15 top social media resources for your small business

When building a social media strategy for your small business, it helps to learn from what experts and other people in your industry are saying and doing. The best thing you can do it to take advice from others that have found success when using social media. Whether it’s gaining more followers and fans, increasing engagement, make sure you’re always up to date with the ways in which social media can contribute to success and growth.

To save you some precious time, here’s a roundup of the 15 most useful and interesting resources we recommend reading, from how to get started with social media to Facebook advertising hacks to boost exposure and ways to use Instagram and Pinterest to promote your small business.

1. Eight steps to getting started with social media

If you’re ready to get started with social media but don’t know where to begin, this guide walks you through all the essential steps from finding where your audience is spending time online and figuring out which social networks you should be using to reach them to ways to engage them with great content and fabulous customer support.

2. The proper way to automate your social media activities (and 5 other best practices)

An interesting article from Copyblogger that talks about the importance and benefits of scheduling posts on your social media accounts. Here are two: becoming more productive and engaging with the part of the world that’s awake when you’re sleeping. Read the post for some good automation tips that you should keep in mind as you set your social media strategy.

3. How 7 top influencers share great content on Twitter

Influencers know what they’re doing, otherwise they wouldn’t be followed by thousands of people. Read this useful post to learn how influencers find great content to share, what type of content works for them and how they use Twitter to share that content and engage with their audience.

4. 3 psychology principles that boost social media engagement

There are too many business social media accounts where you only see lots of content shared but zero engagement. There are some psychology principles that trigger engagement and you’ll find the three most important ones detailed in this post. Make sure to incorporate them into your social media strategy and see how well your social posts trigger action from your audience.

5. Seven rules of social media and why wet floors are always dangerous…

You read stories about businesses and professionals getting over 20k Twitter followers and over 50k Facebook fans, and you can’t stop but wonder: “How did they do that?” Follow the simple rules in this post to increase your social media audience as well as engagement.

6. Lessons from 15 of our best-performing tweets

Want to learn what makes a good tweet? Based on an analysis of tweets with the highest engagement rates, this post shares some excellent examples and tips on how to compose tweets that perform really well and stand out among the rest.

7. 15 new social media templates to save you even more time with your marketing

We’re always looking for ways to get organised and save time on simple talks that take too much of our time. In this post you’ll find a nice collection of templates that can help you work smarter, from social media reports and audit templates to content calendars and visual social media templates.

8. How to use images on social media to improve engagement

Images are proven to increase engagement on social media. Studies have shown that using images on Facebook can result in an 85% interaction rate while retweets on Twitter can increase by 35%. Read this post to learn what makes an image shareable and what tools you can use to create images quickly and easily, even if you don’t have technical skills.

9. 9 huge mistakes you don’t know you are making on social media

While there is a plethora of resources on how to do social media the right way, many business owners are inadvertently damaging their brands through their efforts, rather than growing and building their business. Find out what are the nine huge mistakes that you may not know you are making on social media.

10. The 5 most meaningful Google Analytics reports for social media marketers

While you may be putting a lot of effort into building brand awareness and engagement in social media, you also need to find out if your effort is paying off, don’t you? In this post you’ll find out about the Google Analytics report that you need to look into to see how well you’re really doing on social media. In it you’ll find information about specific reports you can access, where exactly to find them in Google Analytics and what each report tells you.

11. 9 tactics to utilise the power of Instagram in your social marketing

If you’ve been thinking about using Instagram to grow your business, you should give this post a read. You’ll learn more about the benefits of using Instagram plus nine excellent ways to get the most out of this popular social media platform.

12. 7 ways to use Pinterest to promote your business

Pinterest is another image centric social network that’s rapidly gaining market share due to its high engagement levels. If you’re considering using it for your small business, in this article you’ll find some useful ways in which you can use Pinterest to promote your business.

13. 3 Facebook advertising hacks for small business exposure

If you have a budget and want to invest into Facebook advertising campaigns to gain exposure and grow your revenue, this post is a must-read. In it you’ll find some great tips to help you use Facebook advertising to bring in the right customers.

14. Seven deadly sins of having your business on Facebook

When posting on social media, you need to pay attention not only to your message but also to typos, irrelevant hashtags or a misplaced photo. Even a small mistake can easily snowball into an error with huge consequences. In this post you’ll find seven of the biggest Facebook blunders made by some of the most popular brands in the world. Read and learn from their mistakes.

15. How to drive traffic from social media to your online shop

If you sell products online and you’re hoping to attract more customers through your social media channels, you can. This post walks you through a few simple ways you can turn your social channels into sales channels without driving customers away.

These are some of the most informative and interesting resources on social media that we’ve read lately. We hope you find them useful and if there are others you’ve stumbled across, do share them with us in a comment below.