How to start Social Media Marketing

What is social media marketing?

Social media marketing is the practice of using social media channels to sell or promote a brand, product or service.

Social media marketing helps businesses:

• Increase brand awareness
• Build engaged communities
• Sell products and services
• Measure how people feel about your business
• Provide customer service on social media platforms
• Advertise their products and services to target audiences
• Track your performance and adjust your strategy accordingly

What is a social media strategy?

A social media strategy is a document outlining your social media goals, the tactics you will use to achieve them and the metrics you will track to measure your progress.

Your social media marketing strategy should also list all of your existing and planned social media accounts along with goals specific to each platform you’re active on. These goals should align with your business’s larger digital marketing strategy.

Finally, a good social media plan should define the roles and responsibilities within your team and outline your reporting cadence.

10 Steps to Getting Started in Social Media Marketing

1. Determine your goals

What do you want to get out of your social Web participation? Why are you doing it? Are you trying to generate direct sales? Are you trying to offer a form of customer service? Do you want to build relationships with customers and boost loyalty? Your answers to these questions greatly affect the type of content you publish and the activities you participate in on the social Web.

2. Evaluate your resources

Who is going to create your content? Who is going to maintain your social media accounts? Who is going to respond to questions and be the face of your business online? Do you have the technical ability in-house to join the online conversation? If not, are you willing to learn? Can you or someone who works with you write well? You need to be sure you have the necessary people in place to execute a social media marketing plan before you start.

3. Know your audience

Where does your target audience spend time online? What kind of content and conversations do the audience members get most vocal about? What kind of information do they want from you? What do they dislike? Remember, you’re not just publishing marketing messages on the social Web. You need to find out what your audience wants and needs, so you can provide the kind of content they find useful and interesting. However, you also need to be personable, so they actually want to interact with you.

4. Create amazing content

Once you know where your audience spends time and what kind of content audience members want, take the time to give them more of that kind of content. Don’t give up. You need to continually offer your audience amazing content, which also comes in the form of conversations, in order to build a loyal following of people who trust you as a source that can meet their needs and expectations.

5. Integrate your marketing efforts

All of your efforts at social media marketing should feed off each other. Cross-promote your efforts both online and offline, and make sure your social media and traditional marketing efforts work together seamlessly.

6. Create a schedule

Allocate specific times during your day to devote to social media marketing. For example, spend five minutes on Twitter before you check your e-mail each day and another five minutes before you leave work each day. When you create a schedule, it’s easier to stick to it and make sure you don’t skip your social media marketing activities each day.

7. Adopt an 80-20 rule

Always spend at least 80 percent of your time on social media activities that are not self-promotional and no more than 20 percent of your time on self-promotional activities.

8. Focus on quality, not quantity

It can be easy to get caught up in the numbers, but don’t become a slave to followers and subscribers. It’s better to have 1,000 highly engaged, loyal followers than 10,000 followers who sign up to follow you but then never acknowledge you again.

9. Give up control

You must let your audience take control of the online conversation and make it their own so they develop an emotional attachment to you, your brand, and your business. Remember, on the social Web, apathy or invisibility is a bigger problem than negativity.

10. Keep learning

You can never stop listening and learning. For success in social media marketing, you need to be flexible and accept that change is good.

Getting Your Small Business Started With Social Media Marketing

1. Start with your basic objectives for using social media

Before you can really begin to leverage social media, you need to ask yourself some key questions about why you’re doing it. What are you hoping to accomplish? Are you hoping to increase sales, or improve customer service? Or alternatively, are you just looking to create a little more visibility for your brand?

2. Start small, and be selective

There are numerous social platforms. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest – the list goes on. If you’re ambitious, you’re probably anxious to get your business up and running on most of them. But the reality is this – you can’t (and shouldn’t)  try to create your social presence on each of these platforms overnight. You have to start small (think crawl, walk, run).

