What is social media marketing?
Social media marketing is about building awareness about your brand, especially your services and your products through different social media platforms.
The best goal for any social media campaign is to lead the websites to get more traffic, to maximize the visibility and exposure of a service or a product, and to get more and more followers that will eventually turn into customers.
Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, and Pinterest are the most popular social media platforms today. There are a lot more yet those the the key platforms now.
What makes social media marketing so important?
They are very important because:
- Social media marketing is the easiest and fastest way to make exposure to your service, product, or news – A tweet is likely to go viral in a few minutes and deliver your message to the whole world more quickly than traditional media or television.
- It is a trend, a lot of people spend so much time on social media platforms so if you need to reach your target audience, you know where to find them.
- This is the new era of marketing. In the past, marketing specialists have found that a lot of people spend their time driving their cars so they decided to put their social media ads on the billboards on the streets. Now, people spend most of their time on social media, so marketers decided to think the same way to reach your target audiences, by heading to social media marketing.
- Social Media is the new influencer, the latest studies have revealed that social media is a great way for sales and a lot of businesses are claiming that they get customers from Twitter and Facebook.
Social Media Marketing Tips and Guides for Beginners
How can you take advantage of social media? How can beginners build a proper social media presence fast?
How can social media advertising be useful for your business? How can a beginner establish a good and fast social media presence?
These are the main 10 tips to know before beginning:
1. Choose a social media platform you want to work on.
2. Make sure to improve your social media profiles.
3. Link your blog or website with your pages on social media.
4. Put buttons to link to your social media pages on your website.
5. Follow the influencers in your field.
6. Keep your following and followers balanced.
7. Share interesting content (images, texts & videos).
8. Post regularly but make sure you’re not overdoing it.
9. Make sure you follow back.
10. Be patient and follow the rules.
1. Choose the platforms you want to work on.
For beginners on social media, you need to select only one or two platforms and focus on them, instead of working on all networks at the same time, which will definitely make you out of focus and will cause contrary results.
This is a fault that a lot of beginners do and they don’t have any useful results after all.
A good way to figure out what the best platform is suitable for your field is to discover the influencers and make an analysis of why did they have done to succeed.
For instance, discover the major influencers in your field and check out the number of their Twitter followers, Facebook fans, Pinterest followers, and so on.
If they have 100k fans on Facebook, yet only 1000 on Twitter, then you have a good indication that Facebook is more useful for your business than Twitter.
Also, this is an indication that you will have success with Facebook more than Twitter, so you may use your time and effort more effectively and engage on Facebook instead of any other Social Media platform.
2. Make sure to improve your social media profiles.
And when you choose the social media platform you will use, at least for the start, the following step is to improve your profiles on these websites.
By improving your profiles you maximize your opportunities of getting more followers and it’s also a great way to increase your SEO efforts.
These are some general rules that implement to all websites are:
- Use real photos, show your face, avoid using places, animals, or anything that’s not real. Social media is all about linking people together and if you need to have a profile that people can trust to get out of cages and put your real self on the web.
- You have to write a proper description of you and your business – What’s your expertise or background? What are the things you’re proud of? You have to mention this on your profile.
- Give your users a signal of what is the type of information you are going to share – Though this is not the most important part, it’s good to write in the profile what is the kind of information they will receive from the page they are going to follow. For example, for such a business, you may write “SEO, social media marketing, tips for digital marketing, and advice”””.
- Add a link to your website. On Facebook add a link in the “about” on Pinterest and on Twitter add the website on the “website section” So, use your social media profiles for SEO goals too.
Related content: 5 ways social listening can help elevate your brand.
3. Link your blog or website with your pages on social media.
When you make your social media pages prepared, the next stage is to link your website to your social media profiles.
There is a specific process to follow for every platform and it’s so important that you make it the right way.
A right bond between both ways that social media websites and search engines know what is the website agreements to social media pages.
- For Facebook, read this.
- For Pinterest, you may find this very useful.
- For Twitter, you can use this.
- For Instagram, here are 10 ways how to grow your social media engagement.
4. Put buttons to link to your social media pages on your website.
In addition to connecting your site with the business page on your social media platforms, you need to put buttons of social media on your website. So, the readers may simply share the content they read on the website.
