Last updated on January 29th, 2026 at 09:57 am
Social media is a powerhouse of potential.
More than half the world’s population — over 4.6 billion people — use social media. And the average person spends 2 hours and 27 minutes per day on their preferred platform.
When it comes to promoting your business, social media offer some of the lowest hanging fruit.
With a budget as low as $50, you can run social media advertisements and start getting results. Or you can build an organic following and reap the rewards.
In this guide, we’ll show you how to make the most of your social media efforts.
Here are 10 ways to effectively promote your business on social media.
Or you can click below to skip right to a lead-gen strategy that’ll change your business forever.
Get More Leads NOW With This Two-Page Funnel!
1. Study Your Target Market
In preparation for this article, I spoke to a good friend of mine who has quite a bit of experience running Facebook ads: Kyree Oliver. He’s managed over $30 million in ad spend and generated over $120 million for his clients over the last few years.
I asked him what the biggest mistake is that people make with their social media promotion efforts. Here’s what he told me…
“The biggest mistake I see people making when trying to promote their businesses online is constantly thinking like the business owner, instead of thinking like their ideal customer.
The easiest way to do this is to literally talk to them. Call people who have already purchased from you and interview them, send out surveys, talk to people who saw your offer or opted in with a name and email and didn’t end up purchasing.”
His advice makes sense.
After all, if you’re going to spend time and money trying to reach your target market on social media, then you best know who your target market actually is.
In fact, we recommend creating a crystal clear customer avatar.
Check out the video below to learn more about how to do this…
Once you’re clear about the people you serve, you’ll have a far easier time…
- Targeting the right people with your ads.
- Creating content that resonates with your target market.
So this is ground zero.
Don’t move forward until you know exactly who you’re trying to attract.
2. Understand Your Sales Funnel
Here’s a question.
Why do you want to promote your business on social media?
Obviously, you want to make more sales and get more customers. But you can’t just post “Buy from me!” on Facebook and expect a positive response.
You’ve got to nurture your target market.
You’ve got to take them on a journey.
You’ve got to woo them.
That’s why it’s important to understand where your social media strategy falls within your overall sales funnel.
An organic social media strategy is going to fit into the top of the funnel — you’re trying to build an audience, spread brand awareness, and get people on your email list through lead magnets and bribes to subscribe.
If you’re running ads, that’s still mostly a top-of-funnel strategy if you’re running those ads to custom audiences who’ve never heard of you before.
(Retargeting ads are an exception to this — more on that later)
Why is this important?
Because you need to harness the power of social media with proper expectations. Don’t expect people to purchase your highest ticket product after seeing one ad. Don’t even expect them to buy from you. Try to get their email address instead. Then you can send them emails and nurture them for the coming weeks to slowly guide them toward their first purchase.
Social media marketing is primarily a TOFU strategy because you’re trying to get the attention of people who’ve never heard of your before.
Treat it as such and you’ll be far more successful.
Get More Leads NOW With This Two-Page Funnel!
3. Choose Your Main Platform
Now that we’ve got that out of the way — studying your target market and understanding your sales funnel — we can get a bit more nitty-gritty.
First up is choosing your main social media platform where you’re going to be active and run ads.
Why choose just one?
Because unless you’ve got a big team backed by an even bigger budget, you’re not going to have the bandwidth to invest in all of the platforms at once.
So our recommendation is to choose one main platform.
You’ll focus all of your efforts on this platform, but then you’ll simply republish your content on other platforms where you want to be active.
So essentially, you’re only optimizing your content for your main platform… but then you’re throwing seeds out on all the other platforms with very little additional effort.
But which platform should you choose as your main?
Here’s an overview of the options.
Facebook is the best platform for most businesses. It’s got the largest user base with over 2 billion people logging in every month — that’s almost a third of the world’s population!
Plus, Facebook is incredibly diverse. You can find just about any target market you could possibly imagine here.
Facebook is also the most advanced platform when it comes to running ads. You can target people based on their interests, demographics, behaviors, and even what they’ve done off Facebook.
