Editor’s note: Here at VerticalResponse, we’re pulling back the curtain with a behind-the-scenes look at our webinar program with a retrospective from our Social Media Manager, Ria Boyce. In case you missed her expertise and tips on using social media for your business, here are a few of her key insights. 

A few weeks ago I hosted a webinar for Deluxe called “How to grow your business with social media in 2017.” It attracted the highest amount of attendees to date for one of our webinars: 1,744 people registered, and 561 attended. Clearly social media is a topic small businesses want to know more about!

The webinar was designed to educate our attendees on the importance of social media and what to expect from the results. I understand that everyone’s knowledge of social media can vary, so I didn’t want to lose my audience before I even got started. My introduction included a quick overview of my career experience with social media. From there, I dove into the importance of social media for today’s businesses and the advantages of various social channels for those just getting started (Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn). I also covered paid social media versus organic social media and expectations around revenue from your social efforts.

The Q&A section was packed with excellent questions, three of which I want to highlight here.

1. What social media opportunities exist for businesses offering services?

In most social media profiles, there are bio sections to elaborate on what it is your business offers. This is a great opportunity to give your followers more information about how you can help them; i.e., this is where you want to list your products and services. Facebook takes it a step further with an entire section dedicated to list every service you offer. Not only does this help give your followers more information, but it’s another opportunity to sprinkle in more search engine-friendly keywords that are relevant to your business. Good keywords are extremely important for increasing your overall online authority and relevance.

2. How much time should I spend on social media?

My suggestion would be to start small and focus on two to three social channels. Most companies post at least once a day on the main channels such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. Twitter, with its much more rapid-fire pace, requires a higher posting frequency of around three to five times a day. If that seems impossible at first, start small with one to three Tweets per day, then ramp it up as soon as you’re able.

In addition to posting and Tweeting, plan to carve aside a little time each day for monitoring social engagement. Social media is a powerful outlet to connect with your customers. Having a poor response time to customers’ questions and answers can reflect poorly on your business and hurt your overall reputation.

3. How can landing pages work with social media?

If you are using social media to bring awareness to certain products, services or promotions, the best way to engage your followers is to link to a customized landing page directly from your posts advertising those items. Of course, your landing pages should mirror the messaging from your posts, and vice versa. As an added benefit, landing pages are another opportunity to collect contact information from followers, which you can use in future marketing efforts.

Social media may seem tricky at first, but if you spend a little time familiarizing yourself with it and start posting regularly, you’ll quickly see that it can be one of the most powerful tools you have as a small business.

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