The major social media platforms (at the moment) are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and Snapchat. Great marketing on social media can bring remarkable success to your business, creating brand advocates and even driving leads and sales.
Social Media and Marketing: Start with a plan
Before you begin creating social media marketing campaigns, consider your business’s goals. Some businesses use social media for increasing their brand awareness, others use it for driving website traffic and sales. Here are some questions to ask when defining your social media marketing goals:
- Who is your target audience?
- What are you hoping to achieve?
- What message do you want to send to your audience?
- What social media platform would your target customer typically use?
How social media marketing can help you meet your marketing goals
Social media marketing can help with a number of goals, such as:
- Increasing website traffic
- Building conversions
- Raising awareness
- Creating a brand identity
- Improving communication
Which social media platforms do you want to focus on?
The major social media platforms are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and Snapchat. There are also smaller and up-and-coming platforms, such as Tumblr, Tik Tok, and Anchor, and social messaging platforms, such as Messenger, WhatsApp, and WeChat. When starting out, it’s better to pick a few platforms that you think your target audience is on than to be on all platforms.
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Using hashtags effectively
Hashtags are a crucial part of social media marketing. It is a great way of labelling and finding social media updates. It makes your content discoverable. When you are choosing a hashtag, it is important to make sure that you pick something that people are searching for and can easily remember. Your hashtag should be short, precise and simple to spell. You should use a hashtag that is relevant to your content and company as well as simple to use.
Social media content planning
Building a social media marketing plan is essential. Consider keyword research and competitive research to help brainstorm content ideas that will interest your target audience. What are other businesses in your industry doing to drive engagement on social media?
Its also a good idea to have a content plan that runs for 6-12 months so that you know what content you are going to publish each month to take your customer on a journey with your brand or products. This will also ensure you stick to your key content messages.
In addition it is useful to keep an eye on what is going on in the wider marketplace so that you can capitalise on any news stories that are published that may be relevant to your business.
Publishing your content
Publishing to social media is as simple as sharing a blog post, an image or a video on a social media platform. It’s just like how you would share on your personal social media profile.
To ensure that you are maximising your reach on social media, you need to publish great content that your audience likes, at the right timing and frequency.
Analysing your social media marketing
Whether you are publishing content or engaging on social media, you will want to know how your social media marketing is performing. Are you reaching more people on social media than last month? How many positive mentions do you get a month?
The social media platforms themselves provide a basic level of such information. To get more in-depth analytics information or to easily compare across social media platforms, you can use the wide range of social media analytics tools available.
If you would like some help setting up a new social media platform or creating content for your existing platforms please get in touch today.
