What are the main goals of social media marketing? To expand your brand to a wider audience, and to influence the decision-makers to make favorable decisions and award business to your company. Social media marketing can be a dynamic powerhouse that solidifies branding, creates quality leads, and drives sales. A successful social media marketing strategy is exactly what you need to make your business grow.
Benefits of Social Media Marketing:
- Increased Brand Awareness
- Grow a larger audience
- Connect with your audience better
- Increased website traffic
- Generate more leads
- Make more sales and money
If you take advantage of the following Social Media Tips, you can optimize the benefits of social media marketing for your company.
Tip #1 – Learn the differences between the social media channels and what types of content work best on each one
There are currently over 80 different social media channels available for marketers to advertise on. The top 4 channels that marketers have found to be most beneficial are LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Here are what each are best used for.
Linked-In: A professional network that is perfect for a B2B audience. This also includes Linked-In Pulse, a content publishing and distribution platform.
Facebook: With more than 2.7 billion monthly active users, Facebook is the most popular social media worldwide. This makes it a powerful marketing tool for businesses. This platform is particularly good for news and entertainment-related content. Try joining Facebook groups to connect with your ideal audience.
Instagram: This platform is perfect for highly visual content. Static images and short videos work incredibly well, but it’s not as good at driving traffic back to your blog.
TikTok: TikTok is the newest trend in social media with more than 689 million global active users as of January 2021. TikTok allows brands to engage with users through video, only in shorter, bite-sized clips. Most users are between the ages of 16 and 24.
Focusing your marketing efforts on two to three platforms will give you the best return on your investment. Crafting content unique to each platform is critical.
For example, let’s say your content writer has written a blog about social media marketing. You want to promote that blog on your social channels, but how you craft your post will differ depending on the platform. Writing the copy will get attention and clicks on LinkedIn is different than what works on Facebook, which is also different than what works on Instagram or Twitter.
Tip #2 – Put the right person in charge of your social media
Businesses trying to achieve successful social media marketing must overcome several common challenges:
- Carving out enough time to dedicate to your channels
- Creating high-performing content
- Properly measuring the resulting metrics
If handled incorrectly, your efforts can tank the plan, and leave you with a big goose egg as a result. One of the biggest mistakes companies frequently make is to choose the person who has the lightest schedule or the cheapest per hour rate. Many people don’t understand the complexities of managing social media, and they just assume the college intern or their teenage niece will do just fine in the role.
A social media manager needs to have a clear understanding of:
- Your company’s brand voice
- The ins and outs of social media strategy
- How to choose content
- Graphic design
- The best way to engage with followers
- Social media analytics
- How to run Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram ads
- Your business’s target audience
- Calendar management
- Grammar, spelling, and punctuation
Managing all your business’s social media platforms is a big job, do you really want to leave it up to an unpaid college intern or your teenage niece? Investing your resources in a knowledgeable digital marketing expert or social media manager can help your business grow in all the right ways. Trust us, it’s worth the investment.
Tip #3 – Share the right content at the right time
One fatal mistake many businesses do is feel that they have to post constantly to stay in front of their customers. So they post any and everything they can think of. There is no faster way to get people to disconnect from you than to waste their time. If you don’t have interesting and engaging content, you should NOT be putting it out on social media.
There are four goals for social media posting:
- Social Listening
- Social Influencing
- Social Networking
- Social Selling
The first rule of social media posting is to understand what the purpose of your post is.
Social Listening
The purpose of Social Listening is to monitor and respond to customer service and reputation management issues on the social web. Examples of this would be responding with a thank you message to a customer giving you a shout-out for great service. Or apologizing to another customer who had a not-so-great experience. People tend to be way more accepting of a company or brand making a mistake if they own up to it and apologize for it.
Social Influencing
Social Influencing is establishing authority on the social web, often through the distribution and sharing of valuable content. Think “be the expert” here. Social Influencing is where a brand can show why they are the trusted expert in that field, or why the brand is the top choice in the market. This is a brand’s chance to educate and be entertaining.
Social Networking
Social Networking is finding and associating with authoritative and influential individuals and brands on the social web. Lowe’s is the expert at Social Networking. For example, they sell CharBroil grills. So they will post blogs and re-shares from CharBroil about their grills. They will also post recipes with links to their CharBroil grills on their website.
Social Selling
Social Selling is used to generating leads and sales from existing customers and prospects on the social web. Most brands spend the bulk of their social media cache trying to sell their product or service. However, this is mistake. Brands should never spend more than 20% of their social media strategy selling. Spend more time and you will turn off your audience. No one wants to be pitched to all the time.
If you are unsure how you are spending your social media resources, try doing a 10 minute social media audit. It can be an eye opening experience for many brands to realize they are spending way more time selling than they thought.
Trying to manage your social presence doesn’t have to be hard. Schedule some time and we can chat about how to simplify your social media needs and move your company into the AGE OF NOW!
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