Social Media Marketing for Beginners

Social media is an integral part of any business success strategy. In fact, in today’s day and age, businesses cannot afford to ignore social media.

When you take into consideration the cost of traditional marketing and compare it to social media marketing, it becomes clear that social media marketing comes out on top. Even a small business with a low marketing budget can afford using Facebook Ads or investing in Promoted Pins.

If you're considering how to use social media for your business, then dig into this beginner's guide. In this post, we’ll walk you through the steps necessary to create a successful social media marketing strategy. But firstly, what is social media marketing?

Definition of Social Media marketing.

Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms to connect with your audience to build your brand, increase sales, and drive website traffic. This involves publishing great content on your social media profiles, listening to and engaging your followers, analyzing your results, and running social media advertisements.

The major social media platforms (at the moment) are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and Snapchat.

With the definition explained we shall then define the steps for a successful social media marketing.

Step One: Create a Plan

Before developing your strategy it is first important to develop an adequate plan about how your strategy will look like. The plan most include how your target audience will look like and define also your goals and objectives.

- Define your target audience: Customers should be chosen based on your product offerings. The best way to determine who your target audience are involve focusing on the type of people you want to help. For example: Why that particular group? How do you want to help them? How old are they? Where do they live? What problems do they have? Will my product or service be able to satisfy them?

- Define your goals: Once you know the type of customer you want to attract, it’s time to set some goals. Your goals should follow what is define in business as the S.M.A.R.T goals. That is, your goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-specific.

Specific: Avoid goals like “I want to gain more sales with social media.” This type of goal is too broad and don’t follow any guidelines. Before defining your goals you should consider who is involved with your goal, why you want to achieve it, and what do you need to do in order to achieve your goal. For example, a more specific goal may include, “I want to gain more exposure for my business through social media”

Measurable: Your social media efforts should accomplish results to ensure you are making progress. The best way to measure your level of progression is by asking yourself the following questions; how many people did I reach? How many potential customers did I engaged? How many potential customers did I convert into buyers and loyal customers? If these questions are not answered within a specific period, you need to reevaluate your goals.

Attainable: Your social media goals need to challenge you but they shouldn’t be impossible to the point of causing burnout and overwhelm.

Relevant: Your social media goals should measure the result and not just the activities. For instance, if your goal is to increase awareness, measure your goal not on the number of tweet you send but on the number of people who interact with you through your tweets.

Time-Oriented: Setting a deadline for your social media strategy helps to keep you on track and gives you a practical timeframe to monitor your results.

Step Two: Choose your social media platform

Choosing the right social media platform can be a complicated task, especially when you consider the massive amount of social media platforms available. More importantly, not every social media network is the right choice for every business. Hence we will follow a series of steps to follow in order to follow the right social media platform.

- Focalize on a few social media platform: You might think that the smartest choice would be to get active on all of them, but that is actually the wrong way to go about it. Is it better to have 30 loyal fans on your Instagram account that visit your website, buy your product or to have 1000+ followers on Twitter that barely interact with your content? It’s far more effective to start small and focus on just one or two social media platforms and grow from there.

- Determine the type of social media which correspond more on your business: Many people believe that the bigger the social media the better, e.g Facebook. But there are many other factors to take into consideration. For instance, determine the type of social media platform your potential customers focalize more, do the social media platform suit your type of business? And in which social media platform your content has greater chance of getting exposure? For example, a restaurant business that relies heavily on local reviews would benefit more from social networks such as Instagram while a technology startup would see better results from Twitter. Whereas, a beauty consultant would benefit more from focusing on Facebook.

- Apply Some Market Research: Focalize your attention on your target audience, carry out research about your customers’ preference and determine whether or not your products may satisfy the target audience.

Step Three: Consider what and when to Post

Determine the type of content which will get more views and how the potential customers may gain more awareness and eventually can trust your offerings.

- Update Consistently: This involve continuously interacting with customers’ every day.

- Deliver Value: The best way to deliver value is to continuously generating new ideas that your audience will love. It may include blog post, funny stories, quotes and many others.

- Decide the Type of Content to Share: Choosing the type of content you're going to share depends on the amount of time available to create it. If your time is limited, choose status updates that don’t require a lot of time to create. It’s a lot easier to create a list of questions or quick tips than it is to create custom graphics and complex infographics every day. If, on the other hand, you rely on presenting data to your target audience consider posting infographics once a week. Keep in Mind other Peoples Content: Aside from sharing your own content, your social media content should include other relevant resources, such as any type of content that is relevant to your industry as well as your target audience. For example, if you’re in the business of selling printer ink cartridges, your social media updates can include other computer related tips.

- Track your Engagements and Social Media Strategies: At the end of every month or semesters you need to determine the level of involvement of customers toward your brand. Adapt to the changes in customers demand in preferences and determine a strategy based on these changes to stay constantly up-to-date.

Different strategies based on each social media.

• Twitter - Twitter is a microblogging and social platform in which users post and interacts with various messages known as tweets. Twitter is one of the fastest moving networks around. It might seem impossible for your followers to catch your message. Because of that, posting more than once is almost a requirement and recommended practice is to aim for at least 10 tweets/day.

• Facebook - It features include, facebook messenger, facebook watch, facebook portal and equally facebook market place. Aim for at least two posts/day on Facebook - one in the morning and one in the afternoon/early evening. Facebook is a social media platform and one of the top five companies in the US.

• Pinterest - Pinterest is a social media service which is design to share and discover information specifically ideas, through images gifs and videos. Pinterest has been emerging as the most popular social media network recently and according to some, it’s the biggest referrer when it comes to website traffic. Similarly to Twitter, the more you pin, the more chances you have of getting your pins seen. Aside from pinning your own content, you should re-pin other pins and add pins from other sources. However, avoid adding a lot of pins at once. It’s better to spread it out over the course of the day. Aim for at least 50 pins/day.

• LinkedIn - It is a platform mainly used for professional networking and allow job seekers to post their CV’s and employers to post their jobs offers. It is also a site for entrepreneurs and businesses. LinkedIn pretty much took out the guesswork in their own marketing guide and revealed that the ideal frequency to post is about 20 times per month, or once per day.

• Instagram - It is photo and video sharing social networking services. Although Instagram is a visual platform like Pinterest, the same strategy of posting more doesn’t apply here. It’s actually better if you stick to one or two status updates per day.