Social media marketing is a cross-functional and interdisciplinary concept which uses various platforms to achieve short- and long-term organizational goals. Consumers and businesses alike use social media marketing to effectively communicate to share wants, needs, values and reviews.
Effective social media marketing can assist your online business in a number of ways, by:
- Building conversations
- Creating an identity for your brand
- Increasing website traffic
- Improving interaction and communication with target audience
- Making a positive brand association
Social media marketing tips
- Make a social media marketing plan
Before you begin, start with a plan. Understand what you are looking to achieve with regards to your target audience, your business expectations and the kind of impression you intend to create. Brainstorm for web content ideas, which will accrue attention from your target audience. Consider doing a keyword research and then build your content accordingly.
- Create a brand image online
Use social media to create your brand’s image, then use it to make your presence felt across various social media platforms. Ensure that the core identity and purpose of your business remains the same, regardless of platform.
- Build interesting content
Offer information, use images, videos, graphs and other pictorial representations to make your content appealing. You can keep a tab of the originality of what you publish through various plagiarism checker tools that identifies uniqueness and duplicacy of content. Producing original, informative and interesting content is essential to online marketing.
- Marketing via email
Email marketing trends for 2016 revolve around sending the correct message to the correct people at the correct time. With the number of mobile views for emails increasing in leaps and bounds over desktop views, today’s consumers prefer personalized messages suited to their needs and choices. Concentrate on creating engaging emails, which will multiply the chances of business conversion through more clicks on the links attached and corresponding traffic on your website.
- Do not shy away from using hyperlinks
While it is imperative to share original content, do not shy away from providing links of other interesting pages and articles which can create a buzz with your audience. Linking to outside sources makes you more reliable and trustworthy.
- Use analytics to measure success
Google Analytics is a great tool to track social media marketing data. You can track which of your strategies are working effectively, and see which ones might not be working as well as you’d hoped.
- Keep a tab of your competitors
Your competitors can provide you with great insights. Observe their social media marketing business strategies closely, and if a particular strategy works for them, you can replicate the same strategy into your business.
Also on StartupNation.com: A Minimalist Guide to Social Media for Your Brand
Social media marketing platforms
There are a plethora of social media marketing platforms that will help you grow and develop your business. However, each platform requires a different approach and strategy, each of which works best in its respective environment. Below is a brief list of the various social media platforms that will help grow your online business.
Try to keep your approach casual and friendly. Ensure that your enterprise’s Facebook page is attractive, with interesting visuals. You can post industry related images, videos and article links.
Twitter is a great way to interact with your customers and fellow business enthusiasts. Be sure that you are responsive with your tweets and share all appreciative tweets received from your customers. Your tweets should be interesting and should cover a variety of topics including updates, articles and other relevant content. You can create actionable hashtags to build communities and followers.
Pinterest is an image-centered social media platform. Small businesses can effectively showcase their products and offerings to a wide audience and create a unique personality for their brands.
YouTube can help small businesses find a large audience through it’s video content sharing interface. You can focus on creating constructive videos related to your business, such as ‘”how to’s,” which can fetch huge viewership from the video search results of Google, as well.
LinkedIn is a purely professional platform, and can be utilized to enter into business communication with entrepreneurs and professionals from similar industries. You can showcase your customer base, and encouraging customers to recommend your skills on your profile can build credibility for your business.
All of the above social media platforms offer additional enhanced paid services which are a great way to boost the viewership of your business, while allowing you to reach to a more specified target audience.
