What is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing is the process of creating awareness of yourself, your products, or services through various social media channels.
The ultimate goal of any social media marketing campaign is to drive traffic to a website, increase product visibility, gain more social media followers, or find more customers.
The most popular social networks today are Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram, Tik Tok and Linkedin.
What is the Significance of Social Media Marketing?
Social Media Marketing is Important Because:
It's the fastest way to spread the word about a new product, service or news: a tweet can become a rival in minutes and spread a message around the world faster than television or other traditional media.
It's a trend: millions of people spend a good part of their time on social networks, so if you "need" them, you already know where to find them.
It's the new marketing: In the old days, marketers found that many people spent time driving their cars, so they thought of billboards on the streets. People spend time on social media nowadays, so as a marketer, you need to start thinking this way too.
It's the new influencer: Recent studies show that social networks are becoming a great sales channel, with more and more companies claiming to get customers from Facebook or Twitter.
How to take advantage of social networks? How can beginners quickly build a proper social media presence?
Beginner's Guide To Social Media Marketing
1. Pick a Social Networking Platform To Use.
As a social media newbie, you should pick one or two social media platforms and focus on them instead of trying to work on all platforms at the same time.
This is a mistake that many beginners make and eventually give up with no benefit.
A good way to find out which platform is best suited for your niche is to find influencers and analyze where they are successful.
For example, find out the leaders in your niche and check the number of Facebook followers, Twitter followers, Pinterest followers, etc.
If they have 100,000 Facebook followers but only 1,000 Twitter followers, this is a good indication that FB is a better fit for your niche than Twitter.
It's also a sign that you're more likely to be successful with FB than Twitter, so you can use your time more efficiently and engage more on FB than any other platform.
Pro Tip: A great way to get started with social media marketing is to sign up for a good course. Here is our list of the best social media marketing courses for beginners.
2. Optimize Your Social Media Profiles
Once you've decided which social media tools you'll use (at least initially), the next step is to optimize your profiles on those sites.
By optimizing your profiles, you increase your chances of getting more followers and it's also a good way to increase your SEO efforts.
The following are some general standards that all websites should follow:
- Use a real photo that shows your face; avoid using animals, places, or anything that isn't real. Social media is all about connecting people and if you want to have a trustworthy profile, you have to get out of your cage and put your face on the web!
- What is your history or experience? Write a solid description of yourself or your company. what are you proud of? Indicate that this is your profile.
- Give users an indication of the type of information you will share: Although this is not necessary, I like to read in profiles what type of information to expect from a particular person. For example, on my Twitter profile I wrote: "...tweet SEO, social media, internet marketing tips and tricks."
- Include a link to your website (if applicable): On Facebook, include a link in the "About Section", on Twitter and Pinterest in the "Website Section". In other words, use your social media profiles for SEO purposes as well.
3. Link Your Website or Blog to Your Social Media Accounts.
After preparing the social media profiles, the next step is to link your website to the social media pages.
There is a process to follow for each platform, and it is vital that you follow it exactly.
A proper link between the two means that search engines and social media sites know which site corresponds to which social media page.
- For Facebook, you can follow these instructions
- This method can be used to verify your website on Pinterest
- For Twitter, you can follow this
4. Incorporate Social Media Icons Into Your Website
In addition to linking your website with your respective social media company pages, you should also add social media buttons on your website so that readers can easily share your content.
Depending on the platform, there are many ways and plugins to do this, I suggest you google using "how to add social media buttons to xxxxxx" - replace xxxxx with the platform your website is based on.
For instance, if you're using WordPress, look for "how to add social networking buttons to WordPress" on Google.
As a general rule of thumb, keep buttons in the top half of the page to increase exposure, and keep in mind that larger buttons get more clicks than smaller buttons.
5. Identify and Follow Influential People In Your Field.
So far, we have selected the most appropriate social media tools for our niche, optimized our social media profiles, linked our website to social media pages, and added buttons on our pages for further interaction.
The obvious next step is to find people to follow, but above all to gradually build our tribe of followers.
I would say that there are 5 basic steps to follow to get more followers and these are outlined in steps 6-10 below.
Before you get into this, you need to first find and follow influencers in your niche.
They will almost certainly not follow you because you have a new account with no followers, but doing so is important for 3 reasons:
- Social media platforms will use this information to make suggestions about who to follow, so following popular people in your niche is like telling them you're in that niche too.
- When you follow popular people who can also be followed by others. A trick that many people use is to follow the followers of a popular person because they know that some will follow them too.
- They will most likely share important and useful information about the niche so that you have the opportunity to learn something new and re-share it with your followers.
6. Keep a Balance Between Followers and Female Followers
Once you start following people, you should always keep in mind that it's best to strike a balance between the number of people you follow and the number of people who follow you.
This is important, especially on Twitter and Pinterest and the reasons are many:
A strong profile, in this case, is someone who has more followers than followers and someone who is followed by people who are considered niche influencers.
7. Share Interesting Content (Text, Images, Videos)
This is the basis for having a successful social media marketing campaign. When it comes to posting content, we always say that "content is king" and this is true on social media as well.
By sharing interesting and useful content, you can get more shares, more visitors to your website, and under some conditions, even more customers.
What is the interesting content? From my experience (and some studies) this is a combination of:
8. Post Several Times a Day, But Don't Overdo It
A common question from people just starting out on social media is "how many times should I post per day?"
The answer depends on the network.
There are many studies that analyze the effect of publication frequency and some good practices are:
9. Don't Forget To Follow
Most people focus on getting new followers but forget to follow those who have already followed them.
Every day you have to get used to seeing the people who are already following you and deciding who to follow.
If you don't do this regularly, chances are some will unfollow you, so sometimes you may notice a drop in the number of followers.
10. Follow The Rules and Be Patient
Social networks have rules to keep spammers out. For example, on Twitter there is a limit on the number of people you can follow each day; Facebook has its own rules, etc.
This means that it may take some time to build thousands of followers, so you should be patient and not try to get continuous results by violating the rules (your account will be suspended) or spending your money on "buying followers or tweets" or something similar.
Try to take your time to create a great social media profile that will last over time and why not become one of the authoritative profiles in your niche.
Conclusion
When it comes to social media, there are 2 important pillars.
The first has to do with setting up your social media profiles and the second has to do with usage, which is how you use your social media account.
For the first pillar, it is important to participate in the networks that best suit your niche and to have a proper connection between your social media pages and the website.
For the second pillar, it is important to follow the right people, be followed by the right people and share relevant and interesting content always adhering to the rules of the different social networks.
0 Comments