10 Small business pain points of social media

Social media is essential for small businesses, offering you a channel to share your brand and engage with a larger global audience. Over 4.6 billion people use social media globally, guaranteeing your marketing strategy a massive reach and an opportunity to grow your small business.

However, social media marketing is not always a bed of roses, especially for small businesses. Despite the perks of using social media, many small businesses face a range of challenges while trying to manage a successful social media campaign.

The following are ten small business pain points on social media that businesses encounter when managing their social media marketing campaigns.

1. Lack of Relevant Content

Small businesses typically struggle with creating and delivering high-quality, relevant content on social media. This social media pain point results from the limited expertise and resources to provide engaging and enlightening social media posts.

One way to overcome this hurdle is to hire a content writer to create engaging content for your social media pages. You can also utilize social media marketing tools, such as Audience Insights for Facebook, to help you obtain enough insights to customize your content to meet the needs of your target audience.

2. Low Social Media ROI

Like other aspects of your business, your social media marketing strategy needs a set of objectives to demonstrate its effectiveness. However, measuring the ROI on social media is challenging for most marketers, and it can only be worse for new small businesses.

While it is apparent that social media campaigns achieve results, quantifying the exact impact is still hard. You can beat this challenge by setting clear and attainable objectives to give you an insight into how your social media campaign performs. Also, identify the metrics to track to determine whether your strategy meets your goals. 

3. Limited Knowledge Base

The social media marketing landscape keeps evolving, and keeping up with the new features, algorithms, and regular updates is often a pain point for small businesses. These businesses struggle to keep up with the evolving trends in social media due to limited knowledge of new social media platforms and emerging features.

These changes are essential to your social media campaigns because they impact your numbers and visibility. Also, the current trends and shifts in social media affect your marketing strategy, including your posting schedule, the content you share, and the messaging for your business. Having a social media manager or team can be an effective way to counter this pain point.

4. Lack of Measurable KPI

Setting goals for your social media campaign is essential, but how do you gauge your performance? You need to develop key performance indicators (KPIs) to help you measure the success of your social media campaign.

Small businesses often find it daunting to evaluate the effectiveness of their social media marketing by failing to develop the proper KPIs. The solution to this social media pain point is to formulate practical, measurable, and time-bound KPIs. Some KPIs you can track in your campaign includes the number of shares and the number of people visiting your website from your social media platforms. 

5. Poor Time Management

Small businesses frequently struggle with time management in their social media campaigns. This struggle is because of the under-staffing nature of most small businesses. So, you have endless tasks to complete daily, and social media isn't a priority.

Creating engaging and interesting social media content is time-consuming and requires consistent effort and attention. If you struggle with time management, consider adopting social automation tools to manage your content schedule. You can also seek the services of a social media agency if you're held up with your daily business operations and can't create time for social media.

6. Limited Resources

Like other operations in your business, effective social media strategies require resources. But given the growth phase of most small businesses, owners can't afford to shell out resources to complete social media marketing tasks.

For small businesses, every social media marketing decision relies on the trade-off between daily business operations and spending on a marketing team that may or may not deliver on goals. You can overcome this social media pain point by increasing your marketing budget just enough to cover essential marketing tools.

7. Multi-Channel Presence

More social media platforms are launching to accommodate the surging number of social media users. This surge in users presents small businesses with social media pain points as they find it overwhelming to coordinate their efforts on all social media channels.

While you aim at maximizing your reach on all the social media platforms, you can't expect to find the right audience in each of them. Conduct your research and evaluate your historical data to find your marketing campaign's most effective social media channel.

8. Lack of Consistency

Small businesses face a significant pain point with the consistency of their social media content. For instance, you can post one top-quality post and follow it with an irrelevant post. This inconsistency can be a turn-off for your audience, reducing the engagement metrics for your social media posts.

Keeping a consistent voice, tone, and messaging in your social media posts is crucial to the success of your campaign. Also, consider sharing relevant content with your target audience and promoting your core brand messaging.

9. Engagement Struggles

Audience engagement is a significant small business pain point on social media, as you may find it disrupting other business tasks. Managing and engaging your social media audience is time-consuming, but it gives your brand a human touch and makes your audience feel appreciated.

You can boost engagement on your social media posts by offering incentives, such as giveaways and exclusive content, for shares and following. If you don't have the time to respond to each comment and engagement, consider having a team to manage your social media posts and comments, and track results.

10. Brand Reputation

Gone are the days when word of mouth was the only determinant of a business's reputation. Social media and online reviews now play an essential role in establishing the reputation of your small business. Maintaining a positive reputation is one of the significant small business pain points on social media.

The best way to build and maintain your social media reputation is to utilize your audience's feedback to improve the user experience. You can use the negative feedback on your social media platforms to your advantage to identify areas you can improve in your campaign.

Final Thoughts

Social media has become indispensable in the digital marketing world; it boosts your brand visibility and connects you to potential customers. A social media presence is vital to small businesses, allowing you to reach a wider audience and build brand awareness, resulting in increased sales.

Most small businesses face multiple hurdles in their debuts in the social media marketing space. Growth Friday is a reputable digital marketing agency based in Santa Monica with an in-house team of social media experts who will help you take decisive and informed actions to overcome these small business pain points and more on social media and enhance your brand's social media presence. Feel free to check out our social media packages and managed PR services for more information.

Schedule a free strategy call with us today for insightful solutions and witness your small business thrive in the social space.