Getting the best out of social media

Social media marketing (SMM) involves creating and sharing content to achieve your branding and marketing goals. Social media is a powerful way for businesses of all sizes to reach customers, create brand advocates and help drive leads and sales to grow your business. Creating and sharing the right text, image and video content can really drive audience engagement.

The first thing you need to consider is what your goal is for your business. Ask yourself;

– What do you want to achieve from social media marketing?

– Who is your target audience?

– How does your target audience use social media?

– What message do you want to send?

The right kind of social media marketing can help to increase website traffic, build conversions, raise brand awareness and create a brand identity and with it, positive brand association. We have put together some of the best tips on how to get the most out of social media for your business.

1. Content Planning – have a look at what other businesses in your industry are doing to drive engagement on social media and think about keyword research to help you brainstorm. Going into social media marketing with a plan will make it much easier to gain followers and send the right message for your brand.

2. Great Content – once you have a plan you can start to think about what content you are going to post and share. Without great content to back up your plan, you will struggle to achieve your goals. Make sure you post regularly and offer information that your target audience will find interesting and valuable.

3. Consistent Brand Image – each social media platform has its own unique environment, but across them all your business’s core identity should remain the same. This helps build reliability with customers and also makes your brand easy to recognise no matter which platform you use.

4. Sharing Curated Links – while social media is a fantastic way to share your own content with your followers, don’t shy away from posting links to outside articles/content that you think your followers will enjoy or find useful. It’s a really good way to improve trust and reliability with the added bonus that you might get a few links in return!

5. Using Analytics – Google Analytics is a really helpful tool to use with social media marketing, it helps to measure your most triumphant social media marketing techniques as well as highlighting that those that might need re-thinking. Remember to attach tracking tags to your campaigns so you can easily monitor them.

Each social media platform requires a different approach to truly be successful, this is what makes it so easy to grow your business on social media. It can also mean that it’s a little daunting when starting out, knowing what style of marketing suits what platform comes with time and research. Below are some tips for the biggest social media platforms to help you get started;

Facebook – Facebook has a casual, friendly environment and requires quite an active marketing strategy, it is, however, the easiest to start with as it’s a platform most of us are very familiar with. To start with you’ll need to create a business page, you should remember to keep your tone light and friendly in your posts. Organic reach on Facebook is quite limited so it’s definitely worth considering a cost-effective ad strategy.

Pinterest – this image-centred platform is ideal for retail but can also be beneficial to other businesses. It allows businesses to showcase their best product/service offerings and develop a brand personality with eye-catching boards. When developing your Pinterest strategy it is worth bearing in mind that the majority of the users for this particular social media platform are female.

Twitter – an easy to boost your followers on Twitter is to follow other accounts from your industry or even related fields, not only will this help people find you, but might also get a few follows or re-tweets in return. Be sure to post fun, brand-building tweets in and amongst your specials, discounts and news. Whenever a customer tweets something nice about your business it’s worth re-tweeting as good reviews are always an advantage! Don’t forget to try and answer any questions people ask.

LinkedIn – LinkedIn is a great platform for entering into a professional conversation with people in similar industries and provides somewhere for you to share content with like-minded individuals. It’s the most professional of the social media platforms available and may not be suited to all types of business, however, it can also be a great place to post jobs and find people with the right skills to help you further your business.

Try and encourage clients to give your business a recommendation on your LinkedIn profile, this helps makes your business look credible and reliable to new customers.

YouTube – this is a fantastic place for sharing and creating video content and YouTube can be a very powerful social media marketing tool. Your focus should, where possible, be to create useful “how-to” style videos rather than aiming to create something that will “go viral”. The advantage of this is that it will rank in video search results on Google.

Our key piece of advice that we want you to remember is that when it comes to social media marketing choosing the right platform for your audience can make or break your social media strategy. Focus on the platform that is going to give you the biggest ROI, get that up and running, making you money, then start to add in the other platforms. Don’t try to do it all at once.

It can seem like a huge task to get started with social media marketing and make a success out of it, but it couldn’t be easier, get in touch today to find out we can help with everything from setting up your business page to creating, writing and posting content for you.