Use these Marketing Tips to Ease Your Progress
So – you have refined your social media plan. You have worked out who your avatar is and you know your target, you have researched and sourced all the content you will need and you have developed fabulous habits of consistency in all areas.
Well done, you.
Most social media marketing campaigns are primarily designed to:
- help gain more social following
- increase product/brand visibility
- drive traffic to a website.
Use these pointers below and you will be able to set up your campaign efficiently and with confidence
You must reserve your user name across all social media platforms
Even if you have no intention of using a particular platform right now, in the future you will almost certainly change your mind. Opening an account and reserving your user- name means that there will be no hold-ups when you are ready to move. This is also a protection against would-be imposters who may want to use your identity for some nefarious reason.
Choose carefully when picking the social media platform that right now, will best suit your needs.
Not all platforms are equal and it is hard graft trying to work them all. Some may not be suitable for your kind of campaign (at this time) and struggling to make them work is time-consuming and counter-productive. You must pick the platform which shows you the best results and spend your time enhancing those results.
Optimise your social media platforms
OK – so you have chosen your first platform. One way of encouraging followers is to optimise your account profile. Use a real profile picture, write ‘ABOUT’ page profiles that are comprehensive while being clear and concise. If you are able, do not forget to link to your website.
Connect all your active social media accounts to your website
This helps to keep the pathways open. Having each of the accounts you are using linked to your websites, allows visitors to link to any of your accounts. Your social media followers can then easily discover more details about your offer.
Research and connect with leaders in your niche
Joining the fan pages of influential people in your business/niche not only gives you access to their training and heaps of useful information, it provides you with an opportunity to make your own mark on his/her followers. This is done by ‘commenting’ and ‘liking’ posts in an intelligent manner. You may be fortunate enough to gain inspiration from their work by following their case studies. ‘Following’ or ‘favouring’ them will help here.
Use hashtags
This is not just a pretty function to make your phrase turn into a link and look pretty. Hashtags are a great way to do searches on social media. It is also a polite way to make your content trend on Facebook. Don’t do it to death, though.
Stay social though
Whether this is your personal profile or a business page, you must keep up the social end of it all. You need to do all the interactive, social development stuff. So follow other users, make friend requests, make comments, like things, update your status, post images and memes and even the odd picture of dogs, babies and horses! In a nutshell – Be Interesting and entertaining.
Follow the Guidelines and Rules
Each platform has its own rules and regs. Be sure to familiarise yourself with all of them. An example would be Facebook’s restrictions on the numbers of friends you can have. Twitter has a cap on the number of people you can follow each day and so on.
Track mentions
This is where PR kicks in. Use available tools to track every mention of your brand across all platforms and find out what people are saying about you or your brand. Don’t miss a chance to neutralize any negative talk.
Post as many times per day as you like, but again, don’t overdo it
Only you can determine how often you want to post each day. Some suggest around 5 times. Others say twice. It is surely up to you – just do not flood the internet – your friends and followers will not thank you. Just take into account the number of followers you have, how well they engage and any network requirements.
Right then – get to it and Good Luck!
You make some really great points in this article. I’m utilizing most of these tips currently in my social media marketing strategies. I’ve just recently started using hashtags in my social media posts, mainly on Instagram. But again, really great read.
Thank you Greg. Glad you enjoyed it.