Absolute must know rule for how to use social media for small businesses

Social media is a consistently changing environment with algorithms learning and updating themselves without warning and social trends coming and going almost as quickly as leaves passing in the wind.

It's important as a business owner and marketer to understand that when you're using social media for your business it's not the same as marketing in newspapers or on the radio.

Psychologically speaking, people are not in the same state of mind on social media as compared to when they're in the car listening to the radio or at a cafe reading the newspaper. They are receiving and interacting with information in a different way altogether.

Generally speaking, social media is a place people come to be social with their friends, snoop on other people's business and laugh at creative content. It's a place where people spend a lot of their time and it's generally for an escape or if they just want to be entertained.

So...be entertaining, be fun and be clever with your business social pages. Don't always try sell things to people because more times than not, they won’t be listening to you unless they like your brand.

As a marketing agency we at Happy Hippo Media encourage our business customers to implement the rule of thumb on social media that is the 80/20 rule. This means that 80% of the time you should post things that are entertaining, inspiring or educative while at the same time being relevant to your industry. The other 20% of the time is your opportunity to sell your business. In other words, 80% of the time you should post brand driven content and the other 20% of the time you should post actionable content.

Maintaining this balance of the 80/20 rule will encourage more people to look forward to your content when you post.

Positioning yourself as someone that is full of useful information without trying to sell people anything can lead to better quality leads in the end than leads accumulated using plain old "Buy me" types of posts.

Using humour through your social feeds helps people relate to the human side of your business personality more.

Remember! People love to connect with people! We're all human after all.

Quick example:

For brand driven content a lawyer could post branded content like successful cases won, free advice and tips, engaging news updates, ‘meet the team’ posts, testimonials, etc whereas for actionable content they could post offers like ‘no win no fee’ or perhaps ‘flat rate settlements’.