When it comes to marketing online, social media has certainly grown into one of the most popular options among a host of different businesses.
Ensuring you get the most out of your social media marketing efforts, it’s important to remember some key facts. In today’s blog, I will be listing 6 points that are very much worth keeping in mind to help you maintain a successful social media presence.
it’s about permission
Social media marketing should really be seen as an integral subsection of inbound marketing. It exists to grow your online presence and focuses on a type of marketing where you capture leads through organic means as opposed to simply forcing your sales or message on them. In a sense, that means everything you do on social media is, in a way, permission-based.
You’re not telling prospects, leads or customers that they have to like your status or engage with you, you’re aiming to create content that will hopefully inspire them to interact with it in one way or another. For example, you may ask your followers on Twitter to retweet your tweet, but ultimately it’s their decision and will be determined by whether or not your tweet is actually worthy of a retweet.
On social media, no one is obliged to share any of your content. They choose whether it’s good enough. With that simple fact, you either directly or indirectly are seeking permission from them to share it.
Focus on your customers, leads and prospects
Okay, this probably seems like a very obvious statement, but it is the truth. When on social media, it’s less about you yammering on about why your products and services are great and more about you offering your audience content that’s going to speak to them. In other words, if you do decide to make a post about your product, you shouldn’t be saying why it’s so great – you need to be illustrating how it is of worth to your audience.
How would your product or service solve their problems?
But you also need to avoid the constant push of your products and services. I’ll go into this in a later point, but you’re supposed to be social on social media. You’re not just trying to build leads and customers, you’re wanting to humanise your brand and give people good reason to engage with you.
You need to remember that your current customers will be able to vouch for your brand. When you’re more engaging and make your audience feel welcome, then current customers will be more likely to sing your praises in a public forum such as on social media.
Embrace real-time marketing
With social media, the ability to engage with your audience in real-time has become exceptionally easy. When considering this, it also means that real-time marketing can play a huge role. Whether you’re checking a certain trending topic on Twitter or looking at the latest industry news on your RSS feed, you’ll find that there’s plenty of news or events happening in real-time that you can discuss.
As always, never forget to clarify the nature of a trending topic or news story. Because if the topic or news is in regards to something tragic, then you could find yourself in hot water if you unintentionally make an inappropriate post about it. So always research beforehand. Ultimately, though, there’s no denying the power of real-time marketing. By posting at the right moments, you can capture more traffic and really get a healthy discussion going.
Stand out from the chaos
For all the value that social media can present, it can also be fairly chaotic. Because while a trending topic can be a good source of newsjacking and real-time marketing, it’s equally a fine example of how congested social media is. When a topic is at its peak of dicussion, you could find after looking at a Twitter feed of the topic for five seconds, another 30 tweets about it are ready to be loaded. According to findings by Integer Group, around 2,314 tweets are sent per second. On YouTube, years of video content – just under 12 years, actually – is uploaded per day.
Social media is such a busy place that it can be hard to stand out from the chaos. The truth is, the only way to be remarkable is to offer something different. This could be trying to create content that has a possibility of going viral, but this is more or less a guessing game with very little chance of winning. So what should you do? Well, try and identify what others aren’t doing. If there’s a real-time story developing right in front of you, what are most people missing? Is there a unique opinion you can throw into the mix?
It can be hard to gauge what will and won’t work, but aiming to be remarkable is better than saying what everyone else is saying and fading into the digital noise.
Choose your social networking platforms wisely
In the same way social media is a busy place, it’s also a world with a whole lot of platforms. Facbook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest, Vine, the new Myspace, the old MySpace, Tumblr, StumbleUpon, Foursquare… There’s so many. Do you need to be on all of them? Absolutely not.
If you did that, you’d find the experience of marketing on social media to be a very unpleasant one. Before venturing onto any of them, research what they truly offer businesses. Because, at the end of the day, some social networks would just be a complete waste of time and would only add stress to the whole experience.
Be human, be fun
As I mentioned in the second point, your social media presence isn’t about pushing the sales, it’s about growing a base of leads and customers. It’s about engaging with your audience and humanising your brand. In other words, have fun with your social media presence. People aren’t really going to be all that interested in your business if every post you make is robotic, corporate and sales-based. But they will care if your posts are fun, thought-provoking and worthy of engaging with.
Source: Marginmedia
