Note: This post has been guest authored by Kevin Urrutia, who is the founder of Voy Media, a Facebook ads company in New York. He helps businesses maximize the benefits of Facebook Advertising, leading to a dramatic improvement in sales while pushing down costs. Voy Media thoroughly studies each client and comes up with tailor-fit solutions to bring about the best results.
There’s no doubt about it. Although different platforms may change over time, social media as a channel is here to stay. It has grown into a powerful marketing tool that gives you maximum exposure, giving your brand and business greater mileage. Social media has transformed itself from being just a trend to one of the most powerful advertising tools out there.
Although using various tools make publishing more convenient, an effective social media marketing is more than just creating content and scheduling them to be published.
In this post, we’ll talk about the ten social media marketing tips that can give your brand maximum exposure.
1. Find the right platform
A lot of digital marketers and business owners make the mistake of crafting the same kind of content on all social media platforms that they have. However, by doing so, they fail to deliver a unique experience a user is looking for in a particular platform.
Every social media platform out there is targeted for a specific demographic, so crafting the same kind of content in all social media platforms will not give you the results that you want.
Here is some information to guide you:
- Facebook: The world’s biggest platform with over 2 billion monthly users. This site is excellent for businesses and brands that are looking for leads and want to build a relationship with their target audience.
- LinkedIn: A social media platform for business networking. It’s utilized by both B2B and B2C businesses to connect and engage with their audience and create authority and trust.
- Twitter: Ideal if your audience is under 50 and wants to be updated with time-sensitive information like trending topics, various announcements, and news.
- Pinterest: This is a photo-sharing social media site and is ideal for businesses that have a visual appeal like travel, wedding, arts and crafts, restaurants, etc.
- Snapchat: Businesses can use this expiring content platform to give exclusive access, personalized content, and building relationships with both audience and influencers to foster brand loyalty and recognition.
The key here is to tailor your content to a specific platform. Test what kind of format works best for you.
2. Choose the right automating tools
Always staying active on social media takes a lot of time and dedication. But the good news is, there are a lot of automation tools that you can use to publish your posts and schedule them ahead of time.
Tools such as Buffer, Hootsuite, BuzzSumo, and Sprout Social can help you save time by helping you plan your content, then schedule these batches of postings all at once. Moreover, they make it convenient to monitor your network and reply to messages.
3. Tell stories more, sell less
Although social media is considered as a marketing tool, selling your products in front of your audience’s face will hurt your chances of winning them over.
The thing is, people will always love stories and they’ll scour social media to look for them. They’ll use social media to learn about new things and impress themselves with a particular feature of a product.
That’s why to effectively sell on social media, you need to be able to tell a story first before you could go on trying to sell.
Through the access of social media platforms and excellent design templates, this makes it easier for brands to tell a story that’s meaningful to them and their target audience.
Emotions play a key role in digital sellers and marketers. So, to be able to sell, you need to spark the curiosity of your prospects.
4. Share more visual content
You probably heard the saying, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” That’s why each time you publish content on social media, always include images.
However, see to it that the image that you use speaks to the reader, and don’t just pick your images randomly.
5. Post more educational content
According to a study by Hubspot, regularly publishing educational content is a useful way to get more exposure and widen your reach.
By crafting targeted educational content to your audience that is relevant and interesting, you can reach a wider audience, especially if this is done consistently.
6. Hold contests and promotional activities
Holding contests and other promotional activities are a great way to capture your audience’s interest and motivate them to engage with your brand.
You can come up with any kind of contest, like having product giveaways or giving away product discounts for example.
Be creative, because people will always love competing and will share your content and brand with others, helping you widen your reach.
7. Have something to give away
Giving away free stuff doesn’t mean that you’re just giving your stuff away. These freebies can be in the form of highly informative and engaging content, non-premium content, free webinars, and free videos.
The more targeted your audience who receive these perks, the better. Soon, it will only be a matter of time that they’ll happily transition into paying customers.
8. Make an extra effort on mobile marketing
In a data by Facebook, there are over 1.15 billion active mobile users on the platform daily, and it is predicted to increase to 23 percent each year.
Mobile social media marketing is more powerful than before. That’s why you need to create content and location-based ads that target mobile social media users.
9. Actively engage with your audience
No matter what platform you’re in, always remember the basic rule of social media ‒ be social.
To create a huge following and create a loyal audience, you have to interact with them. That way, your audience will feel that what they’re saying is valuable to you as well.
Once you show that you appreciate them, they’re more likely to reciprocate.
10. Test, Measure, and Optimize
If you want to grow on social media, you need to enhance the performance of your social media campaigns. Whether your content is organic or paid, everything should be properly tested, measured, and optimized.
Let’s say, you want to post at least 2 pieces of content daily. You need to measure the clicks, the traffic that you get, the open rates, and your reach. See if there are patterns and know what works best for you.
Over to You
So there you have it. Include these social media marketing tips in your strategy in order to give your brand maximum exposure. Also, always test your strategy so that you know what will work best for you.
Remember, consistency is the key if you want to accomplish something great.
