2017 KEY:SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING FOR SMALL BUSINESSES

My New Year's resolution for 2017 is as follows: For the coming year, I want you to concentrate on growing your organic social media reach. As 2016 comes to a close, I've been thinking about my core brand strategy and why it important to all of my clients, friends in small businesses, peers, and other people who produce branded content. As new platform features were released over the past year on YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, and most recently Instagram, I truly committed to publishing content on those platforms.

With regard to my own brand, a lot occurred this year. But the thing that interests me the most is how little money I spend on sponsored advertising. Yes, I paid for the amplification of some Facebook videos and some YouTube pre-rolls, but not at the same levels that most of you do (or would do) to get significant results.

You begin to see that social media is simply the colloquial name for the current state of the internet when you start to understand what it is today (in 2016) and where it's going in 2017.

The essential message is this: In 2017, emphasizing on the material you publish on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, Linkedin, Medium, and whatever else the market is interested in at the time will play a significant role in getting your message out there.

People have been ignoring organic material for the past two to three years due to the expansion of sponsored advertising. Paid social media does indeed have amazing benefits, and in my opinion, it offers the finest value in all of advertising (aside from advertising during the Super Bowl). But what has come out of everyone's paranoia that social media only works when you spend money is a lack of hustle and a failure to grasp the power of great content, especially when amplified in subtly effective ways.

By "amplified in subtle ways," I mean that you can easily start being noticed over time on Instagram if you simply start using the right hashtags. Using hashtags is an incredibly natural method to increase discoverability and generate amplification for your content, regardless of whether you're a Fortune 500 B2B firm, a small-town pizzeria, a car dealership, an artist, or a rapper. Additionally, if you have paid media resources, even just $100–300 a week on the amplification of your YouTube and Facebook video material can cause an explosion in your content.

The truth is that no amount of paid publicity will be able to salvage poor creative. Similar to how no amount of venture capital funding can turn around a subpar product. To improve your brand's content over the long term, you must make an investment (and you do that by creating a lot of it).

I basically think that if you're a small firm, you should concentrate on investing your time, money, and energy into producing excellent content (and a lot of it). Instead of the other way around, you should be spending $85,000 a year on high-quality content creation and just another $35,000 on bought amplification. The idea that most small businesses (and even A-list celebrities) spend $250,000–500,000 annually on strategies like websites, public relations, direct mail, or paid media when they could have invested everything in organic social content and a modest amplification budget would delight me to no end.

The largest misconception is that marketing to anyone under the age of 40 nowadays requires high-quality content. Anyone in that group initially learns about a company by either: (A) conducting a Google search or (B) locating its information on social media. You will become mute and out of date in the current business environment if you aren't killing it and concentrating on the material you publish on the most significant social networks. The impression you get when someone visits your page directly is that they are a much more qualified lead and possibly a more valuable customer than someone you acquired through a "media" buy, which is why organic reach is so important.

No amount of purchased media will be able to salvage poor creative.

There are many various paid strategies (Facebook Advertising, Instagram influencer marketing, YouTube pre-rolls, Snapchat new ad product, etc.) that can help you increase your audience, but the chance to take your social media content very seriously matters. Why? because it represents the internet in its most natural and modern condition. The opportunity for brands that produce excellent content to expand in the right way is enormous as the market for paid media becomes more saturated.