Social media marketing is a difficult beast to master. It might seem like a simple collection of small tasks at first, but the hours of effort required to truly succeed are equal to a full-time investment.
Essentially, what social media marketing success boils down to is growing your audience and building trust between your followers and your brand to the point that they happily and regularly engage with you. Fail to follow these four basic rules and you’ll find success very difficult to achieve.
Don’t make it all about you
You’re creating social media content for your audience, not for yourself. With that in mind, you should always try to formulate your posts with the aim of helping and/or informing your followers in some way.
Whenever possible, try to include words like “you” and “your” – words which address your audience directly. By doing this, your social media posts will feel more personal for your audience, making them more likely to engage with you. In the same vein, try to avoid words like “we” and “our” – these words make your posts seem self-interested and can make your audience feel disconnected.
Focus on creating brand awareness
Building your audience and increasing brand awareness should always be your primary focuses when it comes to social media promotion. It’s still very common for businesses to try and acquire leads and make sales via social media, but these are nothing more than effective methods for disengaging your followers and grinding your audience growth to a halt.
By focusing on growing your audience and developing a relationship with them, your followers will grow to trust you and become more willing to engage with your content. When that happens, you should start to see benefits across all your digital platforms (increased web traffic, more email subscribers, more enquiries etc.)
Avoid the hard sell
Nobody wants to see ads clogging up their social media newsfeeds. If your content schedule is simply post after post telling people to buy your products, you’ll quickly see your growth and engagement rates become stagnant.
Make content relevant and engaging
When planning your social media content strategy, think about what kinds of things you and the people you know tend to engage with on your preferred social networks. Once you’ve got a list of a few different content types (e.g. informative blogs, funny videos etc.), think about how you can create similar content and make it relevant to your industry.
Maybe you’re a shoe manufacturer/designer – write some blogs about some of the hottest shoe designs from previous years and put together a few short videos showcasing your best footwear in action. Or perhaps your industry is a bit more boring. Well, that doesn’t mean your content has to be boring too. Get creative with blogs, graphic designs and video content and success will follow!