With the world of marketing completely changing because of the increase in consumers on the Internet, it’s a mistake not to develop a social media strategy to appeal to your audience on the channels they most enjoy. However, there’s no point in throwing spaghetti at the wall to just see what sticks. Ensure that your social media marketing is successful by developing a strategy that will support your efforts.
Know Your Audience
Fully understanding what your consumers want can help you craft the most compelling marketing strategy possible. Nailing down a specific buyer persona could lead you to a more streamlined approach that garners you higher results. Sometimes simply listening to your customers can lead you to fun and interesting ideas. For example, if you keep track of what your most frequently asked questions are, you can safely assume that other people out there are asking those same things.
On social media, in particular, it’s very easy to find out what people are looking for by paying attention to what’s trending as well as the kind of feedback they provide you with. All of this will put you on the path of appealing directly to your customers with the content they are actually seeking out. This strategy works rather well on e-commerce, deals or price comparison websites as it requires high level of customer engagement.
Develop a Publishing Schedule You Can Keep To
One of the most important aspects of social media marketing is the consistency and frequency of posts. Businesses and individuals who want to promote themselves using these channels will not have a successful campaign if they flood users’ newsfeeds and then disappear for weeks at a time. Out of sight is out of mind, and the success of most online marketing is the way a brand can work to stay in the limelight. Figure out what schedule you can keep to and remain at the forefront of your network’s thoughts by consistently producing new content.
Platforms such as Twitter require much more frequency than Facebook or LinkedIn, so be sure that you choose the channels that are right for your strategy. It’s better to start small and work your way up than to start off too ambitiously and let your publishing schedule fall behind. Consider composing an editorial calendar to keep track of the topics you’ll be releasing; this can help both in the organizational aspect of scheduling as well as the creative side of topic ideation.
Repurposing Existing Materials
One of the most effective ways to keep to a publishing schedule and make sure that you have enough to share with your audience is to reuse content and topics for different platforms. For example, if you have a long-form e-book that you anticipate publishing to your blog, you could easily derive several (if not more) unique tweets from the assertions you make in the publication.
The same approach could be used with your smaller content; posts that revolve around a certain theme could be combined to make a larger article. Alternatively, you could also design a clever infographic that represents some of the themes you’ve been handling.
Increase Your Engagement
Social media is called “social” for a reason. If your strategy ends at putting some posts, graphics, and photos up to be viewed by your followers, your approach is sorely lacking. What makes social media such a high-value avenue of marketing is what comes after the interaction.
Once your content has been released to the world, don’t simply disappear. Take the extra effort to engage with customers by responding to their feedback and reposting their comments to you. High engagement has been known to both increase conversions and helps users respond more positively to your brand. When first-time customers see how your company mingles online, they’re more likely to consider your services reputable and worthy of investment.  If you deal with high volumes of engagement on social media consider automating some of your responses with a social media engagement tool
Shameless Promotion Does Not Win Customers
Think of one of the times you may have been watching your favorite show on television. When the commercials come on, most people tune themselves out or even leave the room to make a sandwich. Similarly, in the social media world, people want to be entertained and relaxed rather than bombarded with ads.
They say that the difference between content marketing and advertising is that advertising is an annoying interruption whereas content marketing is providing the information that your audience searches for and enjoys. Simply posting your ad copy over and over will not win over your audience; it takes fun graphics, informative articles, relevant news sources, and promotions they’ll take advantage of. Show the human side of your business, and write candidly so that you’ll come across as an authoritative and genuine resource in your industry.
Be Discoverable
Do research on the proper marketing strategies for promoting your content. Having a website and blog will only increase your online presence, and social media can ultimately boost your SEO strategy. Be sure that for every tweet, status update, and blog post that you publish, you’re also tagging them to optimize your content for each platform’s search functionality.
Track Your Efforts to Find Out What Works
Every time you release content to the world, you have an opportunity to track its progress and make reasonable judgments about whether or not that particular piece was successful. Many of the social media outlets provide some form of metrics system where you can look at data and draw conclusions, and there is even a ton of free software out there that can also help you accomplish this end. Every time you publish something new, you have an opportunity to add to the data you have and further improve your efforts.
User engagement, the amount of traffic you receive, the number of new followers or likes you earn, and the rate of conversion for new sales can all provide you with insights into which parts of your strategy are working and which aren’t. Over time, you’ll be able to tell what kinds of posts receive the most attention and are the most effective, so you won’t need to waste any more time on the areas that do not provide you with a good return on investment.
