Social media marketing for small business: Tactical 2025 guide

Social media marketing is a valuable way for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to connect with new customers and audiences, increase brand awareness, and even drive e-commerce sales, all at very little cost.

More than half (51%) of global consumers discovered a new brand or product on social media in the last six months. And a TikTok-commissioned survey found that 45% of the SMBs that use the platform attribute “a meaningful portion of their business’ success and/or growth” to the platform.

Small businesses can get started with social media marketing without any investment other than their time.

As you learn what works for your brand, you can make incremental investments to expand your social marketing capabilities. You might incorporate tools to increase efficiency, ads that target your ideal audience, or paid partnerships with creators.

You might be sticking with a fully organic content strategy for the moment. Or maybe you’re ready to put some budget into your efforts. Either way, social media is the least pricey way to spread the word about your small business and drive traffic to your website. That’s especially true for small brands with a lean team and limited resources.

In this post, we’ll show you how to build an effective social media marketing strategy for your small business.

How to build a smart small business social media strategy

Step 1: Identify your goals

What are you hoping to get from social media in the first place? Before you start building your social pages and creating content, you need to make sure that your goals are clear.

Your goals may focus on brand awareness and driving sales. But they could also involve growing and engaging with your audience, learning about trends, or even developing your skills as a social marketer.

Perhaps your goal is to make a certain number of sales by a deadline, or reach a follower count that you’re super proud of.

Not sure exactly what that follower count should be? Hootsuite’s original research with Critical Truth found the following average weekly follower growth rate benchmarks for Q1 2025:

• Facebook: 14.53%
• TikTok: 3.24%
• Instagram: 1.37%
• LinkedIn: 0.85%

We’ve got a whole blog post on setting effective social media marketing goals that can walk you through this foundational process.

Step 2: Understand your target audience

In 2025, going viral on social media is a bit of an outdated (and cringey?) goal.

Source: Hootsuite Social Trends Report 2025

Instead of trying to reach ”everyone,” you should focus on people who are interested in your niche, and who are most likely to support your business.

For more details check out our guides on how to research your social media target audience and target market.

Social media analytics and social listening tools can help you source critical data here. You’ll see who’s already connecting with your social content, with your competitors, or with other brands and creators in your niche. We’ll show you how Hootsuite can help at the end of this post.

Once you understand who your audience is, you can create content that speaks directly to them. This is key to building authentic connections that lead to real business results.

For instance, Kelsey, the creator behind Rope Drop Design, got 28 million views (and saw her business take off) by showing how she turned a vintage sleeping bag into a pretty fantastic puffer jacket.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by kelsey | rope drop design (@ropedropdesign)

Her audience (which has grown to more than 300,000 on Instagram) connects with this content. The formul forms the backbone of her Instagram presence.

Step 3: Conduct a competitive analysis

Your small business does not exist in isolation on social media. Yes, your business is unique. But other entrepreneurs and small brands are already out there creating social content you can learn from.

Studying your competitors can help you gain deep insights into what kind of content resonates with your audience. This cuts down on the amount of testing you have to do on your own. You can also learn from their posting frequency, engagement strategies, and platform choices.

But for small businesses, one of the greatest benefits of a competitive analysis is finding your community on social media platforms. Small businesses are less likely to be direct competitors with one another than larger national or international brands. Support other small businesses in your niche with a comment, share, or follow. You may find they support you right back.

We’ve got a whole blog post on how to conduct a competitive analysis, complete with a free template you can use to track your findings.

Step 4: Choose the right platforms

Once you know who your target audience is, and have a sense of what your competitors are up to, you can determine which platforms you want to focus on.

Facebook remains the most popular platform for small business marketing worldwide. It’s followed by Instagram and LinkedIn.

Source: eMarketer

But that doesn’t mean Facebook is the best fit for your business. TikTok in particular is making a concerted effort to connect with small business owners and showcase SMB success stories.

For more insights on choosing the right platforms for your audience, check out our deep dive into social media demographics.

