Easy Social Media Marketing Tips To Follow: Your Ultimate Guide
Social media is something that every company, big or small, needs to have as part of their marketing strategy. 59% of the world’s population is on social media. Because over half of the world uses social media, it’s safe to say it’s as important as ever before to be investing time into social media marketing. Your customers are on social media. In this blog, we cover some easy social media marketing tips businesses should follow.
1. Define Your Goals
So, you’re on social media – but why? What are you hoping to gain out of it? In order to get the most out of your social media marketing, you must set targeted social media goals. Some common social media goals are: lead generation, brand awareness, increasing followers or likes, improving engagement, and website traffic. Goals are important because they give you a target to aim for and you can have a clearer picture of what needs to be done in order to achieve them. Your goals should be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Based. Let’s dig into what that means, exactly.
- Specific: Your goals should be specific and clear.
- Measurable: Your goals should be trackable and measurable.
- Attainable: Your goals should be challenging, but not impossible.
- Relevant: Your goals should align with your values and objectives.
- Time-Based: You should set a deadline for when you will reach these goals in order to keep yourself accountable.
2. Select the Right Social Media Platforms
There are hundreds of social media platforms out there, but not every platform is going to be right for your industry or your target demographic. Each social media channel serves a different purpose and is tailored towards different people. First, you should identify your target audience. According to Sprout Social, these are the demographics you will likely see on each popular social media platform:
- Facebook
- Age Group: 25-34
- Gender: 43% Female, 57% Male
- Instagram
- Age Group: 25-34
- Gender: 48% Female, 52% Male
- Twitter
- Age Group: 18-29
- Gender: 38% female, 62% male
- Notes:
- LinkedIn
- Age Group: 25-34
- Gender: 48% female, 52% male
- Notes:
- Pinterest
- Age Group: 50-64
- Gender: 78% Female, 22% Male
- Notes:
- TikTok
- Age Group: 10-19
- Gender: 61% female, 39% male
Facebook is still the largest social media network for both consumers and marketers, so keep that in mind when choosing which platform(s) to use. However, also ask yourself these questions when determining your target audience: what’s their age, gender, marital status, location, income, job industry, interests, purchase behaviors, and communication preferences?
After you’re done defining your target audience and determining which social platform(s) they’re using, ask yourself; what are my competitors doing? Research your competition, see what platforms they’re using, and how they’re doing on each one.
3. Create a Content Strategy
Once you have determined your goals and target audience, and once you have chosen your social media platforms and researched your competition, you can begin creating a content strategy. Your content strategy should include valuable, engaging posts that align with the goals you’ve set in place. It’s not enough to just sporadically post content here and there without any real plan or strategy.
Here are the steps you should take to create a game-changing content strategy for social media:
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Set Goals For Your Strategy
We’ve already talked about defining goals above. But it’s worth saying again: set those goals – they are everything! Is your goal to build brand awareness? Is it to grow your audience? Boost traffic to your website? Drive more community engagement? Lead generation and sales?
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Research Your Target Audience
You already are aware of this, too! But, make sure you remember who your target audience is not just when choosing the right social media platform, but also when creating the content. You want to make sure you are writing content that is going to interest them and resonate with them. Catering your content to this specific audience is what’s going to get you the engagement, clicks, followers, and more that you’re seeking.
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Create Engaging and Valuable Content
Now for the fun part. Create content and put it into motion! Make sure your content adds value to your customer’s life in order to keep them engage. Some tips for creating engaging, valuable content include: using relevant hashtags, having a call-to-action, use of eye-catching visuals, and competitions and polls – just to name a few.
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Create Content That Has A Purpose
Ideally, you should have something you hope to achieve with your content. It should have a purpose. Are you looking to inspire? Educate? Promote? Entertain?
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Tell a Story
Connect with your audience by sharing content that is authentic and real, but try to refrain from information overload. The last thing you want to do is lose your audience because too much content is being thrown at them at once.
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Stay Current On Trends
Trends come and go. In order to stay relevant, you need to be researching trends frequently. Stay current and up-to-date, but make sure the trends you choose to follow still align with your brand and messaging.
4. Engage With Your Audience
Now that your content is out there, don’t just set it and forget it. Make sure you’re active on your social media platform(s) and engaging with your audience. Engaging with your followers is just as important as posting content. Some ways you can engage with your followers include:
- Liking and responding to their comments
- Hold Q&A sessions
- Create polls and surveys to welcome feedback
- Host contests
5. Analyze and Measure Your Results
If you don’t track your success and progress, then you won’t have any idea how to improve your social media marketing efforts. That being said, tracking, analyzing and measuring your results are so important. There are many tools out there that make analyzing and measuring easy by keeping all that data in one place. Whether you are wanting to review engagement, likes, followers, clicks, or comparisons month over month, some tools to consider using include: Google Analytics, Sprout Social, HootSuite, and Buffer.