If your customers want to communicate via LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, who are you to stop them? Make sure you market through all platforms your costumers might use.
According to this Social Media Examiner post, if your prospects or customers tell you they spend 40% of their online time on Facebook and 20% on Twitter, you know which primary and secondary social networks you should focus.
To effectively market to your customers on social media, you need to create an active social media marketing strategy.
An article in Social Media Today notes that a great social media strategy is built on big-picture mentality – beyond thinking about what you want each post to do, you need to look at the overall state of your social media presence before you can move forward.
This Sprout Social post, says that the pressure is undoubtedly on brands in an era where 46% of users say they’ll unfollow an overly promotional brand. It goes on to note that additionally, 41% of users say they’d unfollow a brand that shared too much irrelevant content.
More importantly, you need to be patient and allow sufficient time for your strategy to yield results.
Here are a few steps to help you create your own social media strategy for 2019.
Define Your Goals
According to this CoSchedule article, 88% of marketers who set goals achieve them.
What are you trying to accomplish on social media? Decide whether you are seeking fame, brand recognition, prospecting for leads, interested in generating sales or customer service.
You need to be clear on your goals for your social media presence as this will help to form a strong foundation upon which you will build your strategy.
Your goals need to be realistic. For instance, this article notes that if you set an objective of increasing sales by 1,000%, it’s doubtful you’ll meet it.
Define Your Metrics
Once you have defined your goals, you need to decide on how you are going to measure your efforts in reaching your goals.
As it is mentioned here, it is necessary to know the percentage of visits from social media that take the action you’re driving on a web page.
Measuring your ROI is difficult as there is no universal benchmark, and it varies from one business to another.
In order to know which social media platforms to incorporate as part of its social media strategy, a company needs to systematically track top platforms where the company and its brands are being discussed.
So you have to define the metrics that are useful for your own business. Are you seeking fame? Then track such metrics as retweets, likes, comments, shares or pins.
What are you trying to accomplish on social media? Decide whether you are seeking fame, brand recognition, prospecting for leads, interested in generating sales or customer service. Click To TweetAre you seeking brand recognition? Then track such metrics as Facebook engagements, email click-through rates, YouTube viewership, Pinterest pins and repins.
Are you interested in generating leads or sales? Then track conversations with your target audience.
Are you interested in using social media as a customer service tool? Then you need to be tracking your rate of answers, tips or suggestions that your brand loyalists are providing and whether their comments are positive, negative or neutral.
Decide On Your Tactics
Decide on which media channels you will be using to interact with your audience.
If your business is a B2B (Business-to-Business), then you should be looking at such social media channels as LinkedIn.
If your business is a B2C (Business-to-Consumer), then you should be looking at such social media channels as Facebook.
In addition to giving you valuable information about your existing and potential customers, social media is also a useful place to get insights into your current and potential team members. According to this article Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram can give you tons of valuable information about the people you’re interested in working with
Do your research to determine the best times to post and interact with your audience on your chosen channels.
According to HubSpot, social media isn’t an exact science, so you need to establish a consistent posting and engagement schedule, to start seeing results.
Execute Your Strategy
According to this CoSchedule article, you need a documented social media strategy because marketers who document strategies are 538% more likely to report success. The article goes on to note that those who document processes are 466% more likely to be successful, too.
For best results, you should have a social media calendar detailing all that you want to post and the ideal times to post for the day, week, month, or even the whole year!
The more detailed your social media calendar is, the better.
Closing Thoughts
In conclusion, remember that as the name implies with social media, you ought to be social and not ‘selly, selly.’
No one on social media is interested in whatever crap you are selling. You instead have to show interests in them and how you can help to meet their needs.
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- Are Digital Marketing Metrics Driving You Crazy?
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