Whether you're a seasoned marketing pro, a newbie to social marketing, or an entrepreneur that wears many hats, the following five skills will arm you with the social media marketing prowess necessary to gain followers, influence an audience, and meet your business goals.
1. Be Selective & genuine
Those likes and followers become your community. So for that reason, be honest about what you say and careful about who you choose to follow. Social media platforms allow you to curate an audience and those people that you follow and share content from should be those whose opinions you want to hear, and ultimately the ideas that when re-tweeted and liked, help to push the company forward.
Additionally, remember that integrity is the name of the game! Often your resources are best served day-to-day when you reach out to potential customers or influencers through social media, but don’t send them the typical content that reminds them of spam. Instead read about what they are interested in, learn about them on LinkedIn, and try to reach out to them through using mutual interests or questions about themselves to grab their attention.
2. Multimedia speaks volumes
Guess what everyone? Images and video massively spike engagement rates when compared to social posts that do not include these elements. This holds true for all your social marketing platforms, from Twitter to Facebook and Google+. But, before you say, ‘Duh’, listen up! Every social marketer will advise brands and companies to use multimedia posts, however most of them forget to advise on best practices with multimedia. Images should be high quality and the correct size (nothing fuzzy please)! Additionally, images of people (preferably performing an action) or infographics continuously outperform other images. Both showcasing human emotion and providing easy to digest data are types of content social users crave. Here is some data from Twitter describing the affect that multimedia has on retweets:
3. Focus on your goals
Each and every social platform is different. But are they not all social media, aimed at gossip and chatting to friends of all kinds? Aren’t Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and even Google+ all, at their core, ways to reach our friends and family? Once upon a time, they absolutely were; however, once businesses discovered the value of connecting with their customers daily and the positive outcomes of selling and getting almost instantaneous feedback on new products, everything changed.
Every social platform can perform different functions for a company. There are even apps and tools, such as Klick Push, that help you further capitalize on social media. Depending on the industry or product, the audience for each platform can change drastically everything from strategy to kinds of published content. For that reason, every social media marketer should spend time and resources on conducting a social audit with their team. Define macro goals, a targeted audience, and even the amount of resources allocated towards each platform.
4. Grab & go
Early stage companies, listen up! This tip will be one that slips from most co-founders minds. The internet is a landscape where in a few years, land will be hard to come by. What does that mean for social media? It means that every social platform sees new sign ups day in and day out. For companies, that means that more and more names and handles are nabbed everyday and you too should claim your IP. For that reason, no matter the platforms and goals you define for each social channel or the your resources you allocate, make sure you create logins with your company’s name for every social platform you can think of. Think your financial services platform has no need for a Pinterest or an Instagram…..the cost in 2025 to buy that name from ‘Joe Shmoe’ will prove you wrong.
5. Timing Matters
This tip is an oldie but a goodie: timing matters - and thanks to the analytics capabilities attached to social media recently, tracking when you post and how well the content performs is not difficult to assess. Make it a strong focus with your social media team to find out when your audience is online and engaged. Test out when to Tweet original content, when to post on Facebook, and when posting new products on Instagram converts to sales. Measure the results based on your content and your community. Though most social marketing tips and tricks will guide your strategy regarding timing, not all of the conclusions drawn and advice given will be specific to your product and audience. Do not be afraid to test and experiment with ideas and creativity…. at the end of the day your own data driven answers will should dictate your social strategy.
Now that you're well on you're way to becoming a social media savant, it's time to enhance the rest of your marketing efforts. Start by building SMART goals. Click below and download the free template.
