Tips for Doing Better Social Media Marketing
Social media is one of the best tools you have at your disposal for promoting a small business. They are not completely free but they are the least expensive option out there if you want to expand your reach as a new company.
It’s important to have a strategy for doing so and to plan out the way you want to use the media and for what purpose. That mostly comes from knowing who your audience is and what kind of audience you want to get.
Know who your customers are
The first thing to do if you want to have a good social media campaign is to know to whom your campaign is speaking. That’s partly based on the data you have simply by using the social media, and partly on your predictions as to who you want to reach.
A business needs to go through their data on the regular basis not only to figure out who their followers are, but how your individual actions on social media is affecting your followers. That’s often known as how a post travels and you want to stay on top of it.
Not all platforms are the same
It’s perfectly fine for a business to use all social media platforms at once. It’s more work than you would otherwise have, but it shows that you’re trying to cover the ground in detailed way. However, what’s not acceptable is for you to use all the platforms in the same way.
Different social media platforms appeal to different demographics of users and they are best used for different types of communication. For instance, Instagram isn’t really for chatting but for engaging the followers and Facebook is more suited to going back and forward.
Encourage communication
Social media isn’t just for informing your customers it’s more for communicating with them. The content you’re producing should be focused on bringing up the engagement and making sure your customers are aware of you and willing to talk. That’s often accomplished by using surveys or small give away.
These will make sure that your followers are actually engaging and reacting to what you’re posting. That’s especially true if you’re a new and small business and you want to establish yourself within the community in which you want to sell and work.
Don’t try to sell
This isn’t a place to try to sell your products or service right away. The ultimate goal of the marketing campaign is always to sell and bring in new customers. Still, that can be off-putting if it’s done directly on the social media page and you might end up losing customers and followers.
The goal of the social media campaign is to tell the story of your business and to create a bond between yourself and the customers and clients. The actual sale strategy comes in later and that’s what your website is for and its landing pages in particular.
Include video
Video marketing has its advantages and they are mostly about the amount of information you can convey quickly and clearly. Videos should be included in the social media campaign even though they are often made by a separate team since they require a bit of production.
Have in mind that you can go overboard with using videos in your campaign and make your social media feed too crowded and too filled with information. That’s something that should be avoided as well since it will end up driving your followers away in the long run.
User generated content
One great strategy that’s often underused is to call on your followers to generate their own content and to focus on it and use it to both showcase a connection with the followers and as a sales content. This is best done when you already have a following to pick and choose from.
It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t vent and go through the content yourself. It’s fine if the content is curated and even if its tweaked a bit so that you can put your own branding on it. Other than that, it’s a time and place for your followers to get creative.
Conclusion
Social media marketing is one of the most important ways to promote your business and for many small businesses it’s the only one. A small company should try to figure out who their followers are first and thus create a campaign that’s tailor made for them.
It’s also useful for a small business to have their presence known on all kinds of platforms and social media at once, but to use them in ways that are suited to particular platforms. It’s also a good idea to focus on the content generated by the followers since that feels more personal and is less expensive.
