When it comes to your social media network you should initially focus on the big three: Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Understanding these three channels is the best place to start to ensure you’re engaging with as many people, therefore potential customers, as possible. There are five main strategies you can also apply to each of these channels to achieve the best social media marketing results possible.
Improving Social Reach
The first and most important aim of your social media marketing strategy is to improve and develop your social reach, attracting and engaging more potential customers. You can do this by ensuring you complete and update all your profiles across the big three and where possible integrate key business-related keywords so you show up more clearly in search results. All non-social sites should have social icons added, such as your business website. This might sound like common sense but you should also ensure you’re ready and able to communicate when people get in touch, if someone initiates chat, chat back – it’s all good for business. Interaction is key as is putting across a personable and genuine image for your business.
On Facebook, use cover and profile pictures to show off the best bits of your business, perhaps your logo or a photo of your best products or happy customers. On Twitter use relevant hashtags where possible and register in relevant directories. Finally, on YouTube tag and title all your videos with relevant key words and submit your video sitemaps to search engines.
Increasing Engagement
Engaging with your network on a personal level is essential to keeping them interested. Posting purely promotional content will engage nobody and your social media marketing campaign will be a flop. Therefore, to increase engagement with your fans and followers you need to get creative. Develop and offer non-promotional content, share an opinion or show off your humorous side. The most important thing is that you’re genuine and connect with those who follow you on a personal level.
On Facebook publish at least one update daily, ask questions of your fans and value their opinions in your future moves. Perhaps give them the chance to name your latest product and use videos and photos wherever possible. On Twitter consider running contests and competitions to get everyone involved, ask quick trivia questions and keep the tone light. When it comes to YouTube make sure your videos are short and snappy, ask your audience for feedback and engage with their ideas. Show off your brand’s personality at all times.
Identifying and Engaging Influencers
Influencers are an essential part of your social media marketing strategy. There are plenty of tools on the market designed to help you recognise your most influential followers or fans and then treat them like gold dust Offer rewards, sneak previews and other exclusive offers solely for those who are particularly influential and have the potential to spread your brand further. It has worked for many popular brands.
You can use particular software programmes or online apps such as Klout or PeerIndex to check out your influencers across your networks and from there you can begin to contact those who are most valuable and work with them directly to improve relations and potentially reveal your brand to new markets.
Increasing Lead Generation
At the end of the day it’s all about making more profit in an ethical and enjoyable way, so that you and the customer benefit. Social networks are a hot bed of people proclaiming their needs or their problems and by keeping an active eye on your feeds you can jump on these situations and offer up your products and services if they ever happen to fit the bill. You can tailor what you offer to what is in demand and soon learn which elements of your business are surplus to requirements and which can lead to further more exciting growth. Social media marketing gives you the opportunity to not only monitor your own feedback and customer experiences but often check out that of your competitors. You can gauge popular opinion via social networks and therefore adjust your actions accordingly.
Understanding Analytics
Analytics have become an essential part of online marketing and understanding how successful or unsuccessful your campaigns, products or services may be. There are many analytic tools out there, for example Google Analytics and Omniture, which are designed to track growth of followers, record hits on your business site and also give you the chance to gauge the quality of the content you’re providing. This gauge can be against both external and internal influencers. Effective use of analytics can also help you to understand your campaign’s effectiveness in terms of turning leads into sales.
Analytics takes some time to get used to but once you’ve got your head around it and spend some time setting up your businesses’ specific goals and expectations. You can then use it effectively to see how well you’re doing against your predictions and also see whether they need adjusting at any time.
Including these strategies in your social media marketing plan will ensure that you’re actively engaging with your growing network and will also help it to expand further. Not only are you engaging with potential customers but also potential partners too. Teaming up with other brands is never something that should be overlooked and social media is the perfect way to connect with thousands of web-savvy brands looking to develop themselves further and who may have space for your product or service in their arsenal.
Social Media Marketing is as integral to your businesses’ success as all your regular marketing and campaign work and could be considered even more so when looking at how many people are actively engaging with social media on a daily basis. There’s a whole world out there waiting to be engaged by and interested in you and your business.
Article Source: Social Media Marketing and You: Developing Networks to Expand your Business
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