Over 82% of U.S. adults are using at least one social media site.
Which begs the question, as a business owner, how effective is your social media marketing? If it’s already part of your digital marketing strategy, is it entertaining? How about does it deliver value to the public? Is your social media advertising bringing in new customers for your business?
If it is—great—you’re all set.
But if it ISN’T then you need to keep reading the 6 Tips to Improve Your Social Media Marketing Right Now.
Get Help With Your Social Media Management
Tip 1 - Create a Social Media Calendar
A social media calendar is a schedule utilized to help develop your ideas into content and publish them across all your social media channels. It’s a helpful way to develop ideas, build consistency and stay organized.
Quality content takes time and planning to produce. Remember quantity should never trump quality. It’s better to post less often but provide informative and valuable material for your audience. In fact, the latest algorithms prove that the more relevant and valuable your content is to online users, the better chance your post has of ranking well on search engine sites. By setting up a social media calendar, you’re not only ensuring consistent posting that builds customer loyalty and trust, but you can measure engagement with different pieces.
Let’s say you write a blog article once a week. In that scenario, your social media calendar might look something like this:
Monday: Write a blog
Tuesday: Post to Instagram
Wednesday: Post to Twitter
Thursday: Post to Facebook
Friday: 2nd Post to Instagram & Twitter
Saturday: 2nd Post to Facebook
Sunday: No Post
Tip 2 - Take Advantage of Platforms Relevant to Your Business
Social media is immensely popular among U.S. adults:
81% of adults use YouTube
69% of adults use Facebook
40% of adults use Instagram
31% of adults use Pinterest
28% of adults use LinkedIn
23% of adults use Twitter
Each of these platforms offers its users something different, and it’s important to take advantage of those differences as they relate to your business and what would be the best platform for your various content.
It’s one thing to be on social media, but if your content isn’t striking a chord with the right customers then your efforts may be wasted. Understanding your target audience will only help you when it comes to appealing to potential new customers. For help, take a look at the dominant demographics of each platform.
General audiences of varying incomes, races, gender, and age. Ideal for specific targeting.
Predominantly millennial and female. Ideal for branding.
Pinterest:
Largely female, split between millennials and generation X. Ideal for hitting a female audience with home, food, and fashion-related visual content marketing pieces (infographics, quizzes, etc.)
A concentrated audience of business professionals that are both educated and high-income earners. Ideal for targeting high-value clients.
Twitter:
Great for targeting educated males, managing PR, and facilitating direct engagement with followers and fans.
A heavy audience of 18-49-year-old males, who spend an average of 40 minutes a day on the platform, and largely on mobile. Ideal for capturing the attention of a specific audience through a visual medium.
Perform market research for which consumer your product or service would appeal to and that’s your target audience. Once you’ve identified which platform they’re most on, devote your time to building followers, educating your audience, and building trust in your brand.
As you develop your social media advertising focus, keep track of reception for your content (to gauge what your followers like) and your ROI. Your ROI will keep track of how much you’re spending and what campaigns resulted in revenue for the business, and which failed to land with customers.
Get Help With Your Social Media Management
Tip 3 - Start Using Video Marketing
Video marketing is one of the strongest ways to build customer engagement. This type of format helps educate your audience in an entertaining way while promoting your product or service. Because of the creative freedom of video marketing, the format is easily adaptable and can be impactful no matter the length.
69% of consumers prefer video to text when learning new information.
It’s more engaging than any other form of media available.
Video marketing makes up at least 82% of all Internet traffic.
Most platforms allow some form of video posting but some of the highest used ones are Facebook with more than 4 billion video views per day and YouTube where users spend an average of 19 minutes a day on the platform. Compare that to blog engagement statistics where the average user spends only 37 seconds reading a blog post, preferring to skim rather than read every word.
That means your customers could be missing out on valuable content that they otherwise could have gotten from a video.
At the end of the day, video marketing is a great way to make your business distinct, forward-thinking, and more profitable on social media.
Tip 4 - Leverage Interactive Content
Do you post quizzes? What about surveys?
Successful social media marketing starts with good content.
Good content is engaging. It invites participation and motivates people to like, share, and comment.
Quizzes and surveys are some of the most effective forms of interactive content out there.
Get Help With Your Social Media Management
Tip 5 - Engage and Support Your Customers as Well as Your Prospects
Talk to your customers and prospects.
Address their problems.
Offer your assistance.
Social media is a public relations platform for businesses, allowing them to speak directly to customers, prospects, and naysayers alike.
If you see a conversation where your business is mentioned or see a topic that’s relevant to your industry, feel free to jump in and offer your insight or expertise.
To best promote your brand and avoid negative PR, follow these best practices:
Respond to questions, comments, and concerns (positive or negative) as soon as possible. Do whatever you can to answer the question fully and provide assistance.
Don’t delete negative comments. Keep them there and address them with compassion.
Keep calm and give your prospect or customer the best service experience you can.
Tip 6 - Automate, Automate, Automate
Consistency is everything.
Sporadic posting will make your business look unprofessional, so posting regularly is key.
Devoting blocks of your time to social media management each day can be time-consuming as a business owner, you don’t have time to log onto Twitter and Facebook on a daily basis. If you’re struggling to keep up, you’re better off outsourcing your social media marketing to a dedicated team of professionals.
Social media is one of the strongest ways to connect to your audience and is essential to your overall digital marketing plan.
And though the barrier to entry may be low, using social media to grow your business isn’t as easy as it looks. To get ahead of casual business users and start seeing some real ROI, you need to take it seriously and work with a partner who knows what they’re doing.
If you’re interested in using social media marketing to improve your branding and sales revenue
Give us a call at (866) 344-8852 or visit us Scorpion.co
