5 Ways to Generate Organic Social Media Traffic for your Small Business Accounts

Social media is a vast world of opportunity for you and your growing business. There are so many consistently active users, both recurrent and potential customers. This provides a great way to level up your retention skills while also engaging with new potential clients in fun ways. This article is a quick overview of just a few simple things you can start thinking about when you’re ready to give it your all on any social platform.

First and foremost, it’s important to note that we’re going to be grazing over A LOT of information in this article. It might feel overwhelming, but remember, this is just to get the wheels turning. At a surface level, these are things to keep in mind when using social media platforms to leverage your business. You may have some mastered but need work in other areas. Nobody is perfect or has any of this 100% down pat.

Regardless of your situation, social media is a rough landscape and it’s sometimes hard to navigate, especially when the rules are changing constantly. But, there are a few social media marketing areas that seem to remain consistent enough to turn positive results every time. With that in mind, here are six consistent and helpful areas to focus on while creating your next social calendar.

Consistency

As they say, consistency is key. Here, it truly is. Your customers are going to expect certain things from your business, especially once they are recurrent clients. Many people don’t like surprises when it comes to their favorite brands, and in fact, they like their companies for just that reason - the brand they’re created. You don’t want to lose your brand-loyal clients because you’re unpredictable. On top of that, consistency ensures that you always have the potential of being at the top of someone's mind when they’re ready to go with your product or service.

I will address the scariest thing about this now - No, this doesn’t mean you have to post daily. Simply put, you just need to do whatever you’re doing at a regular enough pace that it’s dependable. Running a growing business is not easy for anyone, especially in the small business world. Meta has made it so much harder to reach your audience, and the way users are operating on these platforms has also changed. You must stay relevant and in circulation. Be careful, however, not to post too much. Users reportedly don’t like it when content becomes too spammy looking. You have to know your audience and find a sweet spot based on how large your following is. If you have around 1,000 followers, for example, posting 3-4 times every other day, or just once a day may work for you. An easy way to do this is to take advantage of the multitude of social media scheduling tools offered to you. You can use those embedded on sites like Meta, or use an all in one tool like Hootsuite or Sprout.

Remember, consistency also refers to the look of your post. Aesthetics aren't just for Instagram influencers. Your customers expect something from your business and they want to depend on it - every. Single. Time. This doesn’t mean your content has to be linear and completely uniform, but it does mean that if you have an outdoor camping equipment business, your posts should reflect that with the branding, including coloring, feel, tone, etc.

Long story short, you have to use those analytical tools Meta and other platforms provide to learn your audience. The most important thing for your business is your customer base, so you need to either learn how to best utilize these tools to interpret their performance or find an employee who knows how to read that collected data and transfer it over into your content.

Timing

The next thing you should do is figure out the correct timing of your posts on your chosen platforms. In this case, timing truly is everything. Using the various social tools at your disposal on these apps, you can see when your followers are active and engaged - what time of day you get the best reach, what day of the week is most successful, when your click-through rate might be best. This is important because of the amount of content on these platforms. Just think, If you post at 6 pm every day, but user activity is down until 7:30 am the next day, you have over 13 hours of content burying yours, never to be seen again.

Knowing around the right time to post every day can be the difference between the right person seeing your post at the right time, and your efforts being in vain. For example, I’ve worked with a local restaurant open from 10:30 AM to 2 PM Mon-Weds and 10:30 AM to 8 PM Thurs-Sat. Their optimal posting times on Facebook are before 8 AM, around 9:45 AM, and 2 PM. This covers people who look for lunch spots first thing, those browsing social while they’re hungry, and those thinking about dinner after lunch. Alternatively, a local boutique I’ve worked with did better posting mostly in the mornings, all before 11 AM, as their customers were online and lunchtime shoppers. By the time their clients got home, they were ending their days with dinner and winding down with their significant others, children, and so on. Occasionally this business would see success posting between 5-7, but only on specific days.

We’ve seen a recent market shift since the Covid-19 pandemic, where people are connected all day, not just when they’re away from work. This has been a cultural change as well as something that has just happened with up-and-coming generations of buyers aging into the market and their habits. It’s important to acknowledge this and find out what your customers are doing. If you mostly sell to people 45 and up, you might get better results in the early morning or evenings, for example.

