Why Community-Driven Social Media Marketing is Crucial for Your Small Business or Nonprofit

If you understand the importance of a healthy, vibrant community, then you’ll have the mindset to harness the power of social media marketing. Social media marketing is not only about getting your content online in a branded and consistent manner, it is also about connecting your messaging with the potential partners and affiliates around you who have their own audiences who need to know about YOU. Instead of thinking first about what content to create, we turn the paradigm on its head and think about our community, our audience and who needs to know about each post. Once we think about our audience, we develop a tagging strategy; only then do we begin to create great content.

Community is important for small business owners and nonprofits because it’s the backbone that supports us. Community helps these entities to amplify their messages. Innately, communities want their downtowns to thrive and they want the people who build businesses in these places to succeed. Being an entrepreneur or running a nonprofit can be like working in a vacuum. You wear all the hats and there’s never enough time in the day to think about your marketing and social media and get feedback and perspective on what your messaging needs to be. This is when you know it’s time to harness your community and connections and let them amplify your messaging and help you get in front of your prime audiences.

When you use social media as a vehicle to connect with other businesses, community groups and influencers, your social media marketing becomes very powerful. This is what hyperlocal really means. It means learning how to connect with people in your community, real life relationships being created and nourished and ultimately magnifying your message through reciprocal local support.

Amplify your message!

We spend a lot of time thinking about how small businesses can expand their impact and reach in their communities. Creating real life relationships with community partners who can help you amplify your message is key and social media is one of the channels to help you connect. When you think strategically about connecting online, social media can become your most powerful marketing tool.

Let us support you in creating a social media marketing strategy to reach the prospects that you are missing. We promise to help you think deeper about your audiences, your messaging and of course, your calls to action. Book your consulting session with our team and get rooted in your community.

To #Hashtag or Not to Hashtag

One of the greatest questions of our time that plagues people of all ages is: “How the heck do I use hashtags?” 

Okay, so while it may not be one of the weightiest quandaries of the contemporary world, it is still an important question that boggles a lot of minds. On social media, hashtags can be instrumental in helping people find your content and helping you find others' content as well. After you hashtag a word, it enters the vast world of hashtags. This allows anyone on social media to see your content if they search for that word which gives your post the opportunity of being seen by hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people. So should you be using them? Absolutely.


Think of hashtags as a built-in search engine for you to find posts that interest you. Wondering what’s been going on in Montclair, NJ? Try searching #montclairnj on Instagram or Twitter - and users that post content relevant to Montclair may come up. Wondering where you can find a designer to do a logo for you? Try searching #logodesign. You can and should do this in your own posts as well.

Try to use a mix of both broad hashtags (i.e. #tiptuesday or #tbt for “Throwback Thursday”), local hashtags (i.e. #montclairnj #essexcounty), and hashtags that are specific to your brand that you dream up (ours is #growwithredroot). This will maximize your audience so you will attract a wider range of people and brand your biz with your list of hashtags.

When hashtagging, just make sure to use them in moderation in the body of your post or at the end of your post. For example, a tweet or caption that reads, “#Checkout our #new #newsletter on #whetherornot to #hashtag on #socialmedia” might be startling to your followers. We like to occasionally scatter a hashtag within our content and list any additional hashtags at the end. Use up to 30 hashtags on Instagram, as many as you can fit on Twitter and 2-4 on Facebook.

Questions? Call us today at 973 650 0960 or email us at redroot@maarek.com! We would love to hear from you 😀