With over 220 million people in the US alone, using social media regularly, it is a trend that won’t be going anywhere for a good while. This means it’s also a great platform on which to reach out to and interact with potential customers for your brand. Although, if you want to be successful at social media marketing there are some essential things you must do. Keep reading to find out what they are.
Choose the right channels
Unless you are a global brand like Coca-Cola, being on every social media channel may not be the best use of your resources or time. Indeed, it is a much better idea to narrow down the field and only pick the platforms that will be the most useful to you.
However, doing this can be a little complicated, especially if you are new to the social marketing arena. After all, how do you know whether Instagram is the best choice, or whether you will see more engagement and traffic from being on Facebook?
It’s always best to approach things from a customer experience perspective in this type of situation. What this means is you need to choose the platforms that your demographic is most active on. Only then can you be sure you will be getting the ROI on your social media marketing.
Plan your strategy
A goal without a plan is just a dream, and never does this ring so true as on social media. Indeed, it’s very important to both plan out the topics and the types of posts you will be making, as this will help you to publish content regularly.
The content that you do release will depend on the end goals of your social media marketing plan. For example, if you are looking to sell real-life products, images and videos of people using these will be essential. Indeed, platforms such as TikTok and Pinterest often encourage sales of items through video content.
However, if your primary product is a service then your approach will need to be quite different. Instead, your aim will be to set yourself up as an expert within your industry, something you can do with tutorials, articles, and even videos and infographics.
No matter the content you publish, do remember that it’s important to encourage as much sharing on social media as possible. This means hashtags are crucial, a topic you can learn more about in the video below.
Find out what strategies are effective with analytics
Analytics is one of the most important elements of social media success. Indeed ensuring your marketing decisions are informed by data can help you maximize their efficacy as well as your ROI.
The only problem here is that there are so many different platforms and metrics to track. After all, it can become hugely confusing for the person responsible for tracking engagement across social media, especially if there isn’t a quantitative data ‘type of person.’
Fortunately, there is a solution here and it’s to track engagement in one place using a product specifically designed for this purpose. Indeed, by using a single dashboard instead of many you can make the whole process of harnessing the power of analytics not only easier but more effective as well.
Follow others
Remember that your business’s social media account does not exist in a vacuum. Instead, the whole idea of being on social media is to embed yourself within a complex network of interactions, something that when done correctly can help your brand become a part of your customers’ everyday landscape online.
To do this you will need to make sure you follow other people, both individuals and other businesses on the social media platforms that you use. Indeed, with the algorithms that most social media platforms now use, following brands similar to your and even competitors is a smart idea as this can help make sure your business features in related follower suggestions.
Oh and don’t forget that there is a great deal of value in watching what your competitors are doing on social media closely. Indeed, this can often provide valuable insights into the social media marketing trends that are most relevant to your demographic.
Engage with others
In addition to following others on social media, you will want to engage with them as well. This means commenting on posts, reblogging, and even working with others via collaboration. In fact, collaboration can be particularly valuable on social media because it helps to make your brand visible to more people that are a good match to your demographic.
Also, don’t be afraid to interact with other brands online either. Positivity and support are right on trend at the moment and it’s always good PR that will only ensure that your potential customers see you are more trustworthy.
You may even wish to show your brand’s lighthearted side too. Indeed, some of the funniest, most loved, and most shared interactions on social media are those between brands that are riffing off each other.
Maintain brand consistency
Lastly, one of the biggest challenges for any business using social media marketing is making sure they maintain brand consistency across all their channels and platforms. What this means is that wherever a potential customer consumes your content, you want them to be able to instantly recognize that it is from your brand.
This can be quite tricky, especially when releasing content across a range of platforms. The reason for this is that they all have their own mood and voice, and it can be hard to ensure your content fits this while staying true to your brand.
One way of solving these problems is to create a brand schema that defines all the small details of how your content presents no matter what platform it one. Usually included in such schema are things like company colours to be used, official images, and even voice – that is the tone that needs to be used in all written content from tag lines to whole articles.