Marketing has progressed beyond traditional methods and into the realms of digital marketing. Marketing on the web has been propelled through social media channels. Social media uses web-based technologies via computers and mobile devices. This helps in creating interactive platforms through which individuals, organizations, etc., can share/modify user-generated content or online content.

Before you set forth into the world social media marketing, it is a good idea to assess its power. The following statistics indicate the number of users on some popular social media sites as of September 2016

  1. Facebook: 1,712,000,000 users
  2. Tumblr: 555,000,000 users
  3. Instagram: 500,000,000 users
  4. Twitter: 313,000,000 users

 

This shows the scope of different social media sites. Hence, we see that marketing on social media will reach out to a wide variety of users and influence them.

  • The direct impact of social media marketing is enhanced exposure.
  • It enables increasing the traffic to the website.
  • It helps a business establish partnerships.
  • It helps in reduction of marketing expenses.
  • All these lead to the generation of leads and improvements in sales.

Like any other marketing strategy, social media marketing entails detailed planning. You should collect information about various platforms being used and select the ones apt for your purpose. Once you market on social media, you should have a means to monitor the performance of your business through it.

The process of social media marketing can be explained in the following steps:

 

Step1: Identify your objectives
You could define specific objectives such as:

  • Increasing exposure and awareness
  • Enhance engagement
  • Use it as a platform to showcase your knowledge.
  • Convert leads to sales.

These objectives should be defined in terms of set deadlines and specific numbers. This helps in evaluating its performance.

Step2: Research
Your research should cover three main factors:

  • Your audience: You need to have an idea about the demographics of your audience, their preferences, etc. It definitely helps to ‘know your customer’.
  • Your competitors: Just like any other strategy, it is beneficial to evaluate what works for your competitors.
  • Popular trends: You need to be aware of popular trends and use them for marketing. For instance, these days adding a video on social media leads to better engagement.


Step3: Design your strategy
Schedule an editorial calendar: This entails planning what you want to post and the frequency at which you want to do it. You should aim to post content on a regular basis. You can post on a daily, weekly, monthly basis depending on your platform.

Step4: Monitor your progress
This helps in giving you a feedback about how your strategy is performing. You can gauge your performance through the number of engaged users. This will be indicated by the number of likes, shares, comments or link clicks. This will help you altering your strategy so as to yield better results.

1. Define the goals to be achieved through social media marketing.

Through social media marketing, you can generate traffic, create a following, generate revenue or interaction.

2. Design your content so as to achieve your goals.
3. Measure achievement of your goals through metrics

Metrics vary according to the goals.
a. Generation of traffic can be measured by the number of unique visitors from social websites where the campaign has been run.
b. Measurement of the following created can be done through subscribers or followers on social channels.
c. Measurement of interaction generated can be done through the quantity and type of commentary.
d. Revenue generated can be measured by precise dollar value of every lead the social post generates.

4. Increase the frequency of updates

a. Post 5-10 times a day on Twitter and 1-4 times a day on Facebook for optimum results.
b. Post on multiple sites.

5. Engage in real conversations with your audience

Autoposting is one way of enhancing engagement. Additionally, engaging in real conversations brings better results and adds value to their social stream.

6. Check out Google Analytics reports

Google analytics reports such as Data Hub activity and Trackbacks give the precise idea regarding the response of users to your content.

7. Use hash tags to improve visibility of your content
8. Enhance the appeal of your content through addition of infographics

Infographics help in depicting complex information as a visual making it easy to understand.

9. Monitor your social media engagement in comparison with that of your competitors.

This will help you revise your strategy if required.

10. Make your content mobile-friendly.

Since the audience is preferring to seek everything on mobile. It is necessary to make your blog mobile-friendly.

11. Select the relevant platforms for posting

Different platforms have varied reach. Hence, platforms for posting content should be selected so as to reach the target audience.

12. Outsource social media marketing

Social media marketing requires marketing on a number of platforms. Each platform needs dedicated efforts and time. Therefore, you can consider outsourcing it.

13. Include photos to give your post a human touch

Audience is attracted to posts that include photos. This is because photos add a human element and enhance the visual impact. Select the photos which are eye-catching.

14. Enhance engagement through questions to audience in the blog
15. Use questions in your post for better engagement

Let us take this journey to understand the nuances of effective marketing on some popular platforms

Since Facebook is the most popular of all the platforms, effective marketing using this channel helps a business grow by leaps and bounds.

For growing your business through Facebook, you can follow three simple steps:

Attract, Promote and Sell

 

Attract
Attraction entails building a fan base. For this, it is necessary to engage with your audience. One of the simplest ways to achieve this is to create a Facebook ‘Like’ button on your website. Once someone clicks on it, they become your fan. This ensures that you figure on top of their minds when they visit Facebook.

You can also increase your following through your website or blogs. For engaging with your audience, you need to post on a regular basis.

Facebook helps you generate genuine leads who share their details with you. This enables you in building an email list.

Promote
Post precise, to the point status updates. Studies have shown that brief updates attract more clicks. Status updates should be punctuated with images.

Sell
This is the main objective of Facebook marketing. Engage with the audience is vital for encouraging sales. One simple method to engage with your audience is to ask questions to your audience. This helps you in designing your product, service or program according to the needs of your audience.

LinkedIn Marketing consists of three simple steps:

Step1: Build up your Brand
For this you need to establish a Company page that is credible gets noticed.

Step2: Establish a link with your audience
You should aim at converting your target audience into your followers.

Step3: Engage with your audience
Finally, you need to turn followers into brand advocates through engagement.