Step 5: Plan and schedule your content

This step may sound simple. But it actually involves figuring out a few critical (and closely related) elements of your social marketing plan:

• What to post
• When to post
• How often to post

Fortunately, we’ve got some benchmark data to help you out here. In terms of what to post, Hootsuite’s original research with Critical Truth found that the best type of content varies by platform, but generally carousels and videos come out on top:

When to post also varies by platform, as well as by geographic area. Overall, the best time to post is noon on Fridays, but here’s the high-level breakdown by platform.

For a more detailed analysis, check out our full blog post that shows detailed heat maps highlighting the best time to post on every platform. At the end of this post, we’ll also show you how to use Hootsuite to find benchmarks for your own industry, plus the best times to post based on your own audience and social goals.

Step 6: Look for collaboration opportunities

Partnering with other creators and brands isn’t essential, but it is a useful strategy for small businesses.

A very simple way to connect with potential collaborators is through outbound engagement. This is the trend of joining the comment section conversation on creators’ posts, even when you don’t have an existing relationship with them.

Hootsuite’s Social Trends Report 2025 found that 41% of organizations have been testing this strategy. For small businesses in particular, it can be an effective and no-cost way of creating visibility with the creator themselves and their fan base.

If you’ve got the budget to undertake a more traditional influencer marketing partnership, we’ve got a full guide to walk you through every detail. For small businesses, it’s likely more cost effective to work with micro influencers. We’ve got a guide for that too! Or, if you can only afford to pay when actual sales come in, you might want to try an affiliate program.

For example, Canadian garment company Local Laundry has a brand ambassador program that allows people who love the brand to earn a commission on sales referred through social media.

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A post shared by Jaszmina (@jaszminaarycia)

Step 7: Study your analytics

The best digital marketing hack for small business, no matter the platform, is to use analytics to inform your social strategy.

You can access an incredible amount of valuable metrics for free using the social platforms’ native analytics tools. As you scale up, you can invest in specialized analytics tools to get even richer data with a lot fewer clicks.

We’ve got a complete guide to refining your social strategy through analytics, and even a free template to help you track your data.

The short version is that you can use analytics to:

• test strategies,
• prove concepts,
• learn what your audience likes,
• and understand how content supports your business goals.

You can then spot ways to start adding a little budget to your social marketing campaigns. Boosted social media posts are a low-risk way to get started with social media advertising.

You can also identify posts that did not work as well as usual so you can learn from your mistakes as you grow.

3 expert social media tips from a small business

For expert small business tips, we chatted with Kiana Safari, social media content creator, and Emily Cook, PR and partnerships over at Mala the Brand — a Canadian soy candle company based in Vancouver — to learn how to keep the marketing flame burning.

1. Post transparently

Running a small business comes with struggles, and the social media team at Mala encourages entrepreneurs to share both their difficulties and their successes.

“People always share the highlights, but never really talk about what went wrong,” says Cook. “Our community loves our transparency and personal connection.”

Safari points to one of Mala’s most vulnerable videos, in which founder Melody Chen shared that sales were lower than she’d hoped for.

That sincere video earned a ton of support on social media, and scored the brand a local radio interview and news coverage.

Mala continues to keep it real with honest behind-the-scenes content about the challenges of running a small business.

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A post shared by Mala | Coconut Soy Candles (@malathebrand)

(Check out the comment section on that post for a dose of support and understanding from other small business owners.)

2. Be hilarious

Take your social strategy seriously, but don’t be afraid to make jokes. “Something that has struck real success for me is memes—even making fun of yourself sometimes,” Cook shares.

Hootsuite’s 2025 Social Trends Report found that 43% of brands tried a new tone of voice, personality, or persona on social within the last year. If you’ve never tried a comedic take before, now’s the time. For small businesses in particular, the ability to be agile can lead to new ways to connect with fans.

A lighthearted approach will entertain your audience and make your content appear less like an ad, solidifying your connection with potential customers (and solidifying your status as “the funny one” in your workplace).

