Over 50 million businesses have their presence on social media platforms to connect with their customers. Most of these businesses even have their presence on multiple social channels. However, a large number of these social accounts are sitting dormant with limited follower counts. It is because these businesses have no idea about how to do social media marketing.
Simply having a social media account will not even attract your existing customers to interact with your business. Of course, they might love using your products and services. But that is no reason for them to engage with your business online.
If you are looking to increase revenues and maximize profits by engaging existing and potential customers online, this article will discuss how to do social media marketing.
How to do Social Media Marketing?
1. Research your target audience
First and foremost, businesses must research their target audience. It is because making assumptions is the worst possible way to grow any business. Moreover, with the sheer amount of social media analytics tools and demographic data, there is no need for doing guesswork anymore.
Most of the details which a business needs to know about their audience for creating a social media strategy is easily available, provided you know where to look for it. However, if your business does not have in-house expertise on social media, one can always work with a specialized social media marketing agency to make informed business decisions.
2. Decide which platform you will use for social media marketing
Different social media platforms attract different audiences. Therefore, it is imperative to decide which platform your business is going to use for sharing content. Of course, there is no one size fit for all, when it comes to selecting the best social media platform for your business. However, it is more about where your target audience spends most of their time.
For instance, the majority of Snapchat and Instagram users are Gen Z or millennials, whereas Pinterest is primarily best suited for young baby boomers and older millennials. Similarly, LinkedIn has a well-educated user base, thus making it suitable for sharing in-depth, industry-specific content which tends to be more complicated as compared to what you see on Facebook or Twitter.
3. Create engaging social media content
There are 4.2 billion people around the world using social media. Therefore, there is no question that at least some of your followers have also seen your competitors’ content or content from other businesses in the same industry. As a result, it is crucial to create social media content that is engaging and something which forces people to click the follow button and interact with the content regularly.
To get some idea, you can also look at the way your competitors are sharing content on social platforms and then try to uniquely promote your content on the chosen social media channel. Additionally, you can also use different features offered by the platform to engage with your existing and potential customers. For instance, you can create Stories on Instagram to promote your products or for conducting a giveaway.
Moreover, for reaching to potential customers, you can also ask your existing customers to re-post your content on Instagram using your brand-specific hashtags. Thus, helping you take advantage of positive word of mouth. However, all of this is only possible, if your business can create engaging social media content.
4. Ensure your social media post are scheduled
For receiving the best possible engagement from your existing and potential followers, it is crucial to post your content at the best times. Of course, you cannot always remain active on such platforms if you are running other business operations as well. Therefore, the best way to ensure that your social media content is shared as planned is by using social media management solutions such as Sprout Social.
Such tools allow you to write captions, prepare content, and schedule posts in advance. Therefore, whenever the time comes, the post will be get automatically shared with your followers. In addition, always make sure that you are putting out fresh content regularly for increasing engagement level with your followers. While there is no thumb rule of how often you should share a post on these platforms, but make sure that you are only posting content when you have quality available.
5. Analyze results
It is no secret that a lot of social media activity is about trial and error. Therefore, it becomes crucial to analyze the results of your different social media marketing campaigns in real-time. Doing so will allow you to make small tweaks to your marketing strategy, which will then return favorable results for the growth of your business.
There are several different metrics that you can use to analyze the results of your social media campaign. For instance, some of the metrics that you can track include your followers count, number of impressions on a given post, total profile visits, total video views, and number of shares, likes, and comments among other things.
Final Thoughts
This guide on how to do social media marketing highlights the fact that there are several moving parts to the modern-day social media strategy. Therefore, putting together all of the puzzle pieces is obviously going to take some time and effort. Of course, if you have the resource available to deploy a great social media strategy, doing social media marketing in-house is a good choice.
However, most of the small businesses do not have time, let alone the resources to spend on building a social media strategy that works. Therefore, it only makes sense for such businesses to outsource their social presence to a dedicated social media marketing agency, which not only has the resources but also the much-needed expertise to boost the growth of your business online.
