Social Media Marketing Tips

Due to the vast amount of social media platforms currently available, providing a consistent marketing strategy which can be utilised on all platforms can prove difficult. Also due to the sheer volume of companies, businesses and individuals making use of social media platforms for marketing purposes, developing a strategy which works and sets your product or business apart from your competitors is becoming increasingly challenging. Included below is a selection of key social media marketing tips to take your social commerce strategies to the next level.

Like your customers on Facebook

Rather than asking your customers to like you, you should like them on Facebook first. This is one of Facebook key social media marketing tips. The majority of businesses, companies and corporations on Facebook merely use the platform as an extension of their existing marketing strategy. Despite appearances, Facebook is in fact a composed of many, many, many small groups and circles of close connections. Facebook and brands are becoming increasingly less interested in advertising and much more interested in creating, building and nurturing a direct and personal relationship between the individual customers and the brands which provide for them. However it must be stated that this strategy is not for all businesses neither is it for all customers. Despite this liking your customers on Facebook provides  a strategy to companies and businesses who wish to utilise and develop unconventional marketing strategies and break from the fold.

Secure your brand and product names

Regardless of your level of involvement with social media, it is imperative to take steps to secure both your brand name and product names on all major social media channels and platforms. This is one of the most important social media marketing tips we can give you especially if you are a large brand. This is just as important as the domain name you select for your company. Often businesses and companies will tweak or completely change their business or company name in order to fit into an available domain name. Unfortunately a lot of companies do not adapt the same policy on social media platforms.

Regardless of whether you are ready to launch your company’s presence on social media or are already well established, you should make efforts to secure your company handles on social networks. One of the best social media marketing tips is to choose the right platform rather than procrastination on them all. The key networks to secure your handle on are: Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, Pinterest and Instagram.

You should try to ensure that your company handle is the same across all social media networks and platforms. This is because once you start to use slightly different variations it makes it much more difficult for your fans, customers and prospects to find you. It is well worth taking a few minutes to develop and set up a minimum branding package, which you can easily and quickly deploy onto the new social media network or platform when it emerges. We have noticed a lot of brands doing this over the years so we would certainly put this at the top of the list of social media marketing tips as once it has gone it has gone!

Post your blogs onto the most popular groups on LinkedIn

There is an extremely easy way to have your content viewed by a majority of the 200, 000, 000+ LinkedIn users. Here is a guaranteed way to gain massive exposure with some of LinkedIn’s largest and most popular groups, it is so simple it can be done quickly in three stages:

• Find the LinkedIn share button: this is provided on the vast majority of articles and pages throughout the internet
• Next cut and paste your content: paste the content into the box under the Post to updates option, once you have done this, select the Post to Groups option.
• Next select the relevant groups which you want the content to be submitted to.

This is one of the key social media marketing tips we find remarkable, due to the ease with which it can be done, and also because of the massive levels of exposure it generates quickly.

More Key Social Media Marketing Tips

Increasingly more and more companies and businesses are making use of social media platforms and networks as part of their social market and social commerce strategies. Due to the sheer volume of competition on these forums it can be hard for businesses, especially small businesses to gain an edge on the competitive cyber social marketplace. These key social marketing tips are aimed to give your business or company the edge over your competitors.

Create a voice for your business

Another one of our key social media marketing tips for companies and businesses is the importance of blogging. In order to create an online presence your company needs to have a voice. Equally important for companies and businesses is that the content they share is of value. The logical solution to this challenge is to have a company blog. The advantages of this are twofold; firstly it provides a forum with which you can spark conversations, and secondly it helps to lead social media users back to your site, thus generating more hits.

There is no doubt that being active in the social media sphere helps to generate brand awareness. However when a user keeps returning to your website it vastly improves the chances of the visitor becoming a customer. It goes without saying that by providing unique content you greatly increase the chances of that content being shared through social media networks and platforms. This is a fantastic way to expose both your brand and your website to new audiences.

When utilising this key social marketing tip it is essential to keep two factors in mind. Firstly produce blogs with original content which others will want to share. Secondly, it is imperative to create a strategy for your blog; preferably this should be aligned with your marketing strategy.

Transform your social likes into social trust

It is widely assumed knowledge that savvy marketers utilise free content as a means to generate fans and followers. The best way to build on this method is to combine the two methods. Firstly create and share valuable and useful information to all visitors. Secondly, provide the opportunity for these readers to gain access to even more content through liking your page, or through signing up for free subscriptions via your landing page.

The advantage of this twofold strategy is that it allows all visitors to see your first wave of content. However the visitors which subscribe or like your page and gain access to the second wave of content, are far more qualified as they have demonstrated a degree of trust in your company merely by their subscription to your second tier of content. The best bit about this key social market tip is that it works with the majority of social media platforms currently in existence.

Make your website the industry Wikipedia

Have something to shout about on social media. One of the first social media marketing tips we can give you is to improve your own site content and utilise a blog for up to date news. As the internet is developing, becoming ever expansive in the content it quickly supplies users, users have reacted by growing increasingly impatient. Previously users would quite often “hang around” on a site searching for the information or content they want, whereas now the majority of users quickly become impatient or frustrated and look elsewhere. Once you have driven people to your site through social media it is only wise to give them a reason to stay by being informative of your own industry.

Although users have become increasingly impatient in search of answers, they are also far more loyal when they find a site which provides them with what they seek. In essence if a website continually proves to be a source of in-depth and knowledgeable information, then people will continue to use it. Based on this, the best social marketing strategy any company can utilise in 2013 is to become the informative authority within their respective industry.

If a customer or a client has ever asked you a question regarding your company or industry, make sure to answer these questions specifically on your website. If companies are willing to adapt what is referred to as the “they ask, You Answer” mentality, almost always fantastic results occur.

Combine all your social marketing

The social media marketing tips strategy of combining all your social marketing efforts together under one umbrella is known to marketing experts as: Perpetual (Pro)motion Machine. When marketing if you are making use of SEO, search advertising, social advertising, organic social media and Google re-marketing adds, you are focused on all assets and therefore getting the optimum results. Through doing this you are building brand awareness through Facebook, taking advantage of buying intent-keywords via Google. Whilst simultaneously ensuring that people who have visited your site, keep seeing it through Google re-marketing and also from your businesses Facebook fan page.

Generate leads with Facebook Offers

Last but certainly not least in our social media marketing tips is Facebook Offers. This is a great way to generate new leads using social media. Facebook Offers are a type of promotional advertisement; however they work very differently to traditional Facebook advertisements. What’s more they can be set up easily and efficiently directly from your Facebook page.

Facebook Offers works for five reasons:

1. When a user clicks on your Facebook Offer on their newsfeed, they are sent an email directly to their personal email account offsite. This provides greater exposure meaning that your offer is not only seen on Facebook, it is also seen in the email inboxes of interested prospects.
2. When users open their email, they will be provided with a link to your page, and an “opt in page”. (This is the website which you send prospects to in order to claim your offer.)
3. Offers appear in the newsfeed, whereas other advertising methods appear in the right hand column such as Marketplace advertisements.
4. Facebook Offers provides the ability to hyper-target your offers; this ensures that your offers are only seen by users who have a genuine interest in your company or business.
5. Advertisements which appear in the newsfeed gain up to six times more active engagement from users than advertisements which appear in the right hand column.