The days of thinking about social media as just a fad for young people is over. Now everyone in business needs to be aware of social media marketing.
Becoming a master at social media marketing might seem overwhelming at first. But it’s possible for anyone to get to grips with the world of social media.
By using social media you can promote your business, products, and services. The aim of this is to drive traffic to your website, and thus, raise awareness of your products and services even more.
Keep reading to find out how you can promote your business online by becoming a master of the art of social media marketing.
1. Choose a Social Media Platform
There are so many different social media platforms. These include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+ and many more.
You can’t concentrate on all of them at the same time from the start so you have to choose one or two to focus your attention on. After this, you can expand your social media marketing strategy across more platforms.
Start by researching where the influencers and leaders within your niche promote themselves on social media.
If they have over 10,000 Instagram followers but only 1,000 Twitter followers, this is a good indication that you should focus your efforts on Instagram rather than Twitter.
2. Optimize Your Page and Profile
It’s time to learn how to optimize your page and profile. This means making sure you include a photo – this should be a real picture of you to promote trust between you and your followers.
Include a description that clearly and briefly says who you are and what your company is about. Also, say what kind of content you want to share with your followers.
And remember the ultimate goal of social media marketing is to get people clicking on your website. This means you need to make sure the link to your company website is displayed on your social media page.
3. Link Your Company Website to Your Social Media
Now you have a fully functioning social media page optimized, it’s time to link your website to your social media pages. This is slightly different with each social media platform.
This is especially important to maximize your SEO (search engine optimization) so that social media also helps you to boost your rankings on SERFs (search engine results pages).
Unless you link the website to the social media page, people won’t necessarily know that they are connected.
4. Include Social Media Buttons
In addition to linking your website and social media together, you also need to include social media buttons on your company website.
This makes it easy and convenient for users to switch between your website and social media to share your content.
Again, this is achieved slightly differently, depending on the social media platform you’re using.
You can usually choose the size of the buttons on your website. Keep in mind that the bigger the buttons the more likely users are to click and share your content.
6. Connect with Influencers and Leaders in Your Niche
Find people on social media in your niche who are influencers and leaders to follow, tweet or share with.
By following the key players in your niche the social media platform will also suggest other people in the niche for you to follow. This allows you to build up your social media marketing campaigns.
By following influencers and leaders, you’re also more likely to get followed back. You can increase the number of followers you have by following the followers of the leaders in your niche.
But by following the big hitters in your niche, you’ll also be exposed to interesting and useful content about your niche. This is always important for anyone in business.
6. Balance Followers and Following
At first, the number of people you’re following is always going to be more than the number of people following you. Even though this is absolutely fine, it’s also good to be mindful that you should always try to keep a balance between your followers and following.
This is because of a good balance between followers and following works in favor of your SEO rankings. But it also improves trust among users, you’re more likely to trust someone with many more followers.
7. Share Great Content
A large part of social media marketing is sharing content that people actually find interesting or useful.
Unless you share great content, you won’t get re-shares or increase traffic to your website.
So whether it’s interesting articles in your niche from your website or a fascinating or hilarious video from Youtube, make sure it’s content your followers actually want.
Last but not least, if you’re using Twitter or Google+ make sure you’re you use hashtags (#). This way, users can search for content using the hashtag.
8. Post Regularly
There is no easy answer to the question – how often should I post on social media? This is because it really depends on the social media platform you’re using. But there’s lots of research on the frequency of posting and how it affects your social media marketing efforts.
For instance, on Twitter, the more you tweet the better. Whereas on Facebook, there is a limit of a couple of times per day, after this, you start to annoy your followers.
9. Follow Back
When you’re concentrating on increasing the number of followers on your social media, it’s easy to forget to follow users back.
But unless you follow people back, you risk being un-followed. This means all of your hard work went to waste.
By regularly checking out the people who have recently followed you, you can decide who’s worth following back, and who you can risk losing.
10. Follow the Rules
Every social media platform has rules to avoid spamming. You’d be wise to always follow these rules. This means that you also shouldn’t buy followers or fans because you could risk being suspended by the social media platform.
But by following the rules, it means you can build up your social media presence overnight. You have to be patient and gradually work before you start having thousands and thousands of followers.
Become a Master of Social Media Marketing
With this 10 tips on social media marketing, you can start your journey towards mastery of social media.
If you’re ready to find out more about how you can run your social media campaigns, contact us to find out more!