10 Social Media Tricks Your Small Business Needs to Try

If you're struggling to get the word out about your small business, social media could be your great equalizer. Social media as a marketing channel is more strategic and data driven than a few blog posts, status updates, and a few hundred “followers” and “likes.

Expanding your audience is crucial, and Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and Twitter let you do that easily. HootSuite lets you manage all these profiles at once, saving valuable time, while Tumblr, Vine, and Instagram allow you to reach a younger audience in creative ways. And don’t say your audience isn’t on social media; the fastest growing demographic on Twitter is 55-64 year olds.

Keeping up with the latest social media changes is not always easy, and your social media marketing tactics may need to be refreshed. At Grovo, an online learning platform that trains people on leading cloud apps, social media tools and Internet trends, we put together the top 10 tips your small business needs to try to take your social media presence to the next level today:

1. Promote a Page Post with Facebook Ads
Paying to advertise a Facebook Page post increases the distribution of an important message so that it appears in more News Feeds across Facebook. To promote a page post, select "Page Post Engagement" from the ads creation page. Pick a recent post from the dropdown, or check the box to automatically promote the most recent post and keep your ad up-to-date.

Below, you'll see what your ad will look like in the "News Feed" and the "Right Column," but you can "Remove" it from either place. Uncheck the box beneath "Sponsored Stories" if you don't want stories published about people liking your posts, commenting on your posts, or sharing your posts.
However, leaving Sponsored Stories enabled won't force you to increase your budget. Under "Advanced Options," you can add "URL Tags" to make it easier for you to track clicks if you want.

2. Get To Know Your Facebook Fan Base
If you don’t know who your fans are, you won’t know what content to publish. Posting the wrong content will help you lose likes, not drive likes. The “people” tab will help you better understand the users who share and engage with your page’s content. Here you can choose data on demographic information and narrow your data down to people you’ve reached, who’ve engaged with content, or who’ve checked in within the past 28 days. You can also see check-in, age, sex, and location comparison reports, and detailed explanations.

This video will help you better understand how you can get to know your fans better, in order to target them with the right content and drive likes:

3. Advertise on Twitter
Setting up your Twitter ads account allows you to promote your brand or company through Twitter. To sign up, go to ads.twitter.com and sign in with your brand's Twitter account.

Once you get started, add the locations and interests of people you'd like to target. Under "More targeting options" you will be able to better precisely and accurately you target your ads. If you do this, the more likely it is that someone who views it will click on it, so choose carefully.

You get to decide the maximum you'd like to pay per day and per interaction for individual promoted tweets and promoted accounts. You won't always pay the maximum amount, but you'll never pay more than your maximum bid. You can also choose to focus exclusively on promoting individual tweets or your account by clicking "Stop promoting" under the other category. Your ads will begin appearing on Twitter users' feeds. You can control your ad settings on this page, and return to it at any time by going to ads.twitter.com.

4. Convert to a Pinterest Business Profile:
Pinterest now allows businesses to have official accounts. These accounts allow companies to more effectively interact with their audiences on Pinterest.

By visiting business.pinterest.com, you can either create a new business profile or convert an existing profile to a business account. To create a new business profile, click "Join as a business." You'll then be prompted to fill out a form with such information as: your business type; your contact info and password; the business name and logo; and a description and website.

Business accounts, you only need to provide a single name, rather than first and last name with personal accounts. To convert an existing profile, select "Convert your Existing Account" on the Pinterest Business page. Log in to your account, provide the required information, accept the terms of service and click "Convert Account." After creating or converting your account, you'll see a Get Started page that can help you Verify your website, install a pinterest widget on your site, drive traffic back to your site, and grow your audience.

5. Make Your Business Googleable
Google Places for Business allows you to manage the information Google displays about your business in search results, your Google+ profile page, your Adwords account, and Google offers all from a single dashboard.

To get started on Google Places for Business, go to google.com/places and click "Get started for free." Log in with your Google Account or Google apps username and password. In the popup, choose whether you'd like to be notified about future release information, agree to the terms of service, and hit "Okay, got it!"

Type your business name, location information, business phone number, and business type. On the next page, verify your account to prove you really own the address, or "Continue and verify later."Note that your page won't be displayed on Google until you verify it. Next, click "Edit information" and add your business's hours, a description, and photos. Your changes will be saved automatically.

6. Post Simultaneously to Multiple Social Networks
Once you've added social networks, you can use HootSuite to post to multiple networks at once.
First, select the profiles you want to send this message to in the box to the right of the compose box at the top of any page. You can select as many profiles as you have connected. Deselect a profile by clicking its icon again. Click into the "Compose" window and type the message you want to send.You can type up to the most lenient character limit of the networks that you selected. You'll see each limit decrease to the bottom left as you type.

If you exceed the limit of one of your networks, the number will turn red and go into the negatives. This lets you know how much of your message will be cut off with an ellipsis on that network. Click the location icon to add location data to your message, and the lock to adjust your privacy settings. Click "Send Now," and your message will be posted to all the profiles you selected.

7. Help Search Engines Find your Videos
Adding tags and video categories can improve the performance of your videos by helping search engines find them when users search for your tags and similar terms. You can add tags when you upload your video, or at any time after by selecting "Video Manager" in the dropdown below your username. Check off a tag you've already used to include it, or type in the box above to find a specific tag or create a new one. You can also choose a video category that matches your title, description and tags to help improve your video's search ranking even more.

8. Track the Performance of your Tweets
There are many ways to advertise your business, this way has 140 character restrictions. Twitter helps your business build an audience, broadcast your message and send followers to your site. Tracking your tweets' performance allows you to see how popular your tweets are over time, as well as get information about the people who follow you. To track tweet performance, go to ads.twitter.com and log in. The following video will give you a better understanding of using Twitter’s Analytics, to dive into your Timeline activity, followers influence, good and bad tweets, and more.

9. Pay to Have a Tumblr Post Shown More Places
Promoting a Tumblr blog post allows you to pay for your posts to have better placement in front of your audience or highlights a post to stand out on users' dashboards.From the post creation page, click "Promote this post" then select either "Pin this post" for $5 or "Highlight this post" for $2.

When you pin a post, it remains pinned to the top of your followers' dashboards until they remove the pin.
Highlighting a post means the post will have a glow around it to stand out from other posts, and include a tag to the right of the post.

Select a message for the tag using the dropdown below, after you select the "Highlight this post" radio button. Select the icon and color to the right. If you've already entered your credit card information, you can either confirm the payment, change your card, or cancel the order. Otherwise, type in your credit card information and click "Next" or use PayPal to pay for your promoted post.

10. Track Your Most Popular LinkedIn Updates
LinkedIn page analytics allow you to keep track of which of your company's updates are the most popular,and see how your LinkedIn page has grown over time. To access your company's analytics page, go to your company's page, then click "Analytics" at the top.Here, you'll see your company's most recent updates, with more information about each post to the right. To better understand your LInkedIn Reach, Engagement, Clicks, Likes, COmments, Shares, Range AND More… Grovo’s 1minute LInkedIn Analytics Overview will help:

Special thanks to Drew Hudson for today's guest post.  Drew Hudson is a Product Analyst and Writer for Grovo Learning, Inc. specializing in social media, cloud computing, and mobile apps. Since the turn of the decade, he has entrenched himself in the evolution of Web services and digital strategies and is an authority on the business impact of new Internet tools and trends. He writes several tutorial scripts each day, with tips on how to better use the Internet, and is a lead writer for the Grovo Blog. Besides keeping up with what's going on in the tech world and writing about it, Drew loves music, sports, and exploring the best of everything New York has to offer.

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