3. Pick your trends wisely

Not every trend is worth participating in, and it’s important to consider your business goals when hopping on a trend.

“You have to have meaning behind it,” says Cook. “It’s very obvious to see who’s just jumping on a trend for trend’s sake.”

Look for trends that present opportunities for micro-virality with the audiences that matter most, rather than trying to “go viral” across an entire platform. What is your target audience already engaging with?

Even just-for-fun trend posts should contribute to your overall social strategy, so be sure that a trend is a good fit before you invest too much time in it.

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A post shared by Mala | Coconut Soy Candles (@malathebrand)

Free social media resources for small businesses

Feeling overwhelmed? Wearing too many hats? Here are some free social media marketing tools and templates to ease the load.

• Social media strategy template: Plan your strategy across networks and accounts
• Social media campaign template: Once you’ve planned your strategy, use this free template to build out specific campaigns
• ChatGPT prompt cheat sheet: All the prompts you need to use ChatGPT to help you with your social tasks
• Engagement rate calculator: Stop doing math! This free tool works for any social platform
• Social media image size cheat sheet: Updated image specs for all formats and networks
• AI caption generator: Choose your platform, style, language, and keywords, and this tool will create effective social captions with just the click of a button
• Hashtag generator: Skip the hashtag research and let this AI tool suggest the best tags for every post
• Social listening alerts: Get notified when people talk about your business, your products, or your keywords online

We’ve got loads more in our resource libraries! Check out our full collections of free social media tools and resources.

How to market your small business with Hootsuite

As you start to scale up your small business, you’ll want to incorporate some tools to help you use your limited time more effectively and take your social media efforts to the next level. Heads-up: 81% of SMBs planned to increase their investment in paid social in Q4 2024.

Hootsuite is designed to grow with you, whether you’re still doing all your social media yourself or you’re working with a small team.

Create your content in advance (with AI tools) and schedule to publish at the data-backed best time

When you’re running a small business, you can’t afford to lose time to task switching. With Hootsuite Composer, you can create and schedule all of your social content in one place, for all of your social media accounts. And you’ll get customized recommendations on the best time to post for each account based on your own audience behavior.

Composer includes tools to streamline content creation, too, like

• A Canva integration with post templates and advanced editing tools, plus a library of free stock images
• A hashtag generator that suggests hashtags based on your caption and the images
• OwlyWriter AI, a built-in creative AI tool that can save you hours of work by generating engaging content ideas and even writing your captions for you

Once your posts are scheduled, you can review and edit them from a single content calendar that gives you a bird’s eye view of your content plan across all your social media channels.

Use cross-platform analytics data to refine your strategy and focus your efforts where they have the most impact

When you see your performance data for all channels in one place, it’s easier to make decisions about where to focus your time. You’ll also gain a deeper understanding of how social media users engage with your brand across platforms, so you can repeat what works, test to optimize your results, and let go of strategies that no longer perform.

You can also benchmark your performance against your competitors. This can provide an important reality check, as you understand your results in the context of other small businesses like yours. (Rather than trying to take on big brands.) You’re doing great!

Manage all your DMs and comments in one place

Yes, all your public and private social messages from all social networks, all in one inbox. Turn the individual social app notifications off and engage more effectively with your fans. You can also use DM automation to send content, links, and more automatically based on keywords. As you build your team, you can assign them messages to resolve, too.

Monitor the conversation about your brand (and the competition)

For small businesses, every penny counts. Fortunately, social listening increases SMM confidence in ROI on all social platforms. With Hootsuite Listening, you can track what people are saying about you, your competitors, your products — up to two keywords tracking anything at all over the last 7 days. You’ll get all the data you need to spot trends, and decide which ones you should join in on.

You can also use social sentiment analysis to understand how people really feel about your brand online and dive into personalized insights on your brand

Hand the tedious work over to Hootsuite, the no. 1 social media management tool for small and medium businesses. Save time with an AI social media writer, stylish design templates, and automatic post scheduling — all in one tab.

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