3 Tips to Leverage Social Media for Your Small Business

As a small business looking to gain a foothold in your industry, you already know the importance of marketing and advertising for building your brand and presence. After all, when more people know about your business, you’re more likely to connect with individuals who’d make great customers.

With over 5 billion social media users worldwide at the start of 2025, social media platforms are valuable channels for small businesses to leverage to gain visibility. But how do you decide which platforms are right for your business? What content should you post? How can you keep your audience engaged?

We’ll answer all these questions and provide top tips on creating a stellar social media strategy that serves your small business’s goals. Let’s get started!

1. Choose the right platforms.

Social media is exciting—it’s a chance to connect with a broad audience of potential customers and drive revenue back to your business. Although jumping straight into content creation is tempting, you must first lay a solid foundation for your social media strategy by choosing the right platforms to focus on.

Many factors might inform this decision, including your:

• Business type and industry
• Goals
• Target audience

Platform popularity is another crucial factor to consider. According to MassageBook, the three main social media platforms are Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok (which have over 3 billion, 2 billion, and 1 billion active monthly users worldwide). If you’re looking for a starting point that will net you the visibility your small business needs, a combination of these three platforms may be the right choice.

While following your social media strategy, periodically assess engagement and conversions through these platforms to identify which ones are worth investing more time and energy into and which may not be worthwhile to continue using.

2. Consistently post appealing content.

In marketing, consistency is the name of the game. You want potential customers to see your messages frequently to increase the chances they’ll feel inspired to make a purchase. However, that doesn’t mean that your customers should see the same social media post repeatedly.

Vary your social media content by creating posts with different formats, such as:

• Text. Follow best practices to keep your audience’s attention, such as breaking your text up with headers, bullet points, and images. However, social media is not the best place for long-form text content—if you have a lot of text to share, it’s best to do so on your business’s blog. Add a short snippet to your social media pages, including a link to your blog post.

• Images. Aside from photographs of your products or services, you can post graphics related to your business to add variety to your social media page. For example, take a look at the Hello Kitty Cafe Truck’s Instagram page. This traveling merchandise truck posts not only snapshots of its van and its cute products but also graphics about where it will be the coming weekend. Additionally, all of its graphics are branded accordingly, so viewers instantly recognize their posts when they come across them in their feeds.
• Videos. You don’t need an expensive camera or a fancy studio to create appealing video content! Getting started is as easy as using your smartphone to film, making this a cost-effective option for small businesses. Plus, not all social media platforms require highly polished, extremely professional content. More than ever, followers appreciate uniqueness and authenticity. Some top-performing business videos rely on a certain level of humor and absurdity—for example, Duolingo’s owl mascot, Duo, was killed and later resurrected through a series of attention-grabbing videos.

The right formats will also depend on the social media platform you choose. For example, Instagram is the best place to post images, and TikTok is the best place to post videos. Facebook is versatile and can accommodate all these types of content.

In addition to varying the format of your content, you should also choose many different topics for your posts. Here are a few examples:

• Product highlights
• Behind-the-scenes snapshots
• Customer testimonials and reviews
• Promotions, discounts, and special offers
• Contests and giveaways
• Employee spotlights

Let’s say you run a massage business. Your social media content for the next few weeks might include:

• Behind-the-scenes footage of a new massage room
• Motivational quote focused on wellness
• New offering spotlight: Swedish tissue massage
• Massage FAQ: How do I decide when to get a massage?
• Monthly special: 10% off aromatherapy massages
• New massage therapist introduction video from Melissa
• Massage therapy fun facts
• Client testimonial video from Andrew
• “Relax with us” contest: Tag us in photos of you relaxing for a chance to win a free massage

Feel free to get creative with your content and hop on new social media trends to amplify your business’s presence. For example, if TikTok is one of the platforms you use, create videos using trending sounds to appeal to your audience and improve visibility.

3. Leverage audience engagement to build community.

In our technologically-focused world, social media isn’t just a way to promote businesses, products, and services. It’s also becoming an increasingly essential part of how people interact, socialize, and build relationships.

New trends are reshaping how brands interact with their followers—particularly, there’s a new emphasis on building a strong community around businesses. While personalization, immediacy, and authenticity are crucial to accomplishing this task, you can take your social media presence further by building deliberate audience engagement opportunities.

On top of responding to comments and messages, here are a few ways you can do so:

• Polls
• Quizzes
• Questions
• Surveys
• Live videos
• Q&A sessions

Another way to increase engagement with your brand is to encourage user-generated content (UGC). This refers to any form of content created by your audience rather than by yourself and includes text, images, videos, and reviews. On top of creating content that invites comments and asking customers to leave reviews, you can also encourage UGC through contests and giveaways. For example, ask your audience to post photos of them using your products and tag your social media account to enter your giveaway for a $50 gift card to your shop.

Not only does UGC generate engagement for your business, but it also boosts your business’s authenticity through social proof—the more people who appear to enjoy your products, the more trustworthy you seem!

Social media allows small businesses to supercharge their brand and gain explosive visibility. Craft a thoughtful social media strategy with the tips from this guide to ensure your efforts bring the return on investment (ROI) you desire. Alternatively, consider outsourcing your marketing to a professional agency to leverage their years of experience and generate consistent results.