When it comes to social media marketing there are many strategies to implement. And since this is relatively new ground to cover for many businesses in the world, it can get tricky and confusing. But, there are already so many businesses that gained big success thanks to social media. That should be a great motivation for you to improve your business to the new heights.
If this is new to you, you’d be surprised at how effective social media can be for your business. Not only you can reach a lot of potential consumer, but social media marketing can also cut your costs by a lot.Social media can be the great investment that your business needs and there is no better time to dive into it than today.
Now, to get into social media as your marketing platform, you’ll have to follow the updates and changes in social media world. Big social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter have been changed so many times since it was established. For example: Facebook made some change in its algorithm that caused controversy and privacy concerns, this potentially scare away a lot of people making it a poor choice of marketing in some area (Facebook is still popular in South East Asia for example). Instagram has become the biggest platform for marketing purposes, especially since it released its own business features and has more than 1 billion users all over the world.
These changes can happen so fast, and out of the blue. You have to always stay on your toes and anticipate any changes in social media. Also watch out for new platforms that may come out at any moment. Not only, the platform but also its users are also changing. The changes on the users will affect the ways business interact with public. That’s why you’ll see many businesses trying their best and even experimenting on how to interact with people on social media and there are businesses who tried too hard at relating with people and end up being criticized.
Speaking of experiments, many big businesses have realized that it’s better to do something new than just follow the trend. Brands have gotten bolder and conscious at how they want to represent themselves. For example: brands like Tesla, Wendy’s and etc. on twitter, they interact with each other or public like a bunch of individuals rather than brands. This breathe a new fresh air at marketing.
Anyway, here are our own list important things when it comes to social media marketing.
4 Important Steps in Social Media Marketing Strategies
1. Strategy
Social Media Marketing Strategies
Speaking of being bold in social media marketing, devising the best strategy for the business is crucial. You need to step back and think about what you’re trying to accomplish. Some businesses use social media to increase brand awareness or increase web traffic and sales. Other businesses are more about engaging with potential customers or the community and serve as customer support at the same time. Researching your audience beforehand is still the best strategy, as making assumptions is a dangerous move for marketers.
Now it’s time to choose which social media platforms you want to use. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and Snapchat are some of the most famous platforms out there. It’s better to focus on one platform, so you can put all the resources into it. You can branch out to multiple platforms after you have the manpower to do it.
Next, is about the content. You need to think about what type of content is the best to reach your audience, it can be videos, pictures, or links. It can also be educational or entertaining or both. It’s good to experiment on this one by creating a persona for your brand. Read: 6 The Best Email Marketing Automation Tools
2. Moving Forward
Steps in Social Media Marketing
Now that you have some basic understanding about your social media platform, it’s time to move forward and publish your ideas. Publishing your content can be as easy as making a blog or social media post, uploading an image or a video. After some time, you can see which kind of content is your audience like the most.
As you progress, hopefully your brand can keep improving. Timing, type of content, and level of engagement can be improved over time. To make your job easier, there are a lot of social media scheduling tools, such as Buffer Publish that can tell you when to publish your content for a maximum level of engagement. Because publishing content is going to be useless if no one is going to see it.
3. Interacting with the Community
Interacting with the Community
As your social media presence grows, representing your brand is going to important. People are going to send messages, comments, and tag you in their social media posts. You need a good way to interact with people that won’t betray your brand’s image on social media.
The good thing about social media is that you can monitor people’s conversations. People might talk about your brand without you knowing and knowing what people talk about your brand on their daily conversations can be a great way to look into the market situation. These interactions will enhance your social media marketing.
There is a tool called Buffer Reply, that allows you to monitor all your social media mentions and messages, including posts that didn’t include or tag your brand’s social media profile. With this you can monitor their conversations and even surprise them with a nice response. Just remember that interacting with community can be very tricky, you want your brand to sound relatable and more humane but at the same time you have to think carefully about what you’re saying on the internet. You don’t want your brand to be remembered because of a scandal or incident that happened on the internet.
More about analyzing the market. After publishing content and engaging on social media for a while you need to now how your marketing has done so far. Are you reaching enough people? How many positive mentions do you get so far? And how many people used your brand’s hashtag on their social media posts? If it works well you can keep going and if not, you can make some changes.
Analyzing data can be both fun and difficult and its definitely important in social media marketing. Using social media alone can provide with enough information about all of these. To get more in-depth analytics you need a more sophisticated and powerful tool on the internet.
4. Advertising Your Brand
Advertising Your Brand
You have to remember that with more funds comes more advertisements. Social media is great for advertising and probably the best platform to advertise your brand. Social media allows your ads to reach more people and generally more accepted. If you want to easily manage your Social Ad campaigns you can use Adplorer and save time and resources.
With social media advertising methods, you can specify exactly who to display your ads to and create target audiences based on their demographics, interest, behaviors, and more. The algorithms behind this is very sophisticated and can guarantee a great result. It’s almost scary to think about it.
Overall, social media is great for running advertising campaigns all at once, with only little research and planning. Social media can handle bulk changes to your advertisement, automate processes and optimize your ads. There is really no better way to improve your brand than social media marketing.
