Find A Social Media Niche For Your Small Business

What’s the biggest failure people see in social media? Not getting any response from people, no progress. That happens for two reasons:

1. You’re only promoting your product and service, not offering people anything they want.
2. You haven’t focused on a social media niche, only broad topics.

Doing either of these is going to make social media difficult for you. You won’t see the return on investment (ROI) that you want and need. We’re going to focus on your social media niche because without a niche, any interesting content you make will go to waste.

If you approach a broad audience on social media, you’ll have a hard time. You’ll reach bots, promoters, or you’ll get lost in the streams of data.

Finding the right niche and balancing its depth is something you’ll have to decide on. There are different layers to finding a niche and you’ll have to decide where to stop.

The Layers

Finding your niche is like peeling the layers of an onion, your goal is finding the right layer. It’s tempting to start on the outside which is your most broad audience. As you peel back layers, your niche becomes more well-defined.

For a web designer, it’s easy to want to define your audience as someone who needs a website. Does that mean just anybody who needs a website, though? That’s too broad.

A web designer’s audience isn’t a student looking for a job, they’re more likely to set up a free website but still need one. That’s why a niche is better defined as maybe a small business. That’s not the most ideal layer, though.

The best niche would be lawyers who need a website.

If you’re selling jewelry online it might be tempting to define your niche as female from age 16 to 55. It’s better to define your niche in a more specific age range and style even. A female from 30-50 who is looking for hypoallergenic silver jewelry is even better.

Go Deep

The deeper you go with your niche, the easier it will be for you to find them on social media. Defining a more narrow social media niche will make your job easier.

If you use hashtags such as #jewelry, #marketing, or #webdesign you’ll have a hard time reaching anybody. You’ll end up getting lost in a stream of messages as they fly by anybody who happens to be watching these hashtags.

Now, if you narrow your social media niche down a bit to a popular but small hashtag, you may reach more people. If you want to target a small business, you may be better off going with a niche if it fits. Instead of using #smallbusiness it may be best to go with #legaltips if it’s relevant to your content.

If you search for hashtags for your niche, even in general terms, you’ll find lots of other great suggestions. Searching for “small business hashtags” turns up several websites with great suggestions on further targeting options.

With the help of Google and a niche mentality, social media niche targeting will get easier for you.

How It Helps

You’re a small business which means you probably have small resources (compared to large corporations). That means you need to make those resources count even more. There’s no time to waste your money or energy on social media that doesn’t work.

Social media won’t work if you don’t narrow your niche to a group you can reach. Once you’ve narrowed your social media niche, you’ll have opportunities to have conversations with real people.

Large hashtags and groups are awash with bots and people wanting to sell you something. If you reach your niche, you’ll find the real conversations happening. Those will be the conversation where you can add value and help.

Focusing your social media niche will allow you to better move away from media and into the realm of being social. Once you reach your real audience and not just those trying to sell you something, you’ll have real conversations that will lead to real relationships and trust.

There’s more you can do than just whittle down on who you’re targeting, though. If you’re a local small business, that can work well for your social media niche.

Local Is A Niche

Local is possibly one of the best niche’s when you’re trying to focus on social media. From local hashtags to geo targeted message, you’ll have an easier time reaching people close to you than far away. Not only that but local social is much less congested than global social.

There are even social media networks that make it easy to target local people. You can set up a Nextdoor business page to reach customers local to you.

Most social media networks allow you to turn on geo targeting when you make a post. Turning it on will make your message more likely to turn up for those around you. Not only that but Twitter will show you trending hashtags that are local.

Local trending hashtags are nice because you can raise awareness for your business if you use the hashtag well.

A small business that deals mainly locally should have effective ways for finding a local social media niche. With local Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups, and geo targeting, reaching local customers shouldn’t be as difficult as trying to reach customers with no targeting.

Check Your Social Media Presence

If you haven’t spent a lot of time on your social media presence, this is a great opportunity for you. I offer free personalized Online Presence Reports which will give you an overview of how well your small business is represented online.

Your small business is important to you and one of your goals is to grow. Your online presence is an important part of reaching new people online and building trust with people you meet in person.