Social media is one of the most important tasks for any modern business. Customers use social media to discover new brands, products, and to keep up-to-date with the latest offers and promotions. Social media is also an active part of your website search rank. Have a good search profile, and you can appear high on Google and other search engines for related queries.
That is why it’s important to ensure you have the best social media campaigns running, even if you are a small local business.
The trouble is, it’s very tempting to just sell on social media, and this isn’t very effective. In fact, it can damage your reputation and harm your chance of being a success.
So, consider our following 8 tips to make your social media campaigns great.
Tip One: Share Content From Third Parties
One of the best tips is to make sure you aren’t just sharing social media content directly linked to your website or products. Look on the internet and social media for other content that your target audience might enjoy reading.
The content doesn’t have to be from a rival firm, it could be from related industries or general information in the local/national press.
Tip Two: Use Rich Media
Text is no longer the most popular content on the internet. With faster download speeds and possibilities, there is an increasing demand for images, videos, and audio from consumers.
You can take advantage of this by creating your own videos and images, branded to your company, to entice audiences to learn more about your brand.
Videos can be created with a phone and edited online with free-to-use software. Also, you can use Facebook Live and other social media platforms to present live video streams.
Don’t forget to use YouTube to deliver videos. YouTube has a great search and recommend functionality built in which gives your brand a greater chance of being discovered.
Tip Three: Use Hashtags To Theme Content
Content needs to be themed and searchable. Social media platforms have gone to great lengths to help users by implementing hashtags. These allow you to be instantly searched for.
However, don't use more than two Hashtags in any one piece of content and they should be relevant to your main piece of content. If you can, use the hashtag within the central message on Twitter, as this helps you to lower the character count within the updates.
In Facebook and Google+ you’ll want the hashtags to be below the URL, you insert into the post.
Tip Four: Share The Appropriate Number Of Times Per Day
Social media can be very addictive, but you should remember that other users won't just be reading your content. They will have many interests and needs and want to be reading a variety of content.
Also, posting too much on one platform can seem rather spammy, and be off-putting to your target audience.
Therefore, you want to limit your publishing schedule so you can gain the maximum exposure without annoying potential clients.
The obvious strategy is to limit your posting to the optimum number of updates for the platform and then post the recommended amount throughout the day at suitable times.
For instance, you should limit the number of updates published on Facebook to just one or two per day while Twitter can have between eight and twelve.
You can use social media management software like Social Oomph, Hootsuite and Buffer to automatically publish these updates at a specified time, or when they think is best based on previous performance.
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Tip Five: Be On Multiple Platforms
There are numerous platforms out there, and not every customer is on all the platforms. Therefore, you need to spend time on a variety of social media networks. The main ones to be on are Twitter and Facebook, but you could also have profiles on Google+, LinkedIn, SnapChat and others.
Consider carefully what platforms you want to use. Not all of them are suitable for your business but there are some really good industry specific social media networks out there which you could take advantage of, e.g. Houzz for interior designers, decorators, etc.
Tip Six: Pay For Exposure
On certain platforms, you need to pay for exposure to get your social media marketing going. One example is Facebook who limits your organic exposure (the exposure without paying) to just 17% of your following. By paying them, you can exceed this easily and get better results.
The best tip is to pay not just for exposure of your content but also advertising your main page. This way you can increase your page fans and improve the organic reach of your content as well as benefit from the paid promotion campaigns you offer.
Consider other platforms as required, but some don’t offer as good as results as Twitter.
Tip Seven: Customize Your Profiles
Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn all offer excellent customization of profiles so you can start to generate more interest and differentiate yourself from others in your industry.
Use free-to-use software such as Canva to help you generate content. Canva is especially useful as it has the templates for the various social media platforms already for you to use.
Tip Eight: Cross Promote
Get your Twitter fans to your Facebook account and get your Facebook fans to your Twitter account. The more times you sign up a potential customer, the more content they will see and the quicker they will convert.
You can also use social media content to acquire email addresses to help you with email marketing.
Conclusion
Social media marketing is a must-do task for 2017. It helps you identify and target relevant prospects and converse with them before you start selling. It can also grow the personality of your brand.
Social media is often misused with too many businesses going for the hard sell approach. Instead, you need to use our tips above to match customer expectations on social media and deliver a content stream that helps you to acquire them as a customer.