Facebook and Instagram. They
e-commerce businesses showcase
consist of a single file, an image with
products from their websites. You
less than 20 percent text, one
can add up to 10 photos or videos
landing page and a call-to-action.
in a single post, which is handy
Single- image ads also require
for businesses that might want to
descriptive text, which includes a
highlight different product
title, description, link description and
variations or prices.12 This ad type
display link.
is perfect for launches of new
product lines, step-by-step
instructions on how
to use your products and customer
testimonials that relate to your
brand.

Driving traffic to your website

Secrets to Social Media Success for Small
Businesses
 12
http://bit.ly/ebook-facebook-carousel-ads

Driving traffic to your website

Secrets to Social Media Success for Small
Businesses
Types of social ads

Story ads Video ads

These can be run on Instagram Video ads on Facebook and

Stories using metrics such as Instagram are out-stream video
reach, traffic, conversions, video ads. This means they appear
views or brand awareness to outside of any streaming content,
drive the results you’re after. similar to standard display ads. If
The tool supports mixed media you want
and carousels, but the default to show your products in action,
display length for images is five you can use a video that plays
seconds, and the maximum for automatically when it’s in the
video is 15 center of a user’s feed.
seconds. Instagram ads also
include one call-to-action per card,
but you can choose different
destinations for each one.

Driving traffic to your website

Secrets to Social Media Success for Small
Businesses
07
Measuring your impact

We know attribution is on the

mind of every digital marketer,
especially as they try to find out
which social tactics and channels
are driving the most revenue.
Marketers use
attribution to measure social
metrics, like impressions, clicks
and shares, to understand how
their social campaigns are doing in
regards to brand awareness,
engagement
and response.
Back to the Top
30
 Finding the right attribution model
Before we talk about measuring the impact of social
marketing campaigns, let’s take a closer look at attribution in
the wider context of digital marketing. If you’re advertising on
multiple digital channels, ensuring that all your data is
working together can be almost impossible. This disconnect
creates a disjointed, limited view of your customers, making
it unnecessarily difficult to figure out what is influencing
customers to buy.

This fragmented picture leads to inefficient use of

advertising spend and faulty testing frameworks—for
example, cutting off advertising spend on a social channel
and seeing its impact, as opposed to measuring the
effectiveness of that channel against desired goals.
Attribution solves this by investigating the activities and
channels that factor into a person’s decision to convert.

Below, we break down the different stages of attribution

modeling and recommended next steps. Before settling on
an attribution model, consider your marketing goal, and
keep in mind your lookback windows when applying credit
for a conversion. You’ll want to see the last 28 days of your
social campaign so you can take into account all the
touchpoints before deciding on a model.

Measuring your impact

Secrets to Social Media Success for Small
Businesses
 Last-click attribution
Last-click attribution awards 100 percent of the credit to the
last thing a person clicks on (organic social post, paid social
ad, etc.) before they completed the desired action. If you’re
just getting started with attribution, this model will suffice,
though it limits your view of your customer’s journey.

This model only really works for limited-time promotions or

when you need to compare and contrast two different social
channels (e.g., Facebook vs. Instagram). A more
comprehensive attribution model that goes beyond just clicks
will help you gain a better understanding of what’s behind
your ROI.

Recommended next step

Start looking into how multiple social channels and tactics
impact your customer journey and avoid limiting your view
to bottom-funnel metrics, such as clicks and conversions.

Measuring your impact

Secrets to Social Media Success for Small
Businesses
 Blended attribution
A simple alternative to last-click attribution is blended
attribution. This incorporates customer touchpoints, including
both views and clicks of organic and paid social posts,
before the purchase. Though conversions can come from
people who have clicked on a social ad, they can also come
from those who have just seen it and then navigated back to
your site at a later time. This method of attribution takes into
account metrics such as impressions (the number of times a
social ad has been served to your audience) and clicks.

Recommended next step

Consider a custom attribution model. Take an existing
weighted model, and then adjust it incrementally to align
better with your business. It’s critical to carefully monitor how
these adjustments impact end conversions.

For instance, if conversion quality declines, course correct

immediately. As you begin to experiment with more
complex media mixes, the challenge of measuring
incremental impact will become apparent.

Measuring your impact

Secrets to Social Media Success for Small
Businesses
 Multi-touch attribution
If you’re advertising beyond social channels, then multi-
touch attribution is for you. This method takes a holistic
look at all of your advertising channels and gives
weighted
conversion credit to each touchpoint by using AI technology.
We recommend using multi-touch if you’re making a sizable
investment into a marketing strategy that spans across
multiple digital channels.

Recommended next step

This is level of attribution can be very sophisticated, so
ensure you have the resources and bandwidth to really
invest in this level of measurement. Complete commitment
is required to get the most out of multi-touch attribution.

Measuring your impact

Secrets to Social Media Success for Small
Businesses
Wrapping it up

Some businesses haven’t discovered the potential of social media, but

many others have—potentially even your top competitors. We hope this
guide is a launching pad for your business’s success on social media.

Remember: no matter the size of your business, your industry or your

target audience, social media can be valuable and impact your company’s
sales and bottom line. By focusing on the basics, you can create a strong
foundation to establish your brand, build meaningful relationships with your
customers and prospective customers, and meet your company’s
marketing and customer service goals.

35
About AdRoll

Since 2007, AdRoll has been on a brands are better able to

mission to help businesses compete structure, measure, and sync
online and grow revenue. Ambitious their marketing efforts. Built for
commerce brands use the AdRoll performance,
Growth Platform to make their our Growth Platform sees
display, social, and email advertising 37,000 customers generate
work together to accelerate business more than
growth. Powered by industry-leading $246 billion in sales annually.
automation and personalization,

Bitly + AdRoll
partnered to bring
you this ebook.

Back to the Top

About Bitly

Bitly is used by businesses around

the world to build stronger
connections with their customers
across every digital channel. Our
complete Link Management Platform
empowers businesses of every size
to embed short, branded call-to-
action links in their communications
using tools, analytics and insights to
maximize the impact of every digital
initiative. Learn more about us on our
website.

Back to the Top