How to Market on Social Media

Most business owners I know struggle to keep up to date with the latest tips on how to market on social media. Are you guilty of this?

If so, I’m sure you will want to get the best results from your social media marketing – right?
These days, brands are under tremendous pressure when it comes to marketing on social media. Many brands are facing an increasing decline in organic post reach and engagement.

Adjustments made to Facebook algorithms have reduced the size of the audience for non-paying business pages (that have at least 500,000 “Likes”) from 16% in 2012 down to 2% in February 2014.

In 2014, over 80% of business executives identified social media as an integral part of their business.

Brands that cannot afford to pay to boost their posts to reach their target audience are being forced to abandon the communities they have worked so hard in growing over the years.

Moreover, users unfollow brands that they deem to be overly promotional. Besides, users unfollow brands that share too much irrelevant content. Many marketers are struggling to create quality content with consistency.

But, it’s not all doom and gloom for brands.

Business retailers have seen 133% increases in their revenues from social media marketing.

Events that sell tickets directly on Facebook drive 2X more free registrations and 20% more purchased ticket sales on average than events that redirect to a ticketing page.

What is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing consists of activities like posting text, photos and video updates and other forms of content that drives audience engagement. It also involves a kind of paid advertisements.

As I always mention to my existing and prospective clients and on this blog before you start any marketing campaign, consider your business goals.

• Is it your goal to increase your website traffic?
• Are you trying to build conversations?
• Do you want to raise your brand awareness?
• Are you trying to create a brand identity and positive brand association?
• Is it your goal to improve communication and interaction with your key target audiences?

Social media marketing can help with any of these goals mentioned above.

Rather than tracking all these goals from the same channel, you can try monitoring different objectives for different channels.

When it comes to marketing on social media, according to this FastCompany article the general rule of thumb is 90/10: Ninety per cent of your content should be sharing other people’s content, and 10 per cent should be promotional.

I usually tell my existing and potential clients to go with the 80-20 rule: where 80 per cent of your content is meant to inform, educate or entertain your target audience while the rest 20 per cent is used to promote your brand.

Whichever strategy you select the most important thing is to not go overboard with self-promotion.

How to use social media for Marketing

According to this article, with 78 per cent of companies planning to integrate further or begin integrating social media data into marketing campaigns, more and more companies are recognising the value of social media.

How can you use it for marketing your business?

1. Conduct an audit of your current social presence. Get access to all your accounts on the various social media platforms. If there are rouge accounts out there created by enthusiastic staff without authorisation, shut them down. Take note of the profiles that are active or dormant.

2. Create your ideal social media customer persona. Document who your perfect customer is and what social networks they hang out. Let your customer persona be as detailed as possible.

Don’t skimp on the demographics data. Let it be as detailed as possible. Include their age, location, job titles and income. Use data from your Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, Instagram Analytics and LinkedIn analytics.

Get to know your ideal customer’s pain points and how your product or service provides a solution to their pain points.

3. Define your benchmarks, i.e. target goals that tell you how to get to your desired destination with your campaigns. Define any interim steps needed to reach your planned goals.

4. Choose the right tools. You have to build your social media marketing stack. You can do remarkable things on social media if you use the right tools.

You also need to realise that the tool by itself is just a tool. It can’t do anything on its own. It is the skill of the person wielding it that matters. So get to know your tools inside out.

But, it would help if you were careful when selecting and using a tool. These days a lot of social networks are clamping down on apps that could fringe on their user’s privacy or that could be used to spread fake news.

5. Create or curate content. Now that you’ve known your ideal customer’s pain points create or curate content that will help your customers and at the same time, promote your product or service. Decide the type of content you will use, such as blog post, infographic, video and audio.

6. Be personable and relatable. Social media is all about building relationships. Your brand has a personality of its own, which you should display it.

According to an App Institute article, when you have to tweet about the business proper, keep the spotlight on customers and topical subjects: advertising 10% off everything for a day won’t be as effective as 10% off a specific item that only Twitter followers have access.

If you or any member of your team is comfortable in front of a camera, get the person to create videos for YouTube. That person can be the face of your brand when it comes to social marketing.

But, if you don’t have any team member who is comfortable on social media, yet you discover that your target audience is on Twitter or Instagram, then you must outsource your social media marketing.

Use Social Media as a Market Research Tool

According to this article in SocialMediaToday, a 2011 report by Nielson on the state of social media claims that approximately 80-percent of people with Internet access utilise social media.

So, as a business owner, what you need to understand is that using social media in your business is not for ‘play’. Instead, it is essential for market research.

The proper use of social media can help you discover the best ways to reach the right people in your target audience.

According to this article, social media is a source of honest consumer opinion: 80% of social media posts are about ourselves, and those opinions and beliefs-expressed individually and within a community-are not interrupted or biased by participation in a formal study or company-run focus group.

Conclusion

As you have seen from the above, your marketing strategy is not complete without social marketing. Gone are the days of treating different aspects of marketing in silos.

These days you have to be thinking of integrated marketing campaigns whereby you consider integrating social marketing, content marketing, influencer marketing and search marketing.

Would you like to discuss this further? Schedule a meeting with me.

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