Published On: July 29, 2019

Author: Eric Oliver

Social Media Marketing Tips

Start your social media marketing the right way. We have researched best practices and compiled a list to help you get start with social media marketing.

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Social media marketing is quickly overtaking the traditional way of marketing and becoming an extremely powerful way for businesses to find and engage with customers. Engagement on social media usually equates to higher traffic and more sales for a business. Are you using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn properly? If not, continue reading to find out how to use social media marketing to drive leads and create engagement for your business.

The What and Whys of Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing is not just a fad for businesses to use. It is here to stay and involves creating content that is not only informative but worth sharing. Sharing is caring and the more people care about your brand, the more successful your business will be online and offline.

Social media marketing includes posting text, image, and video updates to drive customer engagement. Sometimes you need to spend a little bit of money through paid social media advertising but you can still get amazing results organically. Take a look at our tips below to see how you can get the most of our your social media marketing.

Planning Your Social Media Marketing

What would you like to get out of your social media marketing campaign? Don’t just jump into it, you have to plan your strategy and find what works best for your business. Most businesses make the mistake of just throwing anything out and hoping it sticks. The better route is to define your social media marketing goals and have a plan.

What you need to ask yourself when you are planning your social media marketing goals:

What is your primary and secondary goal?
What are you trying to say to your audience?
Who is your audience and where are they? What groups, what locations, and what pages can you find them at? How old are they?
Once you capture your audience, how do you interact with them?
Which social media platform do you need to focus on?

If you are hoping for B2B leads, you may want to focus on LinkedIn and Twitter, but if you are a visual business you may want to share beautiful, professional images that are worth sharing on Instagram. There is a method to the madness, you just have to decipher your target audience and go to where they interact the most.

Meet Your Marketing Goals

When you plan and execute social media marketing the right way, you get much-needed help with your goals. Some of those goals may include:

Website traffic
Conversions
Brand identity and awareness
Product or service launch
Communication and engagement

As your target audience grows, you will see that it gets much easier to reach any of those goals.

Social Media Marketing Tips

So, now that you know the whats and whys of social media marketing, let’s get into the tips so that you can improve your brand and engagement on social media. Here are a few tips to get you started.

Plan and Schedule Your Content. Building your plan above is one of the most important things you can do to hit your goals. Research keywords, find or make images that people stop to look at, and brainstorm content that your potential customers look for. What does your industry as a whole do to drive engagement with their social media marketing?
Create Engaging Content. You know what fluff looks like so stay away from creating fluff. Create content that is engaging and consistent with your brand and marketing presence. Post often and on a schedule to ensure that your audience knows when something new is being posted. Find your best time to post with the most engagement and stick to that schedule. Create text or image posts that your ideal customers can relate to and that they find interesting. Interest leads to engagement leads to purchases.
Share Curated Links. Creating your own content is awesome and highly recommended but it can be time-consuming. You can also share links to outside articles as well. Your audience will enjoy content from you or from someone else, but as long as they hear it from you. Just make sure it is relevant to your brand or industry and it is something worth sharing. Not all content is created equal.
Your Brand Should Be Consistent. Once you know what your brand is, stick to it. If you are a funny brand, be funny. If you are a business brand, be business. Your audience likes you for you, don’t try to be someone else because it could be someone they don’t like. Be consistent across all social networks. They each have a different approach, but your core values should be reflected across all networks.
What Are Your Competitors Doing? Know your competitors. Know what they post, how they engage, and what makes them successful. Do what they successfully do, but do it better.
Measure and Remeasure Success. Research and success go hand in hand. You can’t know how your social media marketing is doing without reviewing analytics. Track your audience and learn what they like and how they interact with your website and your brand. Track your campaigns per social media network so you can measure your success and sift through all of your data without confusing your resources.

Paid Facebook Marketing

Advertising on social media platforms can seem like a daunting task, but once you can learn it or hire a social media marketing agency to help you build the perfect campaigns that can help your business generate new leads. If you do it right you can have success without breaking the bank. Paid social media marketing is a cost-effective solution to expand your business reach. Since most people use some form of social media, you have highly targetted audience capabilities so you can focus on your budget on people that are most likely to convert for your business. Want to get started with paid social media marketing? Let’s review some tips below:

Create Effective Ads on Facebook

Facebook and its ad manager is one of the most powerful digital marketing tools available for businesses. Not only can you create well thought out ads on Facebook, but you can also push those ads to Instagram to cover even more area. You can use Facebook to create effective ads that can generate leads from real people in real-time.

