Author: Liz Frome
Write a positive review - $0
Tell your friends and family - $0
Follow them on social media - $0
Engage with their posts - $0
Sign up for their newsletter and share - $0
Total Cost - $0
1. Write a review
What's the first thing you do when you're trying to figure out where to eat, especially in a new city? Chances are you head to a review site to find the best reviewed restaurant. These reviews help you and so many others decide whether a place is worth the visit or not, making them incredibly important for small businesses. Next time you visit a small business, consider leaving them a review on public sites like Google, and Facebook!
2. Tell your friends and family about the business
Next time you stumble upon a new-to-you small business, let your friends and family know about it! Chances are they'll love it just as much as you do.
3. Follow the business on social media
Depending on how you feel about it, this one seems like a no brainer. No matter which camp you fall into, following a business you love on social media helps them a ton! I'm a huge believer in quality of followers and not quantity of followers. However, there are some benefits to having a large social media following, especially for small businesses.
Having a larger following also helps small businesses stand out, get found, and flourish while competing with major companies that have huge marketing budgets. Some small businesses rely solely on social media and word of mouth to grow, making it difficult for them to succeed against competitors like Target or Amazon. With more followers, these small businesses can leverage their audience to grow their business.
Bottom line: if you love a business, give them a follow!
4. Engage with the business on social media
Once you're following a small business, make sure to engage with their posts and stories. Engagement can be a like, a comment, tagging a friend, sending a direct message, or sharing their post/story with your own followers and friends.
Here's why engaging with an account's content is important: when content receives good engagement (typically 3% engagement rate or more), it triggers Instagram's algorithm, letting the platform know that this is content people are enjoying. This helps a small business get found by people who may not even know it exists yet, which helps them grow.
Your likes and comments go a whole lot further than you think!
5. Share about your interactions with the business
We expect businesses to have a consistent, interesting, and informative online presence.
So it comes as no surprise that posting to your Instagram (as a feed post or in stories) while at a local cafe, restaurant, salon, shop, and more is one of the easiest ways to support a business!
The holidays are coming so write the reviews right away! Challenge: Write 5 now!