Why Social Media Marketing is Every Small Business's Best Tool

Looking for customers? They might be right in your pocket. Here’s why every small business needs to get active on social media.

Why hop on social media? Because that’s where the customers are. Each month 17 million Australians use Facebook, about 9 million use Instagram, 6.5 million browse LinkedIn and 5.8 million log on to Twitter. Tik Tok is the fastest growing platform, with more than 2.5 million Australians now using it. That’s a lot of eyeballs.

Ofer Mintz, associate professor in marketing at the University of Technology Sydney and author of The Post-Pandemic Business Playbook: Customer-Centric Solutions to Help Your Firm Grow, says “small businesses need to be proactive and go to where their customers are. Customers in the post-pandemic environment are relying on social media even more. Social media marketing has advanced enough that it has become relatively easy to target the right customer with the right message on the right medium.”

Lisa Clark co-owns The Butcher Shoppe in Brisbane’s Cannon Hill with her brother, Brad Patton. She’s the business’s advertising and marketing manager and creates its social media content – on Instagram for younger customers and Facebook for older people and families. Butchering is in the family’s blood – Clark and Patton’s grandparents owned butcher shops at Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Markets – but “times have really changed and we’ve had to learn to be more savvy and join our customers online”.

The Butcher Shoppe uses social media to post weekly specials, run video profiles of its staff and encourage customers to share their own content about products and recipes. In less than six years the business has grown from six to 24 staff and has almost 10,000 Facebook followers and more than 6500 on Instagram.

Mintz says success on social media “boils down to understanding your customers – what captures their attention and, more importantly, what motivates them to act”.

But, he warns, too many firms actlike users of social media rather than as businesses. “They focus on trying to be overly funny or getting their social media to become viral,” says Mintz. “The likelihood of it becoming viral is less than being struck by lightning.” Instead, it takes hard work and determination to get social media right, says Clark. For her, it’s a full-time job. She responds to every customer message, has undertaken social media training, knows the power of a well-crafted hashtag and uses professional photographers to get the right look for her posts. It’s worth it, she says. “Social media’s the place to be.”

Illustration by Johnson Andrew