You could lose a competitive edge by choosing to stay offline. In fact, fewer people will be likely to trust your offline business if you are not active on social media. With the prevalence of the internet and appeal of social media, failing to have an active social media could almost equate to being non-existent.
By failing to set up a social media profile, even people who are located near your business could be influenced against engaging in business with your brand. Social media facilitates the addition of contact and location information, which makes your brand more likely to show up on ‘near-me’ searches. Choosing to focus on traditional media avenues over social media could limit your brand’s ability to grow, as well as cost a lot of money. Social media offers access to more people, and costs only a fraction of what offline advertising might. This is the reason why marketers are spending up to 9 times more on Facebook advertising than on print.
Once you have set up on social media, do you know how to market your brand to attract as many new clients as possible?
Look at these 7 Must Follow Tips & Tricks for Social Media Marketing
1Assess your capacity
You should assess your capacity before setting up a social media profile. This will help you understand how many people you have on the job and how much work they might be able to cover. Overstretching your personnel capacity could prove costly because some social media pages will receive less attention than they should. You might end up ignoring follower comments and complaints, and neglecting to meet your ideal posting requirements. This will affect user trust levels in your brand, and could cause you to develop a bad reputation.
2Create a social media marketing campaign
Social media marketing involves a series of strategic marketing moves to increase your brand profile in order to help you meet specific business goals. Social media marketing is best carried out through a social media campaign, which could be developed for all your social media pages. Social media campaigns can help increase visibility, target higher conversion levels and boost user engagement levels. In order to create the best social media campaign for your brand, you should research and plan to understand your clients’ preferences and to meet them.
3Follow your followers
Even if it means doing so literally on social media, you need to follow your followers to understand their preferences and be better able to meet their needs.You can create a great relationship with your followers by being active on social media and interacting with them. They share different opinions and experiences, which could help you, tailor products and services for a great reception. This will increase your ability to grow, as well as maintain your client base. It can be crucial to success, considering it is easier to sell to a past customer than it is to make a new one. With all the options available, following your followers could provide the edge to place you above the rest.
4Assess your performance regularly
Like any other marketing strategy, you need to assess your social media activity to know whether it meets your expectations. This will also help you understand how to tweak your marketing strategy for a better performance. Social media marketing trumps traditional marketing avenues because it allows you to monitor different performance metrics. Every social media platform will provide analytic tracking, which will help you get introspection into the performance of your social media marketing efforts in relation to your social media activity.
5Interact with your audiences
You should consider using social media to interact with your audiences and drive up engagement levels. Users are bound to be more willing to trust brands that engage with their followers over those that choose one-dimensional interaction. If you are going to use the platform for engagement, you need to provide timely and professional responses to all your followers. This could help build a great relationship and could be the basis for personal selling. While it may be tempting to avoid negative responses, you will harm your brand image in so doing. Negative comments are inevitable, but present an opportunity for you to showcase your brand values. You should consider leveraging these to your advantage instead of risking a bad reputation by ignoring them.
6Combine your efforts: Offline & Online
There is some joy to be found in marketing your social media page offline, particularly if you want to target certain demographics. You can combine social media marketing with offline marketing, which you will use to increase brand awareness. You may even explore unconventional efforts, such as by using postcards and mass e-mailing. You can also combine paid and free advertising on social media. You will have some success with both, without having to experience over the top expenses. You can buy 50 instagram followers and other benefits for the platform for $1. Combining different aspects of your social marketing strategy helps to insure your brand in the event that one fails to meet expected performance levels, which improves the likelihood of benefitting from social media.
7Use popular trends
You should consider innovative ways to take advantage of trends since they are a big part of social media activity, and dictate user interest. The latest trends will be very attractive to a large following, and could provide an opportunity for you to create interest in your brand. You can take part in trends by making posts, comments and sharing some brand related information, which will make you visible to a large number of people who are interested or already participating in the trending topic. Overly marketing your brand through trends may get you some exposure, but is ill advised. Instead, you should consider leveraging entertaining and informative content to attract followers and keep their interest.
Final word
These social media best practices will guide you when setting up your social media pages to get the best results. While social media is ideal for your brand, you need to be careful about your activity online. A single post could affect the performance of your brand for years to come. In order to make the right one, you need to invest in paid features. This can help you get ahead on social media, which can be notoriously slow on certain social platforms.
