6 Tips & Tools for Social Media Growth
Written by Jen Siomacco and Brittinee Phillips. Meet Our Team.
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This month we’re bringing you more tips and tools you can use for your small business’ social media growth. As a small business with a brand that you undoubtedly want to scale and grow, it’s important to try different approaches to grow your business’ presence on social media.
Here are great tips and tools we suggest for making an impact on social media with your brand — from your social media content strategy to scheduling and tracking your performance.
Social Media Content Strategy
It’s difficult to run your social media accounts without a strategy! In fact, it’s one of the quickest ways to feel burnt out and overwhelmed. To have a supportive team behind you during the process is always helpful. Our team loves to work with small business owners to identify their business goals and their target audiences so that we can develop a plan for creating content that helps you reach those goals and those ideal clients and customers.
In addition to guidance on what types of content to post and when, a good social media strategy also includes a hashtag strategy. If you’re not sure where to start with hashtags, Sprout Social’s annual list of social media holidays and their hashtags can be a great resource for content ideas all year long.
Allow VVITCH to help you with your social media strategy, hiring a team that cares about your business as much as you do means more value-based outcomes for your brand.
Branded Social Media Templates
Once you have a strategy, it’s time to get to work creating your content. In addition to the caption of your social media posts, you’ll also need graphics, photos, or visuals in order to get your content noticed by audiences across each social media platform. Keeping these graphics consistent and on-brand will help to build trust with your audience. Canva offers thousands of free templates suited for all different types of content, and they can easily be updated with your brand colors and fonts.
If you want something totally custom and unique, you should hire us to create custom branded templates.
Content Generators
Decided to go it alone with your social content and now have a hard time deciding what content connects best? There is a tool for that! Did you know there are tools out there that allow you to easily generate your own memes, tweets and convos? This can be such a great way to showcase your brand’s personality and how you interact with your clients and customers.
You should aim to strike a healthy balance between building a relationship with your social media audience that increases their interest and intent with purchasing from your business. We all love a great laugh or shared moment of nostalgia too!
Try to showcase those elements of your brand by using these generators:
Never Underestimate a Finsta
No one knows a lot about how exactly every social platform’s algorithm works, but the VVITCH team does know that all of the platforms reward you for using their features to the fullest. For example, as Instagram continues to grow their new Reels, people who create Reels are being featured in feeds at a higher rate than other types of content.
However, as we all know, trying out new features can be pretty intimidating! That’s why creating a test or fake account, sometimes referred to as a Finsta, can be a really helpful way to test out new features and get comfortable with them before posting on your business account.
Resources for Free Stock Photography
Next, having great photos and videos can be a game changer for your marketing. This can be costly to do from scratch since great photography and videography often comes with a high price tag. The VVITCH team loves that there are options for free stock photography for small businesses and brands that don’t yet have a photography budget in their marketing plan.
The majority of free stock photography and videography sites allow you to download assets without having an account. While others might require you to sign up before you’re able to use their repository of photos and videos.
The two top sites that we prefer to use are:
Type in your search term(s) and scroll through a multitude of options!
Schedule Your Content & Track Your Performance
Wonderful —you’ve planned and created your social content. Now it’s time to get it published!
Gone are the days of having to manually post all of your social content. Social media schedulers integrate with the major social media platforms so that you can enter all of your post content and schedule it in bulk. This can be a huge time saver and prevents you from getting distracted by other people’s content which is something that often happens if you’re scheduling your content natively in the app.
The other added benefit of using these schedulers is that almost all of them include some analytics and insights into how your content is performing, so you can learn what works and what doesn’t for your audience.
Here are our favorites and why:
Sprout Social — top of the line for analytics and scheduling features
Planoly — primarily, great for Instagram
Tailwind — great for Pinterest
Later — free version available and great for Instagram users who are just getting started
Hootsuite — robust with detailed analytics and features, but can be expensive for teams
Unsure which one will work best for you and your business? Learn more about social media schedulers and how to choose the right one for your needs.
Tried these tips and tools but still want more hands-on support? VVITCH can be a trusted partner for your small business. Learn more about the full services we offer by contacting our team.
Jen Siomacco - Founder and UX Designer
Jen has worked in technology, marketing, and publishing for ten years. After years as a CX/UX designer in the corporate world, Jen put her skills to work as one of the owners of Catalyst Wedding Co.
After seeing both the corporate and entrepreneurial world, Jen is committed to helping feminist small businesses grow into revolutionary brands.
Brittinee Phillips - Copywriter
Brittinee has worked in marketing for a little over ten years. She has a passion and talent for storytelling. Brittinee's philosophy is that storytelling is the most integral part of the consumer and product experience, which is why she makes it a focal point in her approach to product and brand messaging.