 Update your profile regularly
Every time you update your profile, the details are shared with your contacts. Updating the information on a regular basis helps keep the profile fresh and interesting. Updating can be done by uploading the latest profile picture, refreshing the headline of your profile. For instance, you can add any skill sets that you might have acquired.

Enhance your visibility
This can be done by increasing your connections. Each new connection increases your visibility. While building your network, you should target quality connections. It is beneficial to connect with people who provide a good reason as to why they would like to connect. You can increase your network by asking other group members to connect with you. With the growth in quality and quantity of connections you reach the tipping point. The point where you don’t need to seek connections, but they will reach out to you. You need to establish connections with your clients, prospects, partners, vendors, colleagues, etc.

Become active on the network
You need to share, comment, interact regularly. Post status updates once or twice daily. This will make you stay on the top in the minds of your connections.

Boost your profile through endorsements
Every time you give or receive an endorsement, it will show on your Linkedin news feed. This in turn enhances visibility.Twitter is a social media platform which has a wide reach. It is a platform that enables instant connection of people and businesses across the globe. Twitter can be used to leverage a business.

Effective ways to use Twitter for the growth of a business:

  1. Twitter gives you information about the happenings in the world of business. You can have an easy access to relevant information. This can help you utilize it for planning your strategy.
  2. Establish your brand loyalty by communicating with your Twitter followers on a regular basis. Twitter Ads are also useful for this.
  3. Build a reputation by providing timely customer support.
  4. Twitter provides you an opportunity to connect with people outside your personal network. You can use this platform to connect with prospective customers, brand advocates and influencers.

However, tweeting should be done so that it has an impact on its audience. Following are some useful tips that can be followed while Tweeting:

  • The message should be precise.
  • Boost your Tweet through visuals.
  • Include appropriate hashtags.
  • Engage with your audience through polls and relevant questions.
  • Maintain your Twitter presence by retweeting and replying to Tweets.

Instagram
It is basically a social networking platform for sharing photos and video clips instantly on a mobile device. Off late it has become a hub through which people identify a business. It is being recognized as the single most important social media network. It has a high engagement rate. It is especially popular among the younger generation. Therefore, if your business does not have a presence on Instagram, it will be ignored especially by the future generations.

Slide share
It is a slide hosting service that allows its users to upload files (Power point, PDF, keynote or open document presentations) either privately or publicly. The slide decks can be viewed on the host site or embedded on other sites. Just as YouTube allows sharing of videos, slide share allows sharing of slides. However, the usage of this method is not very popular at present. Since the competition is less on this platform, your content will have a better viewership here.

YouTube
It is a platform that is used for sharing videos. It has grown in popularity in recent times. This is because most potential customers prefer watching an informative video about your products rather than reading lengthy written material. More and more businesses prefer this platform for marketing. This is because a video is not only a great promotional tool but also helps in building trust.

Pinterest
It is a place where people go to get ideas for any projects or interest in their lives. Pinterest has a system of boards where these ideas and discoveries can be pinned. It has brief descriptions. The main focus is on visual impact. Clicking on an image takes the user to the original source. It is a means to connect people through shared interests.

Quora
It is basically an online question-and-answer service built on social media. It is highly popular among a wide range of people. It has high-level executives, industry insiders, entrepreneurs, etc., who are ready to answer a wide array of questions for free. It is a site where people post queries on a host of topics. Hence, it proves an effective means to keep in touch with a network of people.Now that you have understood the marketing techniques using various social media platforms, you may wonder “How to get conversions using social media?”

Social media can be used effectively to convert leads. Here are some useful tips to use social media for conversions:

1. You can use gated content
Gated content is one where the users need to fill an online form furnishing their details in order to access the content. This can be used by the marketing department to add them to a lead funnel or subscribe them to an email newsletter.

2. Add a promo code
Including a promo code in your Facebook cover photo or Twitter background helps in conversion. This is because it generates curiosity in the minds of leads who casually visit your profile. And, leads who are already interested will become your customers.
Adding a promo code also helps to measure your ROI.

3. Specify CTA
Many a time the websites have beautifully designed landing pages but the visitor does not know what to do next. Therefore, it is vital to clearly specify the call to action to complete an action.

These are some basic ways of converting leads on all platforms. However, there are no fixed rules regarding conversion of leads.

It is vital to measure the effectiveness of your strategies. Social media measurement can be done through:

Ongoing Analytics: This is a process of monitoring wherein brand tracking I set up. You can just let it run and check from time to time to see how things are going.

Campaign-focused metrics: It varies from campaign to campaign depending on your goals for the individual campaign.

The most optimum measurement program includes both the above methods.

Social media has had a definite impact on growth of businesses who use it. The simple reason being

 

that it offers the best platform to engage. It has helped businesses grow in more ways than one. It has helped build brand loyalty, generate traffic, etc. With a rapid rise in the number of users, more businesses are going to utilize it for furthering their business.

Based on the current trends, the future may be predicted as:

  • Mobile will become a priority
    Popularity of usage of mobiles will make it essential to make social media marketing to be done through mobile Apps.
  • Use of videos in postings will become a necessity
    Popularity of usage of mobiles will make it essential to make social media marketing to be done through mobile Apps.
  • Users will need to pay more for traffic
    Rise in the number of users is prompting more businesses to use it for promotion. Higher number of users have caused the traffic to increase. This has made it difficult to get visibility on social media. Therefore, users need to adopt paid methods to advertise on social media.
  • The concept virtual reality
    It is a new technology which will completely revolutionize the concept of videos. The virtual movie-watching App allows you to ‘sit’ in a theater and watch a video in real time with other users.
  • The rising trend of Emojis
    Emojis have become popular in texts, ads, new stories, etc., on social media.
  • Impact of influencer marketing
    Trends show that people trust blogs more than advertