How To Use Social Media as a Business

Choosing the right social media platform for your business is crucial. Each will require a different approach, which won’t work for everyone. To help you choose, I’ve put together a cheat sheet of the most popular social media for businesses, their highlights, and who could benefit from them.

To decide, you should ask yourself the following questions:

1. Who is my audience, and where do they spend their time? Consider their ages, genders and interests, and prioritize the social media platforms with aligned user demographics.
2. Which platforms are my competitors using? If your closest competitors all flock to one or two platforms, this most likely isn’t a coincidence.
3. What style of post is best suited to my business? Trend-led industries will suit fast-paced platforms with witty, lighthearted content, such as TikTok and Instagram.
4. How much time and effort can I commit to posting? If the answer is not too much, avoid platforms such as YouTube and LinkedIn that require long-form content or a high number of weekly posts (more on that later!)

Social media can seem overwhelming. Below, I’ll break down how to use social media for business in eight steps. Let’s get into it!

1. Define Your Business Goals

First and foremost, head to the drawing board and think about what you actually want to gain from your social media presence. Setting goals will give you a framework to build your overall strategy around, and help you decide what success looks like and how to measure it.

Some common goals you might have for your social media include:

• Grow brand awareness
• Generate leads
• Build customer loyalty
• Gain positive reviews with UGC (user-generated content)
• Improve customer service

2. Identify Your Platform(s)

Every social media platform has unique characteristics, and some will be more suited to your business than others. Now you’ve nailed down your desired outcomes, you can find the platform that will best enable you to achieve these.

Use the tips at the beginning of this article to whittle down the platform best suited to you.

Think about where your target audience are most likely to spend their time. TikTok and Snapchat are popular with Gen Z, whereas millennials are most commonly found on Facebook.

3. Set a Strategy

If your goals are the destination, your social media strategy is the roadmap you’ll use to get there. By putting one in place, you’ll ensure that all of your social media decisions are heading towards the destination and not making unnecessary diversions.

There’s no one right way to create a strategy, but a good start is ironing out the following:

• Who your audience is, which platforms they use, and what their pain points are
• Your brand identity, tone of voice, and the message you want to express

Creating a content strategy keeps these facts consistent across your posts, and gives you something to reference.

Once you’ve nailed your first platform, you can gradually adopt more if you have the time and resources to commit.

4. Choose What To Post

It can be tempting to jump straight into posting as much about your business and products as possible. However, having no solid focus means you risk posting about too many topics and diluting your core message, or focusing on one area too much, which can disengage your audience. Instead, I’d recommend honing in a handful of key areas and posting about them regularly, which is where content pillars come in.

Content Pillars

Content pillars are themes that your social media posts will center around. They’re a great way to categorize your ideas and ensure they stay focused on your goals before you turn them into posts. And since they’re broad themes, rather than specific content ideas, they aren’t limiting.

Research your competitors to find out which content pillars they use, and which ones work best. I spotted four that skincare brand The Glow Recipe uses regularly:

5. Create a Schedule

Timing is everything. Strategically align your content to where your audience is throughout the week. For example, educational and promotional content may work best on a Monday when users are most inspired and productive, whereas memes and behind the scenes content often works well towards the end of the week.

Choosing the right time to post on social media is just as important as the day. Weekdays between 10am and 12pm is a good time for most platforms, but check out the article for precise times for each platform.

6. Create Diverse Content

Nailing down a schedule of multiple content pillars will diversify the content of your posts, but they can still feel repetitive if they all look the same – which is why experimenting with different content styles is key.

Not only will this keep your audience engaged, but it’ll help you become confident with the platform’s capabilities and understand what your audience enjoys most. Make the most of the post formats and placements your platform has to offer, such as images, videos, stories, and live streams.

To prove how much variety your posts can have, I’ve gathered content ideas for four example pillars:

7. Engage with your Audience

Posting multiple times a week is a great start, but to provide the most value to your audience, you need to actively engage with them. In fact, 37% of consumers see direct social media communication as the most memorable aspect of a brand. This means asking them questions, replying to their comments, and seeking feedback on the content they want to see.

Taking time to engage demonstrates to your customers how much you value them. Plus it’s also a way to show off your expertise and promote your own products to solve their problems, like in the example Q&A above!

8. Analyze and Adapt

By its nature, social media is subject to change, and what works one day might not work a month down the line. The key to survival is being able to spot these changes and pivot your strategy – queue analytics.

Social media analytics will provide insight into the performance of your content and help you see the topics and post styles your audience love. They include:

• Performance
• Audience demographics
• Social media ad performance
• Competitor analysis

The metrics you place the highest value on will depend on your content strategy goals. For example, story shares and followers will help with growing your brand awareness, and comments and likes are indicative of an engaged audience.

When To Act

It’s not feasible to change direction every time you see fluctuation in your post analytics. That said, when something truly isn’t working, you need to act quickly. So how can you tell? This is a difficult call, and something that you’ll pick up over time.

I suggest holding off making large changes until you see significant dips or identify behavioral patterns among your followers. Then, you can hone in on one analytic, change a variable, such as a post’s placement or publish date, and track analytics over the next few days to monitor reception.

The steps above show you how to start social media as a business. Here are my top tips for extra chances at success:

• Conduct competitor analysis: While you should never outright copy your competitors, they offer valuable insights into what your target audience does and doesn’t enjoy. Competitor research is a great benchmark for the social media basics such as which platforms to use, how often to post, and content pillars.
• Stay consistent: Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither is a social media presence! Social media algorithms love consistency, so it’s important to stick to your schedule and not give up.
• Be human: Social media is all about creating trust and bridging the gap between you and your customers, so the tone of voice you use should be friendly, open, and colloquial.
• Repurpose and reuse your posts: For posts that aren’t watermarked, don’t be afraid to repurpose them on different social platforms. This will maximize your overall return on investment, but just be sure to optimize them for the platform you’re using. For example, a long-form YouTube explainer or podcast could be used on TikTok if it’s chopped into short excerpts. And this doesn’t stop when it comes to social media ads. Many platforms, such as TikTok, will let you boost old organic posts so you don’t have to create new marketing material.

The benefits of social media for businesses are endless. However, some of the key perks are:

• Increased visibility and reach: A huge 48% of consumers discover new brands through social media. By following social media SEO and algorithm best practices, you’ll be able to connect with your target audience on discovery pages and through social search. On top of this, short-form social media videos are now more visible on search engine results pages than ever, thanks to rich video snippets and a dedicated “Short Videos” tab on Google.
• Building meaningful relationships: In 2025, users are seeking valuable and trustworthy content from brands. Social media provides a direct line of contact between yourself and your customers. By interacting and engaging with your audience online, you’ll show transparency and establish customer loyalty.
• Increased sales: Your social media pages act as a stage to showcase your products to potential buyers. Shoppable posts and native ecommerce, such as TikTok Shop and YouTube Shopping, make it easier than ever for users to follow through with a purchase.
• New revenue streams: Once you nail the basics, you’ll soon realize there are plenty of ways you can make money on social media, with gifting programs like YouTube Jewels and creator rewards programs.

There are plenty of tools around to make your social media journey easier, from creating an aesthetic first impression to helping things run like clockwork behind the scenes. I’ve shared my top recommendations below.

Design Tools

Whether you want to apply your logo to your images or create detailed infographics, social media design tools will be the answer. Some of my favorite beginner-friendly options are:

• CapCut or Instagram Edits: TikTok’s CapCut makes it easy to quickly utilize trending templates and sounds, and it also has an impressive in-app editor. Instagram’s newest app, Edits, has a similar offering, but with a heavier focus on content ideation and planning. Plus, its videos are watermark-free, meaning they can be repurposed seamlessly.
• Canva: Canva has an endless scroll of social media templates suited to every occasion. They can be filtered by platform, post format, and post style, and edited within minutes. You’ll have access to an impressive range of templates and elements on the free version, although Canva Pro has notably more to play with.

Social Media Management Tools

Social media apps have developed pretty impressive inbuilt scheduling and analytics features which will be sufficient for starting out. However, as you grow your following, expand to more platforms, or start to make money on social media, it can be useful to invest in a social media management tool to keep you organized and on-track.

• Sprout Social: This provides everything you need to keep on top of your social accounts, from an omnichannel content calendar to advanced analytics to AI post creation tools. Its user-friendly interface holds a lot without looking cluttered, and it’s a great option for those that want one tool for everything.

As you might have guessed, the frequency of social media posts isn’t  one-size fits all. Businesses using  X, Reddit, and Facebook thrive when posting multiple times per day, whereas YouTube’s algorithm will still reward businesses posting one video per week.

Above, I’ve shown you how to start social media for business. The short answer: just start!

It’s important to properly plan your social media goals and strategy so that you can choose the platform that’s best designed to help you get started. After that, get experimenting with content pillars and posting styles. Nothing has to be cemented in the beginning stages. The most important thing is that you’re posting high quality content that offers value to your followers, and that you do it consistently.

Looking to grow your social media further? Why not dip your toes into the wonderful world of influencer marketing?