Use what’s already in your arsenal

There are a TON of ways you can leverage what's already readily available to you. Work smarter, not hard, they say, right? Social media is something you'll want to integrate and sort of create a flow with. Otherwise, you'll have a push-and-pull dynamic that never works for anyone. So, the easiest thing to do is think about your business and the ways you can create traction online using what you already have.

One way is to use your already established connections. No shame in inviting friends to your page or group. It’s likely that a lot of the people you’re friends with not only want to support you, but they also have similar interests and friends of their own. This promotes sharing and can start a conversation if you're posting the right stuff. Start where you know you already have some advantages.

Something else you can do is repurpose content. Whatever you’re selling, chances are you have to take pictures anyway for your website or wherever you’re hosting sales. Use those pictures on social! We sometimes get so caught up on customer retention that we forget there are a million other people who don’t know our businesses exist and, therefore, haven’t seen your product pictures. Supportive customers will like the post and move on, while you also gain new followers with new-to-them content.

On a side note, and to be very clear, this doesn’t mean spamming your feed with the same dated content constantly. You need to offer meaningful, resourceful content as often as you can. But 1 in every 5 posts being rehashed in a new way isn’t hurting anyone.

With that being said, one other thing that people often neglect in marketing a small business on social media is themselves. It’s your business. Highlight YOU. How do you use your product? What’s going on with you in your business? How is your life going? People are interested in this stuff. And the closer they feel to you as a business owner, the more likely people are to show their support, which includes sharing your content and reaching more screens. This is especially true locally and in smaller populations.

This feeds into another at-the-ready tool - user-generated content. Invite people to post on your behalf through hashtags and tagging. This can be easy if you sell something, like skin care products or baked goods. You'll have to work hard at creating an inviting environment with your brand where people can and WANT to post their experience with your product. Sometimes this is harder with small businesses because people know they're not going to get lost in feeds. They're GOING to be seen by someone. So, with confidence in your product and brand, invite people to share and engage with them. The most important thing here is repetition and response. You have to remind followers to share and you MUST react and strike up that conversation. Otherwise, their posting might come off as a lost cause.

Share relatable stuff

I don’t have to tell you that people want to be able to relate to the brand they're buying from. You’re not just trying to sell your product, you’re selling your business and yourself. People want to buy from people like them that share their same values. So if you see a funny relatable cat meme, make that a post for the day. Of course, this needs to be within reason. I NEVER suggest making your business posts political, for example. But when customers see a post and can chuckle with you, they remember you.

My recommendation here is something either humorous or that offers some sort of educational purpose, trick, hack, or how-to is also very useful. People want quick, easy solutions. So if you run, let’s say, a cotton candy business, share third-party articles about the different ways to eat cotton candy or something in that realm of reason. This also doubles as using content already available to you and more often than not it’s better for both the producer of the article as well as yourself.

Video

Videos are EXTREMELY useful - if they provide a reason to watch them. Videos either catch attention or don’t in the first 3 seconds. I know we’ve all been scrolling TikTok or Facebook reels and passed upwards of 6 videos in a row because they're just people starting an uninteresting story, or just a shot of something random with no particular substance or meaning. And don’t get me started on generated filters! I love using them as much as the next guy, but your entire page cannot rely on filters to sell to the largest audience possible.

Facebook has ways of picking their favorite videos. You can see some of those here. They’ve determined that their users want authentic connections between people. The gist of the article is that they want people to interact with your content before they push it.

That means you have to create “original” content that strikes a conversation. It can be anything from something unusual to a philosophical question to something creative and/or funny. But the point is, people have to WANT to engage with it. A formula for social success doesn’t exactly exist. It’s different for every business and the consumer market is constantly evolving. So when it comes to video, we have to make sure we’re keeping up. You can post a video every day, but if it isn’t engaging to a variety of people, no one will see it, even if they are followers.

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Leveraging social media for organic traffic is no easy feat. It takes a lot of study and dedication, which is why 3rd party specialists and hiring someone for your team may be helpful. Nonetheless, if you work diligently in these areas above, and find out what your customers are asking for - and most of the time you can just ask them - then you’ll be on your way to success. And from this, you can develop a true understanding of what matters most on your social media platforms and even move on to paid advertisement, getting more bang for your buck!