Be selective at first. Choose one or two sites to start out – the ones that make the most sense for your business. Then, once you have enough time and money to commit, begin to scale your efforts and social footprint.

3. Hone in on a target audience

As you’re developing your social strategy, choosing sites and content strategy, etc, you’ll probably be guided by one key question: Who’s your audience?

This will influence everything. Take your site choices, for example. If you’re trying to cater to millenials, you might want to emphasize YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat more than other networks. If you’re targeting moms, Pinterest works great. Facebook is broader, appealing to everyone.

Which social site is the best match for you? It depends on what your business is trying to accomplish. Research your intended audience before you make any final decisions about where you will focus your social efforts.

4. Come up with a memorable handle

What’s in a name? Ideally, it’s one that’s catchy and memorable. When it comes to your social presence, you’ll want to create a handle that people will recognize across all of your social brands.

It might be just your company’s name, or it might be something a little more elaborate, just to emphasize a certain aspect of your brand. 

What kind of handle works best for your business?

Once you decide on your handle, do some research to ensure it’s available on the various social platforms. One of the tools I use for this is Knowem.

5. Build a social media team

Once you’ve got a plan for delving into social media marketing, you need to have resources to execute it. Once your social presence begins to scale, you won’t be able to handle every aspect yourself. You have a business to run, and you’ll need help.

6. Get the cadence right

One of the key questions guiding your social efforts is this – how often will you post on your social sites? Is once a week enough, or do you need to do more?

The answer? It depends on which sites. A good rule of thumb is if you’re writing in-depth blog posts with a lot of words, once or twice a week is probably fine. On sites like Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, where people follow a lot of content from a great many people and brands, you’ll need to step it to 3-5 posts per week. On Twitter, where volume is king, you can do more. Several tweets per day is acceptable. One key rule – don’t post, just to post. Ensure each post, tweet or piece of content is relevant to your audience and adds value.

7. Have a schedule, but show flexibility too

Once you’ve figured out how many times to post on your social sites, the next question is when.

Timing your social posts is part science and part art. On one hand, there are certain optimal time slots – people love to browse social media sites during their lunch breaks and in the evenings after work. But if you adhere to a rigid schedule just to hit those sweet spots, you’ll start to seem too automatic, like a robot. You’ll want to mix it up for variety’s sake.

8. Be authentic and personable

Mingling with people on Twitter isn’t that different from doing so at a party or social gathering. In both cases, you make friends by being yourself and being authentic and nice.

Keep this in mind as you’re posting online. People don’t want to cozy up to a brand whose social presence sounds rigid and corporate – or worse yet, unpleasant. Show a human side, interact with people kindly and develop a personality. People will appreciate that, and the following will come.

9. Develop a content pipeline

A cute or funny post can grab a viewer’s attention for a minute or two, but what really keeps them coming back is engaging content. You want your social presence to link to sites and articles that people will find interesting, or that will add value to their lives. If you can do that, you can secure consumers’ loyalty.

So develop a pipeline for your content. What types of content will you post? When and where will you post them? Map out a plan and stick to it for a while, but don’t be afraid to adapt if you think it’s not working.

10. Mix up your social media marketing content offerings

You’ve got to have a plan for sharing content, definitely. But what type of content? Ideally, you’d have a combination of different elements. Try to balance your own original content with valued, content curated from other sites. Search for those “nuggets” of content that your audience will value, but might not otherwise find.

Balance your original content with the content you curate and share. If you only share content from other sources, you’ll just seem like you’re leeching off of others’ hard work rather than doing your own. If you only share your own content, you’ll seem too promotional and sales-y. A nice balance will make you appear knowledgeable, worthwhile and humble 🙂 .

11. Link, link and link again

Once your business has a strong social media presence up and running, you want to link people to it again and again and again. You don’t want to force it too much, lest people start to feel like they’re being spammed, but still – it’s important to reinforce your brand.