The only downside? The organic reach on Facebook continues to decrease. So you will need to supplement your content strategy with a Facebook ad budget.
LinkedIn is the best platform if you’re trying to reach other businesses or business professionals. It’s great for B2B companies and consultants.
Organic reach on LinkedIn is also pretty good — much better than Facebook. But it still isn’t what it used to be, so you may need to supplement your content strategy with LinkedIn ads.
TikTok
TikTok is a new social media platform that’s growing in popularity — especially with younger generations. It’s basically a video-sharing app where people create short videos set to music.
If your target market is on Tik Tok, it could be worth creating content for this platform. But unless you’re specifically targeting teenagers or young adults, it’s probably not worth your time.
Instagram is owned by Facebook, so it shares a lot of the same features. It’s a great platform for sharing visuals — especially if you’re in a creative industry like fashion, travel, food, etc.
Just like Facebook, organic reach on Instagram is pretty low. So you’ll need to supplement your content strategy with ads.
Twitter is a great platform for sharing news and information in real time. It’s also fantastic for networking and building relationships with influencers in your industry.
As far as demographics, Twitter is pretty diverse. But it does tend to skew a bit younger — with 37% of users being 18-29 years old.
Organic reach on Twitter is pretty good. But unless you’re regularly tweeting throughout the day, your tweets will get buried pretty quickly.
Pinterest is a visual bookmarking tool that’s great for driving traffic to your website. If you’ve got an e-commerce site or blog, you should definitely be on Pinterest.
The vast majority of Pinterest users are women — about 70%. So if your target market is female, you’ll definitely want to be on this platform.
4. Optimize Your Profiles
Once you’ve chosen your main platform — and all the other platforms where you want to maintain a passable presence — you need to optimize your profiles.
What do you want people to see when they visit your profile?
What do you want them to do?
This is why it’s important to think about where your social media efforts fall within your sales funnel.
The best thing you can do with your profile is to promote some sort of lead magnet that will appeal to your target market and give them an opportunity to opt-in to your email list.
For example, For The Interested, a newsletter for curious people, promotes their free newsletter on their profile and has everything looking on-brand.
Whatever your most front-end offer is, that’s what you want to promote on your social media profiles.
It could be an ebook, a free guide, a demo, or a free trial.
Also, make sure that your profile fits the brand image you’ve displayed elsewhere. That will help you build trust and authority across platforms.
5. Post Consistently
Wouldn’t it be great if you could visit social media once per month, say something nice, and get tons of customers?
Alas, that’s not how things work.
People are bombarded with new content — and so they’re quick to move on.
If you want to stay top-of-mind with your target market, then you’ve got to stay active over the long term.
You need to post content consistently that your target market loves.
How often?
Here are some suggestions for each platform
- Facebook: 1-2 times per day
- Twitter: 3-5 times per day
- LinkedIn: 1-2 times per week
- Instagram: 1-2 times per day
- Pinterest: 5-10 pins per day
- TikTok: 1-3 videos per day
To be clear, only worry about posting consistently on your main platform. Your entire social media strategy should revolve around a single platform (unless you’ve got bid budget or big bandwidth) and then you’ll simply republish those posts to other platforms.
Get More Leads NOW With This Two-Page Funnel!
6. Harness STEPPS
So you start posting.
But…
Crickets.
How are you supposed to post content that gets people engaged?
In his book, Contagious, Jonah Berger explains why and how certain content goes viral. He even reverse engineers virality and shows how to create content that is more likely to go viral.
It’s called STEPPS. Here’s how it works…
- Social Currency — People want to look good to their friends. If they share your content, does that make them look good or bad?
- Triggers — If I say “peanut butter” you think of jelly. How can you create associations in your content that will “trigger” people when they see a certain thing in their environment? Examples would be coffee in the morning, Coronas on the beach, or Doritos during the super bowl.
- Emotion — Some emotions are more viral than others. And if your content makes people feel physiological aroused (awe, anger, anxiety, amusement), they’re far more likely to share.
