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The giant checklist of social media marketing basics for small town business

ByBecky McCray

Start with this checklist

Here are specific steps any small business in a rural area can take to get started on social media marketing.

Physical, bricks and mortar businesses, claim your Google listing first:

  1. Claim your Google listing at https://www.google.com/business/
  2. What to do if you’re not in the right place on the map
  3. Update your info, especially hours
  4. Add some photos
  5. Use ongoing updates to post holiday hours, special opening times, events, specials for people who find your listing

For every business, have a good website

  1. Include the basics from this checklist: name, address, phone, true rural location, and hours
  2. The number one feature is the location of your store
  3. Ask your customers what they want from your website
  4. Use landing pages to check your results from your social media efforts
  5. Here are 9 reasons to include a blog even if no one subscribes

Then, ask customers what social tools they use

  1. Know the general rural trends: Rural people use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter at same % rate as urban people. But rural people lag urban on LinkedIn, Pinterest use. (Pew Internet 2016)
  2. Find out if they’re email users (may depend on age and occupation)

Next, pick just one social tool to focus on

  1. Usually Facebook is the one where most of your customers are
  2. But remember to put Facebook in its place alongside email and your website
  3. Facebook Groups are hot right now, but expect things to change (for more on Facebook Groups for business listen to this podcast)

Everyone, definitely email your customers

  1. Getting started with email marketing for small town businesses
  2. Ways to build your email list
    1. Without breaking the law
  3. Stop thinking clutter and start thinking of email as personal

How to keep up with the trends in social media

  1. Should you keep up with trends? Ask your customers
  2. Build a layer cake with others in the community
  3. Start something like Tweetfolk Tours in your area
  4. Center for Rural Enterprise Engagement is a social media marketing resource for growers (but good for any small business trying to keep up)

Other specific tools to be aware of

  1. Pinterest and Vimeo
  2. Yelp isn’t big in my town. I know because I compared five weeks of my views on Yelp to the same month of views on Google. (see the graphic below)
  3. TripAdvisor matters for some tourism-related categories
  4. A few thoughts on “influencers” and your business
Yelp doesn’t look very competitive in my market for my business. Your results may vary.

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Take the small town social media approach

Platforms and tools come and go. These techniques apply in every channel and tool, no matter what changes.

Where to find the time

  1. Use checklists for social media work to keep it from ballooning
  2. How to find time for writing while still running your business
  3. Fit social marketing into your existing plans
  4. Apply the Simplified Marketing Plan

Plan ahead with a content calendar

  1. Planners and calendars
  2. Tap seasonal campaigns like Shop Small throughout the year
  3. Shift Your Shopping series you can reuse any year

Small town style for social media

  1. Our small town culture can be a big asset in social media marketing
  2. Talk less about you and more about them 
  3. Be a social media mirror
    1. Share customer content, with permission
    2. Set up easy ways to contribute: email, hashtag,
  4. 18 Topics to talk about

Use a variety of different media, no matter what channel you pick

  1. Include words, pictures, and video
  2. Here are some tools for easy graphics creation
    1. Canva
    2. Pablo
    3. Landscape (a photo resizing tool specifically for social media)

Listen to customers and respond

  1. Answer customer questions
  2. Ask customers for requests and follow them up

Be part of the local community

  1. How to get locals to follow you on your social channels
  2. More ways to get locals to follow you
  3. Talk about your causes, your people’s causes
  4. Talk about what’s going on
  5. Talk about competitors
  6. Show what there is to do in your town 

Use photos effectively

  1. Always include captions
  2. Where to find photos online that you can use for your business
  3. Know the restrictions on using photos you find online

Use video well

  1. How to use video to promote your small business
  2. How to do simple videos for your business (an old look at the equipment and process I used when I started)
  3. How to do live video like Facebook Live
  4. 21 things to cover  with video

Audio and podcasting

  1. Podcasting basics

Cited in academic papers:

  • Austy’s Bookstore: Leveraging an Online and Social Media Presence to Increase Customer Engagement, student team report Audrey Gacsy, Stephanie Fiorentino, Jessica Schneider, Olivia Stephens, Sustainability Law and Policy, Indiana University Bloomington, Spring 2021 
  • Social Media as a Business Strategy: Rural Grocery Stores as a Case Study, Amber Berg and Jessie Carr, Rural Grocery Initiative, Kansas State University, 2018
  • About the Author
  • Latest by this Author
Becky McCray wearing long braids and a professional outfit smiles as she stands on a rural downtown street with twinkling lights in the background.

Becky started Small Biz Survival in 2006 to share rural business and community building stories and ideas with other small town business people. She and her husband have a small cattle ranch and are lifelong entrepreneurs. Becky is an international speaker on small business and rural topics.

www.beckymccray.com

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