Everyone understands now that social media, while once considered a huge time waster, has developed into a powerful and quick alternative for getting new leads and sales into your small business. What hasn’t yet become crystal clear are the ways small businesses are using social media. Considering the fact that there are many paths to explore in social media, we think we should give you a peek into how social media is being used by small business owners like yourselves.

The truth is, you likely have workers spending their work time on social media. What you may not have is a plan for the way to best make use of their abilities.

What are small businesses doing with social media

And, they’re not afraid to spend some cash either. 21.4 percent of these same businesses list social media as where their media dollars are spent. They are not doing this for a time wasting task!

55 percent of these businesses have a Facebook business page, and another 20 percent are using Facebook Ads to promote posts on that page.

The other leading players fighting for focus from small businesses are LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram. Google would be included in this group, but many were unsure what to do with it, as it stands now, having gone through still another incarnation. Google My Business is the latest offering from the folks at Google, and it is an ambitious effort to combine Google Maps, Locations and God knows what else under one roof. We’ll see.

What can you do to get your business working with social media?

First of all jump right in! Make a Facebook Page, get accounts at the social websites which make sense for you, and above all, do not spread yourself too thin. You’ll want to be posting content to these sites, not just quotations from dead guys and pictures of adorable puppies.

Begin with only a few properties that are social, like YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and perhaps Twitter. Contemplate adding Pinterest and Instagram if you have a lot of products that you could showcase. The key here though is to make sure you do not take on more than you can reasonably maintain.

Be sure and post unique, useful content that may make people want to click through to your other properties, like your website, Website or YouTube channel, and try to engage with anyone who makes the effort to seek you out socially. You’ll find that the rewards of social media will shortly start to show themselves!