With over 3.80 billion users in the world, social media has become a challenge to conquer for every business marketer. Social media marketing has become one of the main marketing strategies for business. Then, what is social media marketing?
Social media marketing is the process of creating and sharing content through social media platforms with the intention of achieving marketing goals. Since each platform differs in its model and audience, every content posted and shared should be tailored and personalized so that it can work optimally in each platform.
Buffer outlined 5 steps to do social media marketing right.
Before You Start: Set Goals
Before you start mapping out your strategy, set clear goals. What do you actually want to achieve from starting a campaign? Is it engagement? Brand awareness? Or sales? With each goal and purpose, there is certain social media platforms that can be the best choice. For example, if you are a photographer, and you want to get people to be aware of your work, Instagram is the best place for you. It’s because Instagram is a good place to show visual, including photographs.
Other platforms that are very popular for this type of marketing are Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, and LinkedIn. Each platform has their own characteristic such as, demography (who uses the platform) and type of content popular within the platform. In setting your goals, this needs to be one of your main considerations. By having a clear idea of your goals and targeted audience, as well as good understanding of chosen platform and suitable content for it, your social media marketing effort can be optimized.
Post, Post, Post
After strategy is established, the next step is to post the content that you have curated carefully. As online presence is important in building awareness towards your brand, be consistent in your posting schedule. It’s also now easy to find published reports and studies about the best posting time for each social media platform. This is an important aspect to consider because post timing will heavily affect your post’s reach.
Several tools are also now available to help you schedule your post and post them automatically at set time. Utilizing such tools will immensely help you in your posting schedule as they can work across different platforms.
Monitor the Impact
After consistent posting schedule, it is important to monitor what’s being said about your business and brand. First and foremost, keep track of what your audience say on your social media channels’: comments, tags, direct messages.
However, also check for any mention of your business outside social media.
Providing response to questions, complaints, and conversations in general will help you gain and maintain positive reputation. Help your existing and potential customers by answering their questions and solving their problems related to your product and service. In short, do media monitoring. By regularly doing it, you can detect potential problems which can be catastrophic for your business in the future and turn the situation to your advantage instead.
Make the Best Use of Data
Utilizing data to create benefit is also applicable in improving business through social media marketing. Diving deep into how each one of your post reaches your audience and how your social media presence help branding effort will enable you to prepare a more thorough and efficient social media marketing strategy.
If you’re planning on using a more comprehensive and advanced data analytics, various tools are now available to provide those data. However, social media platforms also provide basic information about your post.
According to Socialbakers, there are several areas in which analysis can benefit social media marketing. Some of those areas are audience analytics, performance analytics, and competitive analytics – among others.
Let’s Talk Advertising
Another option to improve your business through social media is by utilizing social media advertising. Social media advertising basically means placing advertisement in one or multiple social media platforms. With this service, you can tailor the ads to specifically meet certain demographics.
More and more people will find your business, and this can result in a far more consistent sales day by day.