The landscape of marketing has changed drastically with the growth of social networks. It comes as no surprise that marketing professionals and social media consultants are all singing the praises of adopting a social media marketing campaign into every marketing strategy with the hopes of reaching larger audiences all over the world, even on a very limited budget. The goal of social media marketing is to create content for your audience that generates interest, and in turn gets re-shared to the individual social networks of your audience, utilizing the power of word of mouth.
Getting started in social media marketing can be tricky, so we’d like to share a few tips we’ve discovered in developing social media strategies from the ground up:
10. Quality Over Quantity
When starting a new social media initiative, it’s best to focus on a handful of mediums at first, rather than trying to move into all of them at once. Think about who your target audience is, and focus on where you could find them online. Determine how much time you can devote to developing a social media campaign, and then pick which areas you will focus on. If the content you’re providing to your audience is more hands-on and instructional, it may be more beneficial for you to have only a thriving YouTube account than it would be to have a mediocre YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and blog simultaneously.
9. Represent Your Company
If your business has its own Facebook page, you can browse Facebook as your business by clicking the “Use Facebook as Page” button on your business profile. Then you can browse Facebook groups that pertain to your target audience, and establish yourself as an expert by sharing advice and starting discussions.
8. Connect Social Media to Your Website
A quick and easy way to expand your company’s social media presence is to tie it in directly to your website. An embedded “recent tweets” box can help convince your audience to follow you, and you can even embed a tool that displays everyone who likes your Facebook page on your website. You can also increase your social media conversion rate by adding buttons to like or follow you directly from your website without leaving the site. If you have a blog on your website, you can link to your new posts from Twitter and Facebook.
7. Interact with Your Audience
Part of what makes social media so powerful is in the name – it’s a social form of marketing. It shouldn’t be treated as an advertising platform, and its content should never be completely one sided. Offer your audience opinions, start and participate in discussions, and engage your audience with thought provoking content.
6. Provide a Means for Your Content to be Shared
If you have a blog, one of the best ways to grow your audience is to incorporate links at the bottom of every blog post that allows your post to be shared to social networks, making it as easy as possible for your audience to promote your content – and your brand – to their own networks and new audiences.
5. Don’t Over-Advertise
One of the biggest mistakes in social media marketing is taking on an entirely “me me me” approach – writing only about your products, your services, your specials, your promotions, your events, your business hours, etc. If your content reads as an ad, it will eventually lose followers, and become detrimental to your efforts. People don’t log on Facebook to be bombarded with marketing messages, they want to connect, network, meet new people and discover new things. Remember that followers don’t necessarily translate into revenue, so a return on investment may not be immediately trackable. The idea is to stand out over your competitors as a leader of your industry.
4. Make Your Content More Searchable on Twitter
Did you know you can make your product, service or event more searchable on Twitter by using #HashTags (the pound symbol, followed by your custom keyword, with no spaces)? This lets your audience search for reviews or for other users tweeting your hashtag. It also makes tweets trackable. Hashtags can be used by anyone, so try to pick one that really describes your service or event.
3. Give Your Content the Right Title
It is easy to overlook the fact that when your blog content is shared by users, new users will usually decide whether it is of interest to them based solely on the title. If it is shared on Twitter, which has a character limit, the title will need to be short enough to fit into 140 characters with enough space left over for a link to your blog post. Blog entry titles are also extremely important to search engine results, so try to include important keywords.
2. Be Personal
Allow your audience the unique opportunity to get to know the people behind the brand. Give them a glimpse into the lives of your employees and the day to day interactions of your company. Are you involved in any causes, charity work, etc? Tell your audiences about it!
1. Content Relevancy
The biggest point to consider in social media marketing is how relevant your content is to your audience. Many make the mistake of putting out content that is relevant only to themselves or their industry peers. For example, though it’s less pertinent to their business, a restaurant that is known for selling healthy, organic foods would benefit more from discussing tips for staying healthy than they would from discussing manufacturing costs of organic foods. Determining the content your audience is interested in will keep them coming back for more.
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