Social media marketing is now an essential part of modern business strategy. It’s a great way to build a brand, increase awareness and boost sales. But with so many platforms, strategies, and tactics available, it can be difficult to know where to start.
We’ve got you covered! We’ve compiled 7 social media marketing guides that will help you find your footing on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter.
Set goals that make sense for your business
Social media marketing content should conduct research to determine what your target audience is talking about in the digital space and how they interact with other brands. Set goals for your company that will help you measure success regularly, whether it’s lead generation or something else.
Make Sure Your Goals Are SMART
A SMART goal is a specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound goal. A good example of this might be “I will increase my Facebook followers by 20% in the next three months.”
It’s also important to measure your goals to ensure that they’re working for you.
Increase brand awareness.
Start with the basics: have quality content that speaks to your target audience. These are people you want to do business with, so make it interesting for them. Give them what they’re looking for and more of it on a regular basis–think daily blog posts or weekly live videos on Facebook Live. Share helpful information like recipes.
Monitor your social media platforms
It’s hard to know what people are saying about you if you’re not paying attention. That said, it can be time-consuming to keep up with all of the conversations happening on Twitter and Facebook at once–for this reason, some brands hire someone dedicated solely to monitoring their accounts. Decide who you want as your social media audience.
Please do your homework on your existing social media audience by asking them questions and monitoring their response time.
Find out what they care about, where else on the internet they hang out, and how much information they want from you in a day. This will help you dedicate your time to social media marketing that is worth it–and get rid of habits like posting every hour on Facebook.
Find out where you’ll spend your most important metrics and KPIs
Find out if your audience is on multiple social media networks. If so, you’ll need to run a campaign on each network separately–it’s not enough for someone who has an account only on Twitter or Facebook to see the same content as someone with accounts in both places.
Establish a Realistic Social Media Budget
This is one of the last steps before you get started with your social media marketing campaign, and it’s essential to do this first. You need to define what success looks like for your business, how much time you’re willing or able to dedicate to social media daily (hint: if it feels overwhelming, then start small!).
Don’t Mix Your Tastes with Those of Your Target Audience
You need to be using social media for the right reasons and with your target audience in mind. If you’re just really into tweeting or writing Facebook posts about how much you love cats, then that’s cool too! But it might not make sense as a marketing strategy if you don’t have an audience interested in what you care about.
Choose Stories over Promotion and Share new posts to social media
You’ll then be able to choose the networks you want your post shared on, as well as hashtags and links that will automatically attach.
It’s important not only for what content you share but also how often. Try posting more than once a day and see if it has an impact on engagement levels.
Embrace Video & Live Streaming
Video is one of the most popular types of content on social media, and it’s a format that consumers are comfortable with. It might seem intimidating to figure out how to create a video for your company, but there are plenty of tools available online.
YouTube has tutorials and classes to teach you how to make videos from scratch – or just some simple editing.
Livestreaming is also an excellent way to engage with your audience. There are plenty of platforms such as Facebook Live, Instagram Stories and Snapchat that let you live stream from anywhere in the world.
Use Social Media Analytics Tools:
Measures the performance of your social marketing efforts with these tools:
- Tailwind – helps you schedule and manage content, track hashtags for engagement and identify influencers who can share your message through their networks
- Hootsuite – lets you monitor multiple streams on one dashboard to keep tabs on followers’ activity.
- Sprout Social – helps you monitor what your followers are saying about you, schedule posts and review analytics
- Buffer – Promotes social media content for better engagement.
- Iconosquare – A free app that will help you track the performance of your Instagram account.
How to optimize content for social media: create a mix of different types of content so that fans don’t get bored and won’t unfollow you.
- Share the scenes content
- Post daily updates
- Have a call to action button on every page of your website, encouraging visitors to follow or like your social media pages by providing their email address, name, and link to connect with them on one of these platforms.
Social media is free when it comes to marketing use, but it can take a lot of time and effort. If you want to be a social media influencer, you can hire professional social media marketers like SEO companies. You’ll worry less since they’re trained in this field; just allocate some budget. Don’t worry; it’s worth it!
