Before a new year could even start, here’s a quick guide to social media marketing for 2016. If you think about it, social media is probably one of the most accessible and effective marketing tool created in the past century. Free and has consistent traffic, numerous high-end and commercial brands and personalities have been using this platform to reach out to their loyal and prospective clients, followers, fans and what have you.
It also allows you to monitor the public’s perception of your brand and adjust to the current trends without much effort, or maybe even create your own trend. It basically provides an easy and efficient avenue of gathering data all in one place.
Your guide to social media marketing
Set your goals
Have a clear idea of what you want and when would you like to achieve it. It can either be short or long-term. You can go for simple things like getting a thousand likes on your platform within a month since you made it public. This way you can easily increase your identity and slowly create a social media community for your brand. This guide to social media marketing can also be translated into long-term ones like topping the search engine within the platform – be it the trending hashtag or trend. This is great for those who want to create longevity for their business.
Planning your steps
This guide to social media marketing requires a lot of thinking and careful planning. Your social media strategy should be part of your topmost priorities. Carefully plan out your moves within your platforms and filtering your time allotment on each one according to their effectiveness. Look at your social media presence and determine what needs more work and improvement or may be in need of an overhaul. Grow those sites that are helping in making your goals a reality. As always, quantity over quality.
Goals should reflect your content
On most guides to social media marketing, posting content that reflects the trend of the majority would be a smart move, but it’s not enough. Especially with your goals already being set, your social media content should properly represent them too. But don’t take this literally; this means putting a creative spin on your content that would still give justice to the goal you are trying to reach. Don’t just simply post something on the internet because it’s what people like. Be true to your voice and be proud of each content you actually publicize. Also, key in on special days of your consumers, like maybe Christmas or maybe graduation day and create a content that revolves around it while still being true to who you are as a brand.
Powerful Photos
Including photos in your content is a best practice to social marketing that you should really follow by heart. A picture can add visual impact to an already great post. It can actually say more than your post alone, thus ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’. Potential readers would gravitate to posts that have more visual stimulation to it rather than just plain text.
[Tweet “Great words plus a great photo equals to a better post reception.”]
Perfect timing
This guide to social media marketing should not be taken lightly. Although a carefully planned content is very much needed, timing is also essential in ensuring the success of your marketing strategy.
Proper time and time difference in between each post is key in order to fully harvest the bounty of social media. Posting to early or too late, also too many or too less, would not give your posted content ample time to bask in the limelight and garnered enough buzz and traffic it really needs, or deserves. Sometimes, great content would result to ashes because of bad timing.
Deeper not broader
On the discussion of this guide to social media marketing, people would usually go for the latter than the other. But what they fail to realize is that going broader would mean talking more about things without really getting into the nitty gritty details. Rather than covering a lot of topics, thoroughly discuss each one, especially those that really has created a buzz among the netizens.
In another perspective, going deeper also means getting more out of your platforms, one at a time. Instead of spreading your brand super thin, trying to create a lot of presence within the social networks, try focusing on one or two, or maybe three, platforms at a time and really build your credibility with your followers there. This way, you can provide a great feedback discussion system with them before going to other sites.
Focus where it is needed
Another best practice to social media marketing is to focus on the platforms where your clients, loyal and prospective, are active at. This allows you to really build up a rapport with them and build a stronger and better relationship with them, be it business to business or even business to consumer. The biggest mistake you could do is to invest more time trying to build up new connections rather than improving the one ones you already have.
By focusing on those specific platforms, you are able to better address the needs and concerns of your clients. Choose which platforms best caters to your needs and your clients. Just because everybody is on Instagram doesn’t necessarily mean it would spell great bounty for you. Same goes for the other platforms.
You can even track your name’s activity by including it in your notifications, alerting you whenever someone or a discussion is happening about you. Don’t waste time dealing with something, trying to make it work. Go where you can actually have gold and numbers and not mere projections.
Links
The greatness of this guide to social marketing is that it’s basically a click away. Most blogs and social media platforms are now able to link themselves together into one thread. This means that instead of constantly uploading content to your pages, individually, you can just simply post at one site and it automatically disseminate it to the rest of your accounts. Not only is maintaining your social media content much easier to do, it’s also much faster to redirect your traffic all throughout your accounts without much effort. The key to this is using only a single email account to direct notifications to. It makes it easier to log-in, create and stay up to date with everything, all in one screen.
Connect
Connecting with other social media titans is a strategy that allows your voice to be heard through other people’s platforms. Tap social media influencers (usually the young people that can run the social media world on their palms) and collaborate on something – be it a special project or an event.
These are the type of people you want to be in partnership with because they have the power to connect to a younger forum, making your brand much more relatable to a fresher audience. Like what some people would say, the youth is the future.
A partnership with those influencers can also give your social media identity a newer and much more accessible look that is has right now. But do choose wisely. Go with the ones that share your goal or voice so that things would be much easier to construct from the ground up. Talk to them in person first so that you are able to have a great online conversation if in case the two of you can’t be in the same place together.
Optimize
Optimizing your content, consistently, is probably one of the most important guides to social media marketing and content posting activity you would always need to remember. Though posting the perfect post at the perfect time means a great output on your social media content, optimizing it will bring it to a whole new level.
Optimizing social media content allows your post to be on top of search engine results, whether it be a brand new or archived content, allowing them to be on top of other contents or at least within the first 5 pages of the results page.
Wrapping it up
These are just some of the tips you can follow as a guide to social media marketing for this upcoming year. Some would say that creating an online presence is easy peas but on the contrary, it’s not. There are many ways you can do the wrong move just by assuming that things are great or that it’s just good enough.
Always see that things are not just what meet the eye. Especially with the rise of the social media as a form of marketing tool, things are now becoming more complex than just a simple post or a mere photo. There are now layers and steps you need to take to ensure that you would always be on the list, or even just be part of. This 2016, think before you click.