The great thing about having multiple social accounts is they can all be interwoven with one another. Put up a blog post and link it to your Twitter page. Post a photo on Instagram and invite people to learn more on Facebook. One social presence can link to several others.

12. Coordinate from a central dashboard

The downside is that juggling all of these accounts can get confusing. You’ve been meaning to post on one of your social sites today, but which one was it? Twitter? Pinterest? YouTube?

You might need to use some kind of tool for coordinating all of your social efforts. Investing in a social media management platform – say, an application like Hootsuite , Sprout Social  or Sendible will give you a convenient centralized dashboard. This way, all your social media logistics will be viewable on a single screen. There are a number of social management platforms available – research and select the one that is right for you.

13. Add value for customers

Here’s a key question that many small business leaders have about posting on social media – “Once I begin interacting with customers, what approach should I take? What should I actually say?”

The trick is to find the right balance between delivering the brand message and being personable. After all, the goal is to increase your sales, but you don’t want to come across as being sales-y. Social media is a great platform for increasing awareness of your brand and raising visibility at the top of the sales funnel. It’s not the place to be driving price points and conversion tactics at the bottom of the funnel.

Focus on adding value for customers in subtle ways. Offer them useful tips. Solve their problems and answer their questions. Recommend strategies for their business or personal lives. If you add value in small ways, the sales will come.

14. Make valuable business connections

The other name for social media you commonly hear is “social networking,” and there’s a reason for that – there’s no better place than the Internet to network and make key connections with others. You should be using your social presence to build relationships that might help you later.

This can include any number of strategies. You might use LinkedIn for reaching out to potential hires and to bypass the gatekeepers at various companies you would like to work with. Twitter is a great place for sharing content with industry thought leaders. Facebook helps you bond with local people in the community who might become customers. Everywhere you look on social media, there are opportunities to make connections. Don’t shy away it.

“The best time to begin building your social network is before you need it.”

15. Be willing to try new things

Social media marketing has been a viable marketing strategy for some time now, and we’ve come to understand that there’s an accepted way of doing things. There are norms for where to post, when, how often and so on and so forth.

Maybe in the beginning, you’ll adhere to these rules like gospel. That’s probably for the best – you don’t want to stray too far from what’s accepted until you know what you’re doing and understand the various nuances. Eventually, when you’re ready, you can begin to branch out and try new strategies.

Play with the volume and timing of your posts. Share content that’s different. Venture into new social sites that aren’t in the mainstream yet. Experiment with convention, and you might stumble into a new strategy that works surprisingly well for you and your business.

16. Track your company’s social media reputation

Every social media site represents a great place for sharing information about your business. But here’s the secret – you’re not the only one talking about you. Other people are, too.

As you explore the various social sites, devote some time to tracking the reputation of your business. Search for what people are saying about you. If the word is positive, take a moment to express gratitude for the nice things people are saying, and vow to keep up the good work. If it’s negative, look for constructive criticism. Do people’s social comments point to something you can do better?

17. Measure the results of social media

Way back at the beginning of this post, we discussed the importance of starting with a goal in mind. Remember what you got into social media for – whether it’s increasing sales, better service, better exposure, whatever – it’s always good to have goals.

Along the way, you want to measure your progress toward those goals. If you want to increase sales, then check the numbers – are they going up? If you want better service, then ask around – are your social efforts making a real difference?

Getting involved with social media takes time, energy and of course money. You don’t want any of those resources to go to waste. If you follow up and measure your results, you can ensure that they don’t.

In conclusion…

There’s a wide world of social media sites out there with a range of different uses. Here’s how to make the most of them all:

• Begin with your basic goals. Consider them as you decide on a social strategy, an audience and an identity.
• Build out your social presence with a great deal of content, both from your own business and elsewhere, and share it with impeccable timing.
• Branch out, explore, interact and monitor your progress. Social media will help your business grow and thrive – but remember, it takes time and won’t happen overnight.

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