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Social media marketing has become extremely important for both small and large enterprises today. You can do all sorts of things for enhancing your website’s visibility and reach, but if you aren’t giving enough attention to social media, then it’s possible that you are losing a large number of customers without even knowing it.
Why is social media so important?
Social media has become an important part of our lives. People go to platforms like Facebook and Twitter to follow their brands, family, and friends and in the process, they consume massive volumes of content. Thus, the benefits of social media aren’t hard to see viz. more opportunities for conversion, low marketing costs, and high inbound traffic.
How can you get started with social media marketing?
Contrary to popular belief, social media marketing isn’t a herculean task. You just need to know the basics and have patience. The following are 8 tips to make your job easier:
1.Choose your platforms
Do you know on which social media platform your target audience spends most of their time at? The answer to this question can greatly affect your marketing strategy.
To find which social media platforms are ideal for your marketing goals, you can do a variety of things. For starters, you can check what your competition is doing on different platforms. You can also choose the platforms by understanding its users:
- Facebook: has the majority of the users in the age group 25-34. Ideal for both businesses and individuals as it’s the largest platform today.
- Instagram: has the majority of users in the age group 19-29. Ideal for visual content.
- Twitter: has the majority of users in the age group 19-29. Offers best real-time communication service.
2. Add social media buttons to your website and blog
If you want your customers to share your content, which is really important for word-of-mouth marketing, you must make the process as easy as possible. One way to do this is by adding social media buttons on your website. Most CMS support plugins that allow this very same feature. For instance, there are a number of social buttons plugins on WordPress that you can use including Social Media Feather, Simple Share Buttons Adder, etc.
3. Share high-quality and interesting content
The key to successful social media marketing is sharing engaging and original content. Thus, it’s a good idea to go over lots of resources to learn social media marketing and see what kind of content works for you and what doesn’t.
You don’t just want to create high-quality content but content that’s relevant to your target customers and rewards them for being patrons. That said, there are certain types of content that are incredibly popular on most social media platforms, and you can use them when you are just getting started. These are:
- Motivational and inspiring quotes
- Interesting images and videos
- Articles and website links (from your own or others)
- Opinions on current affairs (Tweets or Facebook status updates)
4. Ensure your social media profiles are up to the mark
Merely setting up social media accounts isn’t enough, you also need to optimize them for high visibility and engagement. For that, you must take the following steps:
- Create a high-quality social media banner for your cover picture. For the profile picture, use your logo.
- Write a detailed description of your company. Don’t forget to include your mission statement, values, and goals.
- Include the links of your website and blog in the “About” section (Facebook), or “website” section (Twitter and Pinterest).
5. Use chatbots
Believe it or not, personal chatbots are going to put the social back in social media. This is because the consumers want to connect with their brands on social media but not every business has the financial capacity to hire a full-time presentative to handle the queries on social media platforms. This problem can be solved with a chatbot.
Today’s chatbots are highly advanced and easily programmable. Plus, they are pretty cheap. So, you can get one that fits your needs and it can answer the questions of your fans/followers on social media on your behalf, 24/7!
6. Pick a social media management tool
If you want to get the best results from your social media marketing campaigns, then it’s highly recommended that you invest in a top-class social media management tool like Hootsuite or Buffer. These programs are designed to give you ultimate control over social media marketing by allowing you to:
- Manage multiple social media accounts in one place
- Schedule your social media posts in advance
- Track performance through numerous metrics
- Improve social engagement and identify the best-performing content easily
- Collaborate with your team on the go
7. Set some money aside for paid advertising
For the most part, social media marketing is free and you are only limited by creativity and talent. However, you can benefit from some paid advertising too, especially when you have just launched a social media campaign. Once your paid advertisements have helped build a sizeable customer-base, you can go 100% on organic marketing
8. Take help from influencers
Influencers are the celebrities of the social media world. They are the users that have a massive following and often promote the products of other brands to help with their sales (in exchange for perks, of course). You can identify a few identifiers for your brand as well and have them spread the word around. Just make sure they are relevant to your business and don’t hurt the brand image. If you finding the search time-consuming or difficult, then you can use dedicated services like BuzzSumo or FollowerWonk.
9. Keep an eye on your competition
It’s no secret that businesses often borrow from the tactics that are used by their rivals. The same practice applies to social media marketing too. Keeping tabs on your competition prevents you from falling behind and retain your customers that may otherwise go to your rivals because of whichever new social media techniques they are using to lure them.
Social media marketing has numerous advantages. However, there is no “one size fits all” strategy that can be used by every business. This is why you have to find our own strategy through informed decision-making and some trial-and-error. Good luck!
