Social Media Marketing – Effective Ways of Using Social Media to Promote Your Business

Using social media to market a business is the best strategy for a marketer to reach a wider audience but more often than not, many people don’t know how to do it correctly and end up being unsuccessful in this regard. Social media helps create new relationships and maintain the current ones with your audience. To ensure an effective social media strategy, below are some tips to help you get started with your campaign.

1. Devise a Social Media Strategy.

Before starting a social media campaign, you need to know the campaigns’ benefits to save you time and effort. You need to know the audience you wish to target, why you need them to visit your site and the best ways of making them visit your site. Having a plan will help you know the series of actions you need to take to be successful. Also, you need to know which social sites you need to create presence in, in order to get most effectively to your audience.

2. Choose the right social sites for your niche.

To get the best results, you need to know which social services your target customers are using the most. Use customer surveys, web analytics, and social metrics to determine which social sites your prospective customers use. For example, Twitter is a great platform for sharing links with a larger audience, Pinterest is good for showcasing images – and is great for photographers, designers and craftspeople; Tumblr is good for videos, snippets, images and quotes. Also, it’s important that you use and manage just the number of sites you can comfortably handle. Joining too many sites may not allow the time and management that each service needs. Choose the sites you are comfortable with.

3. Keep your personal life and business life separate.

Many startups fail to recognize the importance of keeping their personal and professional lives separate. Create separate logins for connecting with your social group, and for marketing your brand and service.

4. Offer great content.

Regardless of the websites you choose to market your services with, providing valuable, up to date, genuine and timely content is vital. To drive the right audience to your page, do optimize the content regularly on the social sites you use. Users mostly look for specific products or services and don’t like working too hard to get what they want, online; make sure you use the right keywords based on your niche. Users are more likely to trust you if you know what you are talking about, and are an expert in your field. Look at market trends and give users up to date content. Also, you should avoid using slang and check for grammatical errors on your content as people are unlikely to share and spread poor content. The content you post on social sites should be valuable and relevant to your users to keep them interested and coming back for more. People always look for content that is helpful and interesting to them and if they don’t find it, they will move on to your competitors. The links you provide to users should be easily accessible and clickable to drive people to your website. Include a great call to action to entice users to click on your links to get further information on a particular topic.

5. Think long term.

Startups use social media with the main aim of marketing their products and services. A good media campaign should be about building good relationships with the community and not simply about getting your message across. You should know that it’s not the number of followers you have but the quality of connections and interactions you have with your users. You will need time and effort to build lasting relationships with your online community for the continued success of your campaign. Stay involved and build relationships with your followers by answering their questions and concerns promptly, participating in trending discussions both on your page and other related pages, and asking questions to help you understand your followers’ needs well. To market your business properly, you need to go to the right, target audience, and by finding the right platforms to spread the word about your product or service.

Photo Source: socialmedia_nl, Jason Howie