What is Social Media Marketing? Tips and Tricks
Think social media is frivolous and not meant for serious businessmen? You would be well advise to think again. Everyone including businesses must be present and active on social media and devote quality time to social media activities per day.
Just being present on social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube etc however, is not enough. The activity there must be align your company’s marketing goals and optimize for sales.
Let us discover some tips on Organic Social Media Marketing and Paid Options.
Tips on Organic Social Media Marketing
- Create business pages on LinkedIn, Facebook and handles on Twitter and Instagram. Also create your YouTube Channel. All this has to be done with appropriate branding and content collateral to show commitment and professionalism
- Use Hashtags with research: The best free way to find appropriate hashtags for a channel is type part of the hashtag in the search box and autosuggest will do the rest. You can do additional work by looking at the activity for the hashtag. Ideally do not use more than 4-5 hashtags in organic promotion except for Instagram where 10-15 are ideal. Use 50% broad and 50% specific hashtags for best results.
- Tag accounts in important posts: If you are using content from somewhere or want to bring it to the awareness of an influencer, you can tag them using @ followed by the name of the account/page/handle. This is should be done with caution and too much of this will get you suspend for spamming. Do so only if it will really of interest to them.
- Use Search feature: to find relevant accounts for business. You can then send them connection requests and add a message if the platform allows. Once you are connect, you are allow to send them direct messages. Please don’t straight away get down to business, build a cordial relationship before you pitch.
- Use Groups feature: Some social channels have the option to apply and join groups of interest like on Facebook and LinkedIn. They have a gold mine of potential leads but each group has ground rules of interaction that you must follow or be kick out and even reported to the channel. Again, build a relationship before you pitch. The best way is to create a rapport and then pitch.
- Cross post the same content regularly across all channels with hash tagging to get the best organic reach for your content
- Prefer visually appealing content with videos, graphic design and written content in that decreasing order
- For B2B outreach, LinkedIn offers great options like writing articles on relevant topics with a public reach. You can also do polls on LinkedIn and Twitter. You can also create events on Facebook and LinkedIn though the channels limit reach organically.
- Facebook allows you to list your products on the Marketplace feature which may get you a free reach
- Listen and participate in the conversation relevant to your space on social media without spamming with your business links. Offer value there and in separate posts to help others improve based on your knowledge-that is how you will grow to be a social media influencer in your space.
- Facebook and Twitter allow free scheduling of posts. This could help you plan time away from the platform. LinkedIn scheduling of posts is generally done through social tools or applications like Hootsuite, HubSpot, etc.
- LinkedIn also offers a free posting of a job with up to 75 applications
Paid Social Media marketing Tips
- A social listening and a social media scheduling tool is essential for a serious social media marketer. Some free options are available with limited capabilities.
- For a B2B business, LinkedIn Premium and LinkedIn Sales Navigator offer cost effective options for reach and business development
- Facebook Ads is a great option for branding and sales. There are many options from promoted posts to ads and lead generation. It allows targeting audiences on the platform with a granular level of targeting based on their interests and behavior. It would make good sense to test the ad with alternate versions, small budgets and the deepest levels of granularity till the right conversions happen and only then scale the ad budget slowly. If this is not done, you easily join the many who have lost a lot of money in paid ads. The display ads can be create for daily budgets as low as Rs. 100/day and work on a CPM (cost per 1000 impressions mode) and are very cost effective for SME’s. Lead generation ads are more expensive and have been comparably a recent addition but many businesses have been using them with good effect since their launch.
- Facebook Audiences advanced features: Once an audience starts giving you sales, you can create lookalike audiences from it multiple times allowing you to reach similar potential customers. You can also upload current customer audience contact data on Facebook, locate them and create a custom audience around which you can create multiple Lookalike audiences. Another great way to find similar people who may convert.
- Google Display Ads: These are ads that Google launches on websites and their YouTube content and are consider more suitable for branding by those with deeper pockets and typically do not suit SMEs with limited budgets. SMEs may be better off using promoted posts options on Facebook and LinkedIn if in B2C or B2B respectively in place of this.
Social Media Marketing combines interaction in communities with marketing activities and must be an integral part of your Sales and Marketing strategy to be relevant in rapidly growing digital first world.
In the next article, we will cover Performance Marketing Tips
