Jumping into social media marketing can be intimidating and overwhelming if you aren’t quite sure where to start. There are so many questions about what social channels you should focus on, what sort of results you should expect, and how to know if your social media marketing is a success.
The 6 steps below provide a starting point for making the leap into social media marketing.
Choose Your Social Platforms
The key here is to be selective, and ideally, to only chose 3 social media platforms as a start. As we know, there are many social media channels out there and it may seem that you need to be on all of them. In this case, the rule is quality over quantity. It’s more effective to be focused on a select number of social media platforms rather than being thinly spread and on too many platforms.
Build Up Your Content Base
When you have a strong content base to support you, updating your social media platforms isn’t a difficult task. Articles are a great way to populate most platforms; for example, on LinkedIn and Facebook, a direct link to the article can easily be posted. On X (Twitter), you can use snippets or stats from articles and share the information that way. Articles have a lifespan of about 2 years, so the goal should be to keep a current ongoing library of about 200 articles. To start, aim for 30-50 articles as your base.
Plan Ahead
Make a posting schedule. You want to be consistent on social media, so you need to know what you are posting and when. Planning ahead will ensure that you’re not being repetitive and that your posts are always relevant, informative and balanced. You also want to be mindful of posting content that is relevant to key selling seasons to maximize consumer awareness of your products/services.
Establish Weekly Goals For Updating Your Channels
If you are on X (Twitter), aim for 3, 4 or more posts per day; on Instagram, 1-2 posts per day; and 2-3 posts per week on Facebook and LinkedIn.
Monitoring Social Media Channels
The monitoring of your social channels can start off small and grow as the use of the channels grows. The role of the monitor, who may be the same person who is posting, may not require a full time job at the beginning but it could certainly grow into that depending on the traction of the channels. When users do comment on any of your posts, the person responsible needs to be ready and have thought through how they will respond to the various comments that users might leave. A series of pre-approved responses may also be helpful.
Analytics Are The Key To Determining Progress
Analytics will assist in monitoring the traffic to the platforms and will provide insight into the demographics of users, the time of day users are viewing content, what platforms are being viewed and which content is most popular. Look for trends in popularity and let those trends guide your future posts.
Bonus Tip!
Take advantage of search engine optimization (SEO) within your content – SEO includes using key words in articles, links within articles to other relevant articles and proper HTML (coding) structure. By taking advantage of SEO, your content will be more easily searchable and therefore more easily found by users.
What Should My Expectations Be For Results Once I’m Using Social Media?
There are no hard and fast rules when it comes to what results can be expected when using social media as a marketing platform. It’s becoming more about meeting consumer expectations by having a presence on a few platforms. While each company’s specific goals may differ, ultimately all companies join social media to have a greater presence and to create brand awareness. Over time, this can easily be achieved if done properly by being focused and strategic with what platforms you are on.
