3 Tips to Guarantee Social Media Marketing Success
If you consider the competition small businesses face in the social media scene, do you think it’s really possible to make your brand and image stand out above the hundreds of thousands of competitors who have a social presence online? If you plan to stick with your usual social media marketing routine—publishing three posts per day on Facebook and then copying those same posts on Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest, I can say with surety that yes, you will fail to win new customers with your social media efforts. However, if you want to take a walk on the wild side and actually differentiate yourself from the other guys and gals online, here’s a few tips to follow.
Cater to the Personality of Your Customer Base
Every niche has a unique customer base. Your challenge as a social media marketer is to find out what makes the customers in your market tick. This includes discovering what their interests are, what type of content they like to consume, what type of posts appeal to their interests, what their buying behavior is like, and most importantly—which social platforms they use on a consistent basis and what time of day and week they’re most active on those platforms. Once you find the answer to those questions you need to spend all your time creating messages that cater to the needs of your customers. If your target audience loves to see funny images, don’t write text-heavy posts on FB and Twitter. If your audience doesn’t spend time on Facebook, don’t waste your time creating messages for that platform. If you’re a digital marketing firm trying to attract new business, you may be better off focusing your efforts on LinkedIn rather than posting images on Pinterest. The key is to know your audience well.
Cut Down on Automated Posts
It’s always funny to observe businesses that try to automate every aspect of social media marketing like they’re robots from the early 1900’s. There’s not anything inherently wrong with automation, but automating all your social media marketing will take any hint of originality and strategy out of the equation completely, and it will show in your posts. Customers like to see creativity and social media is the perfect stage for you to show off your creativity. If you want to attract visitors to your content try doing something out of the ordinary that will surprise people who aren’t familiar with your brand. Of course, you want to keep your posts in line with each social website’s guidelines, but no one ever wins a gold medal for being boring. It’s also smart to avoid posting the same content on every social platform. One of the most severe mistakes a company can make is sharing posts that are redundant. Your customers don’t want to see the same message five times in a day on five different platforms.
Focus on the Presentation of the Message
It may be an obvious statement, but presentation really is everything when it comes to social media marketing. When social media first became a thing it was relatively difficult to be creative when publishing a post, but now the sky is the limit. On Facebook you can create a custom call-to-action message, add a link to your website, and add images and videos to each post. On Twitter you can create “Twitter Cards” which allow you to attach rich photos, videos, and media that help drive traffic to your website. On other social networking sites you can change font color, add bold text, and attach images that are relevant to the post. Once again, remember to cater to your audience. If your audience is serious about finding serious information, don’t mix in the humorous posts. If your audience is made up of rodeo clowns, keep that in mind.
Wrapping it up
If you want to be a successful social media marketer you need to cater to the personality of your customer base, cut down on automated posts, and focus on spicing up the presentation of each post. If you implement these tips into your social media marketing routine you’ll begin to notice progress with your campaign. Before long you’ll be hooking visitors online and converting them into long-term customers who promote your brand for you.
If you have more questions about social media marketing, ppc marketing, seo, and online presence management, contact Local 360 Media today!