- Public — We’re social creatures. We’re wont to follow the crowd. How can you use that fact to your advantage in your content?
- Practical Value — Does your content provide some sort of practical value? If it does, people will be more likely to share… because it makes them look good and it’s genuinely helpful.
- Stories — People think in terms of narrative. Turn your content into a compelling story and it’ll pull people in.
That process might not make you the next big cat video — but it’ll certainly help you get more likes, shares, and clicks.
So think about STEPPS whenever you’re creating content, whether it’s organic or not.
As a fun exercise, try to think through STEPPS in terms of how the following content went viral…
Here’s another example for you to analyze…
7. Track Post Engagement
Even if you’re using the STEPPS method effectively, there are still going to be times when you’re surprised by what content performs well… and what content doesn’t.
That’s why it’s a good idea to track your post engagement in a spreadsheet.
Name each post, put it in your spreadsheet, and track how many likes, comments, and shares it gets after a week or two.
You could also have a team member do this for you.
Why do this?
For a few reasons…
- It’ll help you learn (and document) what works and what doesn’t.
- It’ll give you ideas for more great content down the road. Just mimic your highest performers.
Jeff Hunter, an entrepreneur with 30,000 followers on Facebook and 140,000 followers on Tik Tok does this.
He even tallies all of his content engagement for every month to keep an eye on his progress.
If you’re going to use social media to promote your business… you might as well treat it like a business operation.
8. Automate Your Content Schedule
If you want to ensure that you’re consistently posting content, you need some sort of system or process in place to make it happen.
The best way to do this is to create an editorial calendar and use a social media scheduling tool like Buffer or Hootsuite.
With an editorial calendar, you can plan out all your content in advance. This is great because it allows you to batch your content creation — which will save you a ton of time and energy.
Once you’ve got your content calendar set up, all you need to do is plug your content into a social media scheduling tool and it will automatically post for you according to the schedule you’ve set.
This is a huge time-saver and it will help ensure that you’re posting content consistently — even when you’re busy or out of the office.
9. Run Advertisements
Up until now, we’ve spent a lot of time talking about how to organically promote your business on social media.
But if you really want to move the needle, you need to start running ads.
Social media advertising is extremely effective — especially if you know what you’re doing.
You can use it both to reach a new audience and to retarget website visitors or cart abandoners.
Here are some things to keep in mind when running social media ads:
- Make sure your ad is relevant to the platform you’re running it on.
- Keep your ad copy short, sweet, and to the point.
- Use high-quality visuals (e.g., images, videos, etc.).
- Target your ads to a specific audience.
- A/B test your ads to see what works best.
Generally speaking, you want your ads to be as targeted as possible. The more relevant your ad is to the people who see it, the more likely they are to take action.
To learn more about creating killer Facebook ads, check out our guide here.
10. Funnel Hack
Funnel hacking, as we like to call it, is probably the best thing you can do to improve your social media promo efforts.
What is funnel hacking?
It’s simply the process of looking at what your most successful competitors are doing and then mimicking their efforts.
Let me give you an example.
My business partner and I have been running ads to get subscribers for our free personal growth newsletter, The Tonic.
And we were looking to improve our strategy.
We stumbled across this article where the founder of another similar newsletter shared his strategies for growing to 25,000 subscribers.
One idea, in particular, stood out to us…
At the time, we were running ads directly to a landing page where people are encouraged to sign up for our newsletter. But here he’s saying it’s better to send them to content and then ask them to subscribe to the newsletter if they want more. He even provides one of his most successful articles for doing so…
You can see at the bottom he has a CTA…
So we created our own version of this for The Tonic…
And guess what!
It decreased our cost per subscriber by about $0.50.
Cool, right?
Look at what your competitors are doing and try out their strategies for yourself.
If it’s working for them, it’ll most likely work for you, too!
Final Thoughts on Promoting Your Business on Social Media
And there you have it! Those are thirteen surefire ways to promote your business on social media.
Remember, social media is all about building relationships and providing value. If you can do those two things, you’ll be well on your way to social media success.
Click the link below if you’re ready for the next step!