Tips for always staying ahead on your social media game
There is no way you can maintain SEO without social media. These are always there, together, helping your brand become more visible to your followers and target audience. To become visible on social media, you will firstly need high-quality content. This can be photos, videos or snippets of 140 character texts like those that we see on Facebook.
Have you recently noticed how Google search results also include results from social media sites? You can now find relevant search results from Facebook and LinkedIn as well.Getting noticed on Google with the help of social media is one of the easiest things you can do! Not only can you reach out to your followers, you can reach out to your potential customers who use the same platforms.
The interesting bit about using social media platforms for marketing is the variation in outcomes. Your marketing targets will determine the net outcome of your actions. If your target is to get more followers by using a targeted post, you cannot expect to boost your sales with the same action.
There are several strategies that established brands already use to reach new target audiences, increase brand awareness and increase website traffic. For devising efficient strategies, you will need to know your business targets and business requirements. Therefore, before you begin working on your social media strategy, here are a few points you need to remember –
Brainstorming
Once you know what you want from the process you will need to start brainstorming for new social media strategies and marketing ideas. You need to know the latest social media trends. We use the term social media with a sense of homogeneity. However, there are at least 9 most popular social media platforms that cater to separate niche and have completely different working principles including Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+.
These platforms are already filled with brands who are trying to establish their foothold in new markets. So you will need to be smart, creative and nifty in your approach. Usually, sitting down with people who are well aware of the finest details of social media helps in devising working plans for the same.
Planning your actions –
After you are done brainstorming for new ideas and strategies, you need to plan your actions based on your budget, goal and team strengths. For this, you will need to ask a few questions to yourself including what improvements you want to see in your brand. You will need to assess your content quality, existing marketing strategy and current social media platforms that you can use to gain maximum visibility.
During this process, you need to make sure that all your resources are in place you have the right talent for the work and you have an updated goal-calendar in place to make sure you are going in the right direction.
Implement what you plan –
This is possibly the toughest part of the entire process. Unless you practice what you preach, you will never get anywhere close to your goals. For starters, you can check the following:
- Check the content calendar and tally your posts to keep your users entertained and busy
- Monitor all your social media account to see user activity and market response
- Cross-connect all your social media accounts to Google knows they belong to one entity
- Always keep a plan for high-priority situations like competitor attacks and bad reviews
Using social media as a marketing tool can be very challenging since it is not a one-way process. You need to keep interacting with your Instagram followers, Facebook friends and Twitter followers. You need to constantly like, share and reply to their comments and post retweets to keep the marketing buzzing with your brand name.
Analysis
This is the final part of the process. Without the right analysis and measurement, how will you figure out your ROI? You need tools like Google Analytics and Hootsuite to find out how well your brand is actually doing in the market after the new social media marketing strategies kicked in.
Using the right toolset will give you a direct comparison between your previous and current strategies. You can view your progress and increase in sales in the form of interactive graphs and charts.
If your ROI is as great as you expected then everything is well and good. If your brand is not doing as well as you had expected, then don’t give up. It is time to go back to your brainstorming session and understand the loopholes in your plans.
There is no one-prefect plan for every brand. Social media marketing is not a foolproof method. What works for a retail company will never work for a health and fitness company. You need to find the right audience to see great results.
Author Bio: Maria Jones is a financial advisor and marketing expert.
She has been studying the effects of social media on brand image for the last decade. Her notes on the direct relationship between an increase in the number of Instagram followers and brand success are both accurate and interesting.