It depends on the platform you are using, there are a lot of plugins and ways to do that, we recommend you search on Google using “how to put buttons of social media profiles on a website”
For instance, if you’re using WordPress search google for “how to put buttons for social media to Word Press”
Generally, keep these buttons up and fold to maximize the viewership and keep in mind that bigger buttons get more clicks than the smaller ones.
5. Follow the influencers in your field
You have so far chosen the most popular social media platforms for your field, improved your social media pages, linked your social media pages with your website, and added the social media buttons on your websites for more interactions and engagements.
So obviously, the next step is to find people that have similar interests to follow to establish a tribe of followers gradually.
We would recommend that there are five main steps to follow to get more followers and we will explain them to you below in points 6 to 10.
But before doing that, you have to find and follow influencers in your field first.
It’s almost sure that they won’t follow you back as you are still a new account with a few followers or even zero followers. However, doing this is very important because:
- The platform you’re working on will use this data to recommend more people to follow. So, follow popular people from the same field as yours to tell them that you are into this field as well.
- If you follow these famous influencers, you will probably be followed by others too. A tip that a lot of people are using to follow the followers of the influencer to get some of them following them back too.
- Most probably, they will share useful and important information about the industry so you need to use this to understand and learn new things and share that with your followers.
6. Keep your following and followers balanced
When you begin to follow people, you have to always remember that it is much better to keep your followers and following lists balanced.
This is very important particularly in Pinterest and Twitter because:
- If you have a very high ratio of your followers and following lists you will be more likely to lose chances for high-quality followers, as software applications are using this ratio to make recommendations on ‘who to follow’
- Your target audience will decide if they’re going to trust you or not. If you are following 2500 people and have only 1000 followers are you going to be more trusted than an account that follows 510 and has 550 followers for example? you decide.
- Balanced profiles are also good for SEO and how things change and it’s not confirmed yet, it’s more likely that accounts with stronger profiles have better positions than these with weaker ones.
Strong profiles are those that has more followers than following in their lists, and the account that is considered an influencer in the industry.
7. Share interesting content (images, texts & videos)
This is the first step to have an effective social media marketing campaign. When you think about sharing content, you always have to know that ‘content is the king’ and this is true in social media marketing too.
If you publish useful and interesting content, you may get more shares and visitors to your blog or website and sometimes even customers.
What is considered interesting content? As per some studies, this is a mix of:
- Pages/Stories/Articles related to your field but not only from your blog or site.
- Unusual and interesting stats about your industry
- Motivational phrases related to your industry
- Images and Videos
- Research studies
- Funny posts and memes, whatever your industry is about, you may find jokes or funny images and videos to share and make your followers smile.
- Always remember hashtags (#) will make your content more easily found in searched so never forget to use them in the posts but always make them relevant.
8. Post regularly but make sure you’re not overdoing it
A regular question by people who just started social media marketing is “how many times should I post every day?”
The answer of that question is different depending on each platform.
As per many studies analyzing the impact of frequency of posting and some best practices are:
- Facebook personal page – As much as you want
- Facebook business page – 1-2 times a day and not more than 7 times a week.
- Twitter – The more is the best.
- Pinterest – a few times a day is enough
9. Make sure you follow back
Most people focus on how to get new followers everyday, yet they never remember to follow people who already followed them back, and this is not good for your profile.
You have to revise your followers’ list every day to know if there is someone that worths following back, and do that immediately.
If you do not do this regularly, then, you are most likely to be unfollowed by some people and that is why you may see a decrease in your followers’ list number.
10. Be patient and follow the rules
Social media platforms have strict rules to keep spam accounts away. For instance, Twitter is limiting people to follow a specific number every day; Facebook has a similar rule as well, and so on.
So, that means that it might take time to establish a strong followers list. That’s why you have to be very patient and try not to rush into results by breaking rules that may get your account suspended, or by spending so much money for buying fake followers, or anything similar to that. this will harm your profile and will never be with your benefit.
Therefore, try to spend your time and effort to create a perfect social media profile that will be stronger by time. And you might even be one of the influencers in your own industry.
Conclusion
The most two important pillars in social media, the first one is about setting up your social media pages, and the second one is about the use, such as how to use your social media profile.
The first and most important pillar is to keep engaging with more suitable and relevant accounts to your field and have a good connection between your website and your social media platforms.
The second one which is no less important is to follow right and relevant accounts and be followed by relevant accounts that have the chance to turn into customers. Also, sharing interesting and relevant content is always the right thing to do and always keep the platform’s rules in your mind.
