If you want to grow your brand with social media, it is going to take consistency, dedication, and expertise. More importantly, you need to have a solid social media marketing strategy in place before you do anything to ensure great results.
- Start with Your Business Goals in Mind
- Be Prepared to Commit
- Find Your True Audience
- Create A Schedule
- Create Great Content
- Know Your Competition
- Measure and Track Results
You may be thinking about using social media to boost customer acquisition and retention; but have you truly thought about how to do so with your overall company goals in mind? Think about your mission and then carefully devise a social media marketing strategy designed to fit into that plan whole-heartedly.
Social media is an on-going method that requires a serious commitment if you want any level of success. Your number of fans and followers will not explode overnight. So instead of jumping into it with wild expectations, understand that it will be a slow and steady marathon – not a sprint.
Find out where your target audience is spending the most time on social media websites. Are they primarily using Facebook? Are they big on Twitter? Do they mostly watch videos on YouTube? These are important questions you need to ask yourself so you can implement realistic strategies to connect with them.
Posting, replying, sharing, managing, and other social activities require a serious time commitment. Whether you decide that you only have 30 minutes per day or two hours per day to commit to it, stick with it because consistency is the key to social marketing success.
Perhaps the most important factor of social marketing is to post quality content that is useful and valuable to your audience. Great content is shared more often, which results in even more new fans and followers. Create a list of content topics that your audience WANTS to read about and put them into action immediately.
Before you venture into social media marketing, take a look at what your competition is doing. Not only will this give you insight about how you can approach social media, but it could also help you do it even better than they are. Standing out from the competition is an age-old tactic used by all types of businesses to grab and maintain market share; and that hasn’t changed with social media.
Most social media websites have tools that allow you to track the popularity and reach of your posts; use them. This way, you can easily find out what type of content is more effective for generating shares and responses. Use this data to fine-tune your efforts and overall strategy.
