To get the most out of your social media marketing strategy, here are 6 areas you should dedicate time to and focus on –
Content
If you plan to do any kind of social or digital marketing, you will need great content! Creating compelling content can be time-consuming and often overwhelming.
You’ll find it much easier to generate content if you get yourself organised, work ahead of yourself, and continuously monitor and measure the results (so you know what works most successfully).
I advocate using your content on multiple channels. Creating a piece, posting it on your blog, using it in your email marketing campaigns and splitting or modifying it for social media is the most efficient way to work.
It’s also crucial to work on a content plan.
You can see some general content tips here in a previous blog post, Content Marketing Tips.
Community
Community (or communities) is essential for successful social media activity. It’s worth figuring out whom you want (or need) to hang out with.
Your social activity should prioritise building up the following communities –
Perfect Potential Customers – people who can directly engage or buy your product or service.
People Who Can Help You Get to Perfect Potential Customer – these people could be influencers or connectors or well-networked people with followers whom you want to hang out with.
Conversation
Social media should be (but isn’t always) about conversation.
It’s not going to work if you continue to post content. Posting content is essential, but it’s as important to interact, respond to posts from others, and generally join in the conversation.
I think Twitter was, and still is, the original social channel for conversation.
Joining groups on different social media channels can be a great way to join the right kind of conversation.
Consistency
Whether we like it or not, all social media channels use an algorithm. The algorithm essentially decides who sees what on the channel. There’s lots of conflicting advice about what the algorithms are looking for.
One thing that we can be sure of is that algorithms want consistency. If you have, say, 20 posts a month in you, then spread them out across the whole month, don’t post them all in the first week, then post nothing for 3 weeks.
Generating results from social media marketing takes time. Being consistent over a long period (months or years instead of days and weeks) on your chosen channel(s) is essential to build steady momentum.
Coherency
Your social media strategy should be coherently integrated with your overall marketing strategy.
Social media is another way to share content with your audience and join or start conversations.
It shouldn’t be viewed as a standalone activity. The most impressive results are often generated when coherency is achieved across multiple social and conventional marketing channels.
Conversion
Social media often forms an integral part of an inbound marketing strategy. While the primary purpose of inbound marketing isn’t to sell, we should still be aware of our activity’s impact on conversion.
There’s no point in spending lots of time on any marketing activity that doesn’t generate conversion.
Social media might not convert directly, but it’s important to be aware of its impact on the overall customer journey.
Have I missed anything? If I have, then drop me a line! Share your social media marketing experiences.