What is social media marketing?
Social media marketing is the process of raising awareness about you, your products or services through various social media channels. The ultimate goal of any social media marketing campaign is to drive traffic to a website, increase the visibility of a product, get more social media followers or find more customers.
The most popular social media networks today: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram and LinkedIn.
Why is social media marketing important?
Social media marketing is important because:
- It is the fastest way to spread the word about news, service or new product. A tweet can compete within minutes and spread a message faster than TV or other traditional media.
- Social media is a trend. Millions of people spend most of their time on social media networks, so if you need them, you know where to find them.
- Before social media, marketers learned that many people spend time in their cars and think of billboards on the roads. Today people spend time on social media, so you should adopt this new marketing approach as a marketer.
- Recent studies indicate that social media has become an excellent sales channel and more and more companies are getting customers on Facebook or Twitter.
Social media marketing tips
How can you benefit from social media? How can new beginners create a convenient social media presence in a fast way?
Read and follow the 10 tips below to get started with social media marketing:
- Decide which social media platforms to use.
- Optimize your social media profiles.
- Link your website or blog to your social media pages.
- Add social media links to your website.
- Find and follow influencers where you are.
- Make a balance between following and followers.
- Share interesting content (text, images, videos).
- Post multiple times a day, but don’t overdo it.
- Don’t forget to follow back.
- Follow the rules and be patient.
1. Decide which social media platforms to use
As a social media newbie, you should choose one or two social media platforms and concentrate on them instead of working on all platforms at the same time. This is a mistake many beginners make and eventually leave it without any benefit.
A good way to find out which platform is best for your niche is to find influencers and analyze where they are successful.
For example, find the leaders in your niche and Facebook fans, Twitter followers, Pinterest followers, etc.
If it has 100,000 Facebook fans but only 1000 twitter followers, that’s a good indication that FB is better suited for your niche than Twitter. It is also a sign that you are more likely to be successful with FB than Twitter, so you can use your time more efficiently and interact more with FB than with other platforms.
2. Optimize your social media profiles
When you decide (at least for a start) which social media platforms to use, the next step is to optimize your profiles on those sites. By optimizing your profiles, you increase your chances of getting more followers and it’s also a good way to boost your SEO efforts.
Here are some general rules that apply to all sites:
Use a real photo that shows you – Avoid using animals, places or anything that isn’t real. Social media is all about connecting people, and if you want to have a reliable profile you need to get out of your cage and put your face on the internet!
Write a good description of yourself or your company – What is your background or expertise? What are you proud of?
Give users an idea of what kind of information to share – What type of content we can expect from Profiles.
Add a link to your website (if available) – Add your site to the “About” section on Facebook. Do this within other social networks. So use your social media profiles for SEO purposes as well.
3. Link your website or blog to your social media pages
The next step after creating your social media profiles is to link your website to your social media pages. There is a specific procedure to follow for each platform and it is very important to do this correctly.
These two links mean that search engines and social media websites know which website corresponds to which social media page.
4. Add social media links to your website
In addition to linking your website to business pages on social media, you also need to add social media buttons to your website so that your reader can easily share your content. Depending on the platform, there are many ways and plugins to do this, we recommend searching Google using “how to add social media buttons on xxxxxx”. – Replace xxxxx with the platform your website is based on.
For example, search “How to add social media buttons to WordPress?” at Google if you are using WordPress.
As a general rule of thumb, keep in mind that larger buttons get more clicks than smaller buttons to increase clicks.
5. Find and follow influencers where you are
So far we’ve selected the most suitable social media platforms for the niche, optimized our social media profiles, linked our website to social media pages and added buttons on our pages for more engagement.
The next step is to find people to follow, but the most important is to gradually build our followers. We can say that there are 5 basic steps to follow in order to get more followers.
Before you get into that, you have to find and follow influencers in your niche.
They are almost certain not to follow you because you have a new account with no followers, but 3 reasons to do so:
- Social media platforms will use this information to make suggestions on who to follow, so by following popular people in your niche, you will tell you are also in that niche.
- When you follow popular people who are likely to be followed by others, you meet a common ground with their followers.
- Influencers will most likely share important and useful information about your niche so you will have a chance to learn something new and repost it with your followers.
6. Make a balance between following and followers
When you start following people, you should always keep in mind that it would be better to strike a balance between the number of people you follow and the number of people they follow.
This is especially important on Twitter and Pinterest, and for many reasons:
- Software applications use this ratio (followers / followers) to make suggestions on “who to follow”, so if you have a very high rate, you minimize your chances of getting new followers.
- It’s a question of trust – Who do you think has a reliable profile: someone with 1000 followers but follows 2500 or someone with 550 followers who follow 510?
- A balanced profile is better for SEO – SEO has been talking about the importance of social media for SEO and how things have changed over the past few months.
7. Share interesting content (text, images, videos)
Sharing is the foundation of a successful social media marketing campaign. When we talk about posting content, we say “content is king” and you can achieve successful results with content marketing on social media.
If you share interesting and useful content, you may get more reposts, more visitors to your website, and, in some circumstances, more customers. Content marketing
What is interesting content? A combination according to our experience (and some studies):
- Articles/stories/niche related pages – not just from your own website.
- Interesting statistics about your niche.
- Quotes about niche.
- Research studies.
- Pictures and videos.
- Funny stuff – whatever your niche, you can occasionally post a joke, a funny image or a video to make your followers smile.
- Don’t forget hashtags – hashtags (#) can make your content more searchable, so remember to use hashtags on networks that support it.
8. Post multiple times a day, but don’t overdo it
A common question of newcomers to social media is “how many times a day should I post?”
The answer depends on the network.
There are many studies analyzing the impact of posting frequency and best practices include:
- Facebook personal page – As long as you want.
- Facebook business page – No more than 1-2 times a day and no more than 7 times a week.
- Twitter – The more tweets you receive, the more exposure you will get.
- Pinterest – several times a day is enough.
For more detailed information, How to Create a Social Media Marketing Plan? you can review our article.
9. Don’t forget to follow back
Most people focus on how to get new followers but forget to follow them.
You have to create the habit of watching people who are already following you every day and decide who to follow.
If you don’t do this regularly, most likely some of them will follow you and so you may notice a decrease in the number of followers sometimes.
10. Follow the rules and be patient
Social media networks have rules to keep spammers away. For example, Instagram has a limit on the number of people you can follow per day; Facebook also has its own rules, etc..
This means that building thousands of followers can take some time. So you don’t need to be patient and spend your money breaking the rules (your account will be suspended) or ‘buying followers or tweets’.
Try to spend time building a great social media profile that will last over time.
There are 2 important elements when it comes to social media.
The first is about setting up your social media profiles, and the second is about usage. So it’s about how you use your social media account.
- For the first point, it is important to get into networks that are better suited to your niche and have the right link between your social media pages and your website.
- For the second point, it’s important to follow the right people and share relevant and interesting content, always adhering to the rules of different social media networks.
To learn how to benefit from social media marketing for your business, you can check out our article titled Social Media Marketing for Business.
