9 Essential Tips When Utilizing Social Media Marketing

Social media has become an essential part of any marketing campaign. Social content has the potential to be a powerful force for building your brand. Here are nine tips to help you make the most of it.

1) Create a Plan

Almost everyone uses social media. Your kid, your mom and even your neighbor’s dog probably has a Facebook profile. Social media use is so common that it can be tempting to jump right in and start using it to promote your brand.

Enthusiasm is warranted, but when using social media strategically, it’s helpful to have a plan in place. You’ll want to develop a specific strategy for each social media channel you’re using.

In the plan, include your goal for that channel, the people you want to reach, the types of content you’ll share and the tone you’ll use. Having a strategy planned beforehand will help you be consistent and keep you from feeling overwhelmed when managing your social media.

2) Gather Customer Data

Social media provides you with a wealth of customer data. It’d be crazy not to take advantage of all that information! You can use social media to see who’s talking about your brand and what they think about it. You can find out what your customers and potential customers are interested in, so you can provide better services to them and reach them more effectively.

Using data from social media, you can learn more about your audience, your brand’s reputation and adjust your strategies accordingly.

3) Customer Service

Social media isn’t only a place for promoting your brand. Nowadays, customers also expect to have their customer service needs handled over social media. You can provide quick, convenient customer service to customers using your social profiles. You might even consider making an account specifically for helping customers.

It’s great to assist customers online when they come to you over social media, but you can take it a step further too. When you see someone online discussing a negative experience they had with your company, engage them and let them know you’d like to help resolve the issue. Then transfer the conversation to a private message to work on fixing the problem.

You might be interested in: How to design the best seasonal content.

4) Build Relationships

Whereas traditional advertising such as billboards, television and radio ads are a one-way conversation, social media gives you the opportunity to build relationships. Don’t treat it like a one-way street. One of the biggest advantages is that it allows you to have real conversations with your customers.

You can engage with your customers continuously, ask their input, hold contests, address customers concerns and create lasting, meaningful customer relationships over social media.

5) Target the Right People

Social media allows you to get extraordinarily specific with who you’d like to target. You can target your content through the way you create and promote it and through social media tools.

Once you know your desired audience, you can target your content directly to them, using a tone that will resonate and creating content they’ll be interested in. You can also use appropriate hashtags to gain more visibility for your posts. Many social sites also offer tools that let you target your content by location, type of user and other criteria.

6) Direct People to Your Website

Once you make the initial connection on a social site, you can use that interaction to lead potential customers to your website. Sharing your blog’s content with a link on your social media is a great way entire readers and bring traffic to the blog. Your blog is probably on your company’s website, which creates an opportunity to show customers more of what your company has to offer.

Always make sure your website is easy to reach from your social media. People have limited patience when it comes to finding information online.

7) Become a Resource

If you want people to engage with you on social media, you need to create content that is useful to them. There’s a time and a place for proclaiming your company’s greatness — and that time is rarely on social media. Your social posts should establish your online presence as a resource for your audience.

If customers acquire some sort of value, they’re more likely to come back for more and have a favorable impression of your business. Content that teaches them how to do something, makes them laugh, tells them something interesting or is useful in some other way is going to be much more effective for establishing and building relationships that ultimately lead to new customers.

8) Keep Tabs on Your Competitors

If you’re using social media, your competitors likely are too. Don’t steal anyone’s secrets, but learn from your competitors’ social media presence. Check out their posts and see what’s working well for them and what’s not. Take those observations into account when designing your own posts. Taking note of who your competitors’ audience is can give you ideas about your own audience.

9) Analyze Past Content

Your own social media posts can provide you with valuable feedback that will help you improve your marketing strategy. It’s easy to look back and see which posts received the most engagement. Finding a common theme in the successful posts can show you what you might want to do more of in the future. Is it a specific topic? A format? The use of images? If a topic you tweeted about did especially well, you might consider expanding it into a blog post and then sharing it on social media.

Social media is becoming increasingly influential. It offers many unique benefits, such as the chance to have a two-way conversation with customers, target content and gather customer data. Social media is an incredible tool you don’t want your company to miss out on.