Great social media marketing ad, courtesy of Gulf IslandsWater Park

Specific Demographics. When you create an ad you can set your target demographic, but regardless of whether you sell to people worldwide or next door…do not set to broad an audience. The broader it is, the more likely you will just waste money on clicks and impressions that are not important.
A/B Testing, Then Do It Again. Create an engaging image and text combination, then create another just like it, then another and another. Then run A/B testing to test them against each other. Don’t A/B test all of your variables at one time, test one or two at a time and let the winners compete against another set of ads with a different set of variables. Once you do this a few times you will have a winning ad that generates leads and purchases.
Tracking and Pixel Code. In order to know how your ads are doing make sure you have a pixel installed on your landing page or website. This is important because, without a pixel, your A/B tests will be invalidated. You need to know what your audience is doing when they click the action you are paying for.
Retargeting Your Audience. Once you have an audience set up, let your pixel run. While you are building your audience the pixel will track their actions. If they view your products, add something to a cart, or make a purchase, the pixel will know. Once it knows you can use this to create a new retargeted audience and send them other ads that either leads them more into the funnel or into a new funnel. You don’t want to keep showing ads to the same people especially if they already completed the action. Make your ads and ad set dynamic to the audience.

Choosing A Social Media Marketing Network

There are a lot of social media networks you can use. So, how do you know what your demographic is and what social network to use? Well, we have a few tips for that too.

Using Facebook for Social Media Marketing

Typical Age Range: 25-34+
Posting: At least 1-2 times a day
Audience: Active and Engaged

When you use Facebook for social media marketing you have to be active and engaged. You have to create images and text that mesh well with your brand and your audience. Facebook is where people unwind and chat with friends. Keep a light tone and be friendly. Your audience on Facebook is opinionated and share their opinion often. They comment and share brands they love and make sure their friends and families know what they support. If you get into their circle, you are set. Also remember, that Facebook videos do the best when it comes to marketing and with Facebook’s audience it is in high demand with 8 billion views per day.

Using Instagram for Social Media Marketing

Typical Age Range: 18-29+
Posting: At least 5-6 times a day
Audience: Active and Engaged

Instagram is like the little brother of Facebook. It has over 800 million monthly active users and has created multiple millionaire influencers. Branding and creative posts get seen and liked quickly. With an active and engaged community, Instagram has taken the internet by storm and since being acquired by Facebook, it has only grown. 32% of Instagram users are college students and are looking to stand out.

Using Twitter for Social Media Marketing

Typical Age Range: 20-40+
Posting: At least 4-8 times a day
Audience: Active and Partially Engaged

Twitter can be confusing at times, but for the most part, it is like texting the world. If people have issues with your brand, they can post it on Twitter and have thousand if not hundreds of thousands of people seeing it instantly. The Twitter feed moves quick but something that stands out gets retweeted and spread like wildfire. Above I say they are partially engaged because for the most part unless they are actively involved with a conversation, they can miss a lot. Be quick and active and make sure you follow certain hashtags that reflect your industry. Be the first to hear news on Twitter.

Using LinkedIn for Social Media Marketing

Typical Age Range: 35-65+
Posting: At least 1-2 times a week
Audience: Semi-active and Engaged, but Business Only

LinkedIn is a sort of forgotten network for most people but the people on it are usually business owners looking to talk to and connect with other business owners. It is one of the only places where you can be friends with the CEO of a company. It is business-oriented so if you are active with B2B marketing, LinkedIn is one of the best places to find warm leads. Your audience is business-minded and when they are online, they are actively looking for business-related news and articles. Keep it business though. Typically news and shares unrelated to businesses get knocked down pretty hard.

Check out our guide to become a power user on LinkedIn and make it profitable for your business.

Using Youtube for Social Media Marketing

Typical Age Range: 15-65+
Posting: At least 3-5 times a month
Audience: Active and Engaged

Like Facebook, users use Youtube as a way to relax and watch a few shows they follow without turning on the TV. Some people have their favorite YouTubers and follow them religiously. If you have a channel, don’t expect a huge following unless you create a winning formula and compelling content. Youtube users are vocal and do not hold back when it comes to bad content. Create winning content and you will have life-long subscribers.

Using Reddit for Social Media Marketing

Typical Age Range: 15-40+
Posting: At least 1-2 times a day
Audience: Active and Engaged, tech-savvy

Reddit is a somewhat hidden gem of a social media network. It has over 2 billion pages views a month and its user base is growing every month but a lot of people have never heard of it. Redditor are tech-savvy and will call out promotional posts quickly. Not only will they call it out but they will upvote it just to showcase how it is promotional and to warn everyone that your account posts sponsored posts. They even have an entire subreddit devoted to doing just that called /r/hailcorporate. So, with Reddit, know your audience and post something that is unique and informative. Become a good Redditor and join the conversation. Cats may also help (don’t ask).

Whew, That’s A Lot To Take In

Hopefully, our article on social media marketing helps you and your business. As you can see it is a lot to manage on your own. If you need help marketing your business using professional social media marketing, contact our agency. We can help your business become a superstar on any social media network.

If you are interested in learning more about how this topic can help your business, please contact our agency on our contact page or call us at 1-888-964-4991. We publish a new article once or twice per month so make sure to follow us on social media and allow for push notifications if you want to stay in the loop with our agency and digital marketing.

Posted In: Content Marketing, Marketing, Social Media