The internet has so many tools, it can be hard to keep track of all of them! Some are free, others are paid – but which ones do you focus on as a small business owner? When marketing dollars are tight, you want to master the free tools like social media. These are our tips for using social media to grow your business in 2022!

Social media is 100% free. If you run an online business and you aren’t using social media, you’ll run out of your trust fund money soon enough and start using social media to put your brand out there!

Sure, you can spend money on ads. Sure, you can invest a lot of time in SEO. But nowhere else can you meet countless customers in real time like you can on social media. These are our top 3 favorite social media platforms for growing your brand – Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest:

1) Instagram

A party wouldn’t be a party without Instagram, let’s get straight into that! Instagram, formed in October 2010 and later acquired by Facebook for a boatload of cash, is one of the most used platforms of our time. To put things into perspective, 500 million people use Instagram every single day. There’s more than 1 billion monthly active users. 

You can literally shop on Instagram now. If you’re a business owner, you can drop ship products right from your instagram storefront and make profit on items without ever touching them or shipping them! People spend an average of 45+ mins per day on IG so it’s a great platform to get your business in front of the eyes of locals or users across the globe!

Instagram was a huge part of our business growth in 2019. If you’ve been following us on our journey, you know Instagram has been tried and true for our brand growth regardless of the algorithm changes. I would argue that it’s because we share what we love, we don’t care what people think about it, and we share content that brings people together or helps people grow along a particular journey. If you find yourself not getting the engagement you want, focus on exactly those things – bringing people together and helping people grow along a particular journey!

2) Facebook

When business owners see this word they cringe. They think of bad organic engagement on their posts and overpriced advertising plans. They’re not wrong. But hey…there’s one feature on facebook that’s worth noting. The sharability factor.

What do you do when your high school crush shares a meme or article on facebook? How about if your boss/favorite co-worker shares something? Or maybe if your mother-in law shares something, you might feel different about the content?

That’s the sharability factor. Long story short – get people’s high school crushes to share your content😉

Think about this next time you’re scrolling through facebook and share a meme/photo/article. Who shared that before you did? Did that make a subconscious impact on your decision to share the post?

3) Pinterest

Pinterest is like google images where you can save photos into different folders called Pinterest boards. When you “Pin” a photo to the board, you can allow others to see the collection you created!

This is helpful for brands like us who want to share collections of engagement photos in Joshua Tree national park or maybe a collection of engagement session outfit inspiration pulled from our work, online shops, and work from fellow photographer friends! This way you and other industry pros can build each other up.

A lot of people aren’t using Pinterest to the fullest potential, however. We learned from Jana Williams Photography, internationally respected wedding photographer, that in order to get the most value out of your Pinterest business account, you have to pin photos directly from your website/blog! That way, when someone stumbles upon your photos in a Pinterest search, they can click through to your website and see a blog post or article relevant to the photo they clicked on!

Pinterest is one of my personal favorite social media platforms because you don’t need to impress anyone the way you feel like you need to on facebook and instagram. With Facebook and Instagram, you often feel like you have to show your best self and say a witty caption and be all thoughtful etc. With Pinterest, however, you can get as literal as you want – the more literal the better for SEO!

For example, when you pin a photo from a local business meetup, instead of having to come up with a thoughtful caption about how you enjoyed the business meetup, you could simply pin the photo and write a title that is optimized for local google search like “San Diego business meetup for photographers.”

If you have any questions about Pinterest, we have a helpful youtube video that can get you started in no time and Jana Williams has an A-Z Pinterest Crash Course that teaches more than we can even absorb!

Other Platforms to Note

There’s a few more social media platforms we should mention like youtube and TikTok. These platforms are heavily video focused and are growing rapidly as well. If you understand how to create video content then we highly encourage joining these platforms as well! However, since video content is overwhelming to most entrepreneurs, we’ll talk more in depth on video in another blog post!