What Exactly Is Social Media Marketing?
How Should I Go About Marketing Through Social Media?
Social media marketing is often misconstrued as a place to advertise your product or service. If that were the case, they would have named it business media or advertisement media. Conveniently, it was named social media. While social media users are becoming experienced with their preferred social platforms, they are also no strangers to spammers or sales pitches.
SMM Has Multiple Benefits!
Social media marketing once had the sole purpose of driving more traffic to our website. SMM and people who use it have evolved since that theory developed.
Today social media marketing has become much more than a traffic source. Why should SMM be crucial to my marketing efforts? People spend a lot of time on social media sites. Browsing topics, researching products, interacting with their inner circles. So what does that do for my company’s bottom line?
Well, let’s look at the negative effects of not having an active social media-marketing network.
- Fewer referrals from your trusted community
- No personal references for your leads to verify
- Unable to voice your brand to attract strangers
- Fewer natural links without social media marketing
Why Are There So Many Different Social Media Sites?
The reason that there are many different social media marketing sites is that every social site has different functions and purposes. For example, Twitter is known as a buzz creator. While being less personalized, its platform is known as the holy grail of starting a buzz.
Then there is Facebook. FB is the personalizer. Its platform connects you with friends to share personal views and opinions while staying in touch at the same time.
LinkedIn allows you to communicate with professionals in a business-related platform.
Therefore, by mentioning a few of the main ones you see how different they all are.
Each provides different solutions for social media marketing. Use each one to your best advantage by understanding what each platform has to offer for your product or service to help you with your social media marketing.
How do I start social media marketing?
Here are 10 steps to get you started.
1. Determine your goals.
What do you want to get out of your social Web participation? Why are you doing it? Are you trying to generate direct sales? Are you trying to offer a form of customer service? Do you want to build relationships with customers and boost loyalty? Your answers to these questions greatly affect the type of content you publish and the activities you participate in on the social Web.
2. Evaluate your resources.
Who is going to create your content? Who is going to maintain your social media accounts? Who is going to respond to questions and be the face of your business online? Do you have the technical ability in-house to join the online conversation? If not, are you willing to learn? Can you or someone who works for you write well? You need to be sure you have the necessary people in place to execute a social media marketing plan before you start.
3. Know your audience.
Where does your target audience spend time online? What kind of content and conversations do the audience members get most vocal about? What kind of information do they want from you? What do they dislike? Remember, you’re not just pub¬lishing marketing messages on the social Web. You need to find out what your audience wants and needs, so you can provide the kind of content they find useful and interesting. However, you also need to be personable, so they actually want to interact with you.
4. Create amazing content.
Once you know where your audience spends time and what kind of content audience members want, take the time to give them more of that kind of content. Don’t give up. You need to continually offer your audience amazing content, which also comes in the form of conversations, in order to build a loyal fol¬lowing of people who trust you as a source that can meet their needs and expectations.
5. Integrate your marketing efforts.
All of your efforts at social media marketing should feed off each other. Cross-promote your efforts both online and offline, and make sure your social media and traditional marketing efforts work together seamlessly.
6. Create a schedule.
Allocate specific times during your day to devote to social media marketing. For example, spend five minutes on Twitter before you check your email each day and another five minutes before you leave work each day. When you create a schedule, it’s easier to stick to it and make sure you don’t skip your social media marketing activities each day.
7. Adopt an 80-20 rule.
Always spend at least 80 percent of your time on social media activities that are not self-promotional and no more than 20 percent of your time on self-promotional activities.
8. Focus on quality, not quantity.
It can be easy to get caught up in the numbers but don’t become a slave to followers and subscribers. It’s better to have 1,000 highly engaged, loyal followers than 10,000 followers who sign up to follow you but then never acknowledge you again.
9. Give up control.
You must let your audience take control of the online conversation and make it their own so they develop an emotional attachment to you, your brand, and your business. Remember, on the social Web, apathy or invisibility is a bigger problem than negativity.
10. Keep learning.
You can never stop listening and learning. For success in social media marketing, you need to be flexible and accept that change is good.
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