Businesses with a social media marketing plan get a big head start.
1. Join your professional peers on LinkedIn.
Social media marketing over time has seen LinkedIn become a key online business-to-business channel. Now having a diverse community, LinkedIn offers huge marketing opportunities. Tactics range from simple conversations all the way through to direct marketing for the purpose of generating business leads. Results typically include good brand building, social proof demonstration and a learning process on social media on a more serious level than other platforms.
There are several plan levels for business owners or freelancers to consider depending on their goals and financial investment capacity. LinkedIn has network targeting capabilities that allow you to advertise directly to your future clients and/or industry peers. You select the industry, location and position seniority (eg. CEO) that your message goes through which ensures your target audience receives your post without the ‘noise’ prevalent in other marketing media.
You will need to create your professional company profile and manage paid CPC adverts if you choose the paid track. There is the usual learning curve but it should be worthwhile you doing research or have a savvy team member invest time in order to get a good outcome. There are also plenty of digital business consultants available to help you get an effective plan underway. It is recommended that you get a good grounding yourself first so as to understand what the pros are suggesting.
2. Facebook is not just for friends and family.
For some time now Facebook has been the most popular social networking site on the Internet by numbers of people involved. It’s a diverse online community that offers avenues for marketing your business products or services. Facebook is easy to use and most people have a good understanding of the interface through truly social use. A digital business consultant or social media marketing expert can help with your understanding how to best use every channel in a financially efficient and results driven manner. It’s easy to spend a lot of money on ads and post boosts so you may need guidance to ensure you don’t waste money.
Integrating your Facebook page on your website is a good idea if you are receiving good levels of engagement. If your FB business page is still a bit of a ghost town, it’s best to keep it separate from your main website until you get more activity. Facebook feed widgets, sharing buttons and blog posts re-cycled to Facebook are all great tactics.
3. Twitter is great for short and frequent messaging.
At 140 characters limit, Twitter became a fast growing social networking platform for savvy people on the Internet. The roadmap as an advertising monster is clear with news the character limit will soon be doubled. It will become an even more popular communication channel impacting brand image and reputation and customer P.R.
Sales messages, customer feedback and reciprocal promotions need to be carefully thought out. Timing is everything on Twitter as messages flow through quickly and disappear deep into users’ timelines never to be seen. Repetition is important but so is not aggravating your audience. Somewhere there is the perfect balance for your business. However, you may need professional assistance to understand timing and repetition at the outset.
As with all social media platforms the engagement on Twitter needs to be two-way. Just adding tweets with no intention of responding is a recipe for brand disaster. You or someone in your organisation needs to keep a close eye on activity and respond in a timely way.
4. Is a picture worth a thousand words on Instagram?
Instagram has been a growing phenomenon for some time now and looks like it’s here to stay. It differs from other social media platforms because it focusses on images. Instagram offers multiple opportunities for marketing products and services for a variety of business sectors. Visual based industries make the best use of Instagram. However clever use of the written word has proved successful for many businesses. It’s easy for a fashion house to promote their products but the local butcher needs to be a bit more creative. There’s plenty of models to follow and you’d think everything has already tried but they still keep coming.
Getting as many Instagram followers as possible is important for sharing potential but you also need the follower group to be real and relevant. As with the other social platforms, getting professional help to strategise and implement a campaign is money worth spending at the beginning. Resist the urge to buy followers and if anyone suggests you do this just walk away. Be prepared to start with no-one and build up slowly with real people interested in your brand, business and services.
It’s important to understand that not all business will achieve good returns on investment on all the social platforms. Going in without a well thought out strategy will definitely not deliver good results. So, in the same way that you must have goals for your website, you also need them for social media marketing. Contact us if you need some guidance in getting a good plan established for your business.
