5 Ways Small Businesses Can Improve Their Social Media Presence
Small businesses around the world know that social media is here to stay. You only need to look at the social media demographics across platforms to know that! But that doesn’t mean you have had the chance to put in the time or effort necessary to cultivate a proper presence on the right networks.
Even if you haven’t optimized your social media presence, there’s still time, and the benefits will be worth the effort.
There are many advantages to cultivating your brand on social media. It can help improve your brand’s social customer service, allow you to communicate with customers and prospects on a new level, help engage and reach new audiences, drive customer loyalty, build authority, and drive traffic to your website.
In short, creating a social media strategy can drive growth for your small business by fostering lasting and loyal relationships with prospects and customers. To ensure your brand’s presence on social media is managed with quality and consistency, use a social media style guide to keep track of the many different elements.
Let’s explore how to do influencer marketing the right way in 2025.
Table of Contents
1. Choose the Right Networks
Social media has exploded since Facebook went public back in 2012, and there are thousands of networks dedicated to anything from connecting old classmates to social activism.
So with all these options, how does a business pick the right ones? The advice from most experts is to join the most popular, and choosing the right ones comes down to your audience and your goals. Here’s some information to help get you started:
- Facebook: The largest platform, has 2.1 billion active monthly users according to Statista, and the network is ideal for businesses that want to generate leads and build relationships. If you’re a beginner to Facebook, check out this guide to advertising on Facebook!
- LinkedIn: the platform for business networking can be used by both B2B and B2C businesses to create trust, build authority, and engage audiences.
- X: Whose platform is immediacy, is perfect for businesses whose major audience is under 50 and who need to stay on top of time-sensitive information like breaking news, announcements, and trending topics.
- Pinterest: The photo sharing site, is a fantastic platform for businesses with visual appeal (think restaurants, fashion, art, travel, and weddings) whi want to promote their content. It’s more for social discovery than social networking, and is great for driving sales because so many users look to the site to plan purchases.
- Snapchat: Businesses can leverage Snapchat by offering promotions, providing personalized content, giving exclusive access, and building relationships with influencers to drive brand recognition and loyalty. Check out ‘5 Creative Snapchat Campaigns to Learn From’ for some inspiration.
- Instagram: Instagram’s success is rooted in staying true to its original goal – allowing users to post photos and videos from their mobile. The creation of Instagram Stories (an idea stolen from Snapchat!) featuring content that expires in 24 hours has enabled it to amass 2 billion global users while its range of video formats helps keep engaged.
- TikTok: A phenomenon in the social media world, marketing on TikTok is still effective despite its impending ban in the U.S. It’s the first app not owned by Facebook to have surpassed 5 billion installs due to its popularity amongst influencers and celebrities. The usability of the platform, huge music directory, use as a search engine, and unique filters attract an engaged younger demographic.
There are also a number of alternative social media platforms rising up the ranks in terms of popularity and performance such as Threads, Bluesky, Discord and Lemon8.
2. Set a Goal
Being active on social media has a number of benefits for your business, and there are many things you can accomplish with a social presence. This includes performing customer service, engaging customers, generating high-quality leads, expanding your audience, driving sales, increasing web traffic, gaining valuable insights and feedback, and much more.
But in order to achieve these with any measure of success, you must have a goal to work towards because you’ll need to take steps to create a social media strategy and get there. Your techniques for driving sales, for instance, will be different from your approach to improve your brand awareness. So it’s important to know what you want to accomplish.
3. Come up with a Strategy
Having a goal for improving your social media presence is great, but it’s only the beginning. Once you know what you want to achieve, you have to come up with a plan to get there.
Start by designating the person or people who will be part of the social media team, and break up their roles and responsibilities so everybody knows what’s expected and when.
You should also decide on your posting frequency, and create a content calendar that will help you plan posts and don’t miss days. This approach to scheduling is a big part of your strategy and there are great social media calendar templates you can use that lay out:
- Who your audience is
- What topics and subjects your audience is interested in
- The usable content you already have
- What kind of content you still need to create or curate
- When and on what platforms content will be published
The most effective way to develop a strategy for your business is to learn from the best. Consider a social media and marketing course that focuses on social research and social strategy so you find your audience and know how to engage them.
4. Make a Content Creation or Curation Plan with Your Audience in Mind
Knowing your audience is critical when it comes to finding success with social media engagement. This is because the interests and needs of your audience will determine the type of content you should share and the way you engage your followers.
For instance, if you’re a coffee roastery, your target audience might be interested in recipes for fancy coffee drinks, brewing tips and techniques, and other Java-related articles. Some of the important things you should know about your audience include age, location, gender, goals, likes, needs, behaviors, challenges, and pain points.
No matter who your audience is, the content you share should always be high quality and relevant. It’s worth developing content pillars to group your content into topics or areas that your audience are most interested in. You should investigate the popular content types and prioritize video, images, and other types of visual content as often as possible because these are favored by all demographics and audiences.
5. Select Tools to Schedule and Automate Posts
Staying active and present on social media takes time and dedication. But there are plenty of automation tools available to content creators to automatically publish and schedule social posts up to a month in advance.
These tools, which include Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Buffer, MeetEdgar, and BuzzSumo, can save you time by allowing you to plan and schedule batches of posts at once. They also make it easier to monitor your networks and respond to messages quickly.
Conclusion
Social media in 2025 is no longer just about posting—it’s about connecting, engaging, and building trust. Small businesses that take a strategic, audience-first approach can turn their social platforms into powerful growth engines, even without big budgets.
Ready to elevate your online presence? Focus on consistency, creativity, and real conversations — and let your brand voice shine where it matters most.
