5 Social Media Marketing Strategies to Promote Your Student Business

Reliablecounter Team

Social media is a great opportunity to promote your small business, endorse brand awareness, attract new customers, or generate leads. And if you are a student, you are probably like a small business owner in the sense that you are dealing with everything on your own. 

In such a case, social media are exactly what you need. They are free to use and have many in-built marketing tools to help you with promotion.

Do not worry about keeping everything in place while studying. College is a perfect time to try something out, for example, building your brand. And if there is a day when you are too busy with everything, you can always delegate tasks to others, like assignment writing to essaywritingservice or social media posting to a friend. Here are the key strategies to promote your business on social media.

 

 

Make a Plan

The first step is to create a blueprint of what you want to achieve and how. The main factors are:

  • Target audience;
  • Social media platform;
  • Content types;
  • Exact goals and deadlines.

Target audience means the demographics you want to reach. Every brand has the desired demographics, depending on their product. 

Create a draft of the ideal customer – the age, location, and personal struggle your product will solve. This will influence the type of social media platform to use, what content to post, and how often, and what you want to achieve. 

The goals can be gaining more followers, increasing brand awareness, or catering to future customers.

 

Choose a Social Media Platform

You might think that the best option is to use all of them. But if you are handling everything on your own and study at college at the same time, you won’t have time for that. 

The main platforms are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Tik Tok. It is better to have at least two of them to cover more potential customers.

You might think that Facebook is not as fancy as Instagram, but almost all millennials use it. It is still the fastest growing social media platform with amazing advertising opportunities. 

Maybe you are not going to use paid advertising now, but in the future, Facebook policies will come in handy. LinkedIn is the best platform for professional services and B2B companies. YouTube is a bit complicated as it requires constant uploads and decent filming and editing skills. If these activities are something you enjoy, give it a shot.

Instagram works for almost any business as it is a visual platform. And visuals are highly influential when it comes to consumer behavior. Tik Tok and Twitter are great, but they are more of an additional channel than the main one – at least for now.

 

Create an Editorial Calendar

One of the main rules of social media is providing content regularly. It is not going to do anything if you are posting once a month. What you need is an editorial calendar for all platforms you use. And maybe some time management apps for students if apps are your thing.

Select dates and times when it is better to post something, the optimal range is 3-4 posts a week. Add stories to the calendar too, they can be a bit more chaotic or have less picture quality.

Based on the analytics of your page that is given to any business profile choose the time when to post. It should be hours when your followers are the most active. 

Another great idea is to use auto-posting tools for platforms. This way you can plan the content and set it all to be posted on a specific date.

 

Diversify Your Content

The type of content you will do largely depends on the type of products you sell. In any case, it is better to have some variations to it. The main factors to consider are:

  • Do not use the platform only for self-promotion. If the account is only about ads no one is going to subscribe to it;
  • Provide value. It means creating content that people want to read or see. Users would like to know the story behind the product, tips, and tricks regarding production, anything that shows your expertise in the field.
  • Use a little bit of humor, it works great and 3 in 4 customers appreciate it. But be careful and never make jokes at the expense of your followers.
  • Use high-quality visuals. Pictures and videos always attract more attention than plain text. Thus, you should always try to add them. Take high-resolution beautiful pictures of the product. If you do not have top-notch pictures now, you can use free photo banks like Unsplash to illustrate your post, just be sure to credit the author.
  • Be creative, original, and authentic. As a small business owner, you can show the personality behind the product.

 

Engage With the Audience

The goal can never be just to attract new followers. You need to create a community of loyal customers and appreciators. The best way to do that is to engage with the audience. Here are several ideas on the matter:

  • Always respond to comments and questions. Show people that you care about their opinions.
  • Start a discussion with a question in a post, motivate people to answer in comments, engage with their answers with likes.
  • Create a pole in stories on anything serious or fun.
  • Share customers’ posts with your product via stories or as posts. They will like it, their friends will like it, and more people would be motivated to make posts with your product.

These are just several easy ways, but you can get creative depending on what your business is about and what is the brand image.

 

In Summary

Social media can be a powerful tool when it comes to digital marketing. The best thing about them is that if the content is great, people will share it anyway. 

Always keep the customers in mind, try to provide them with value, and engage actively. Be consistent with posting, use visuals, and try different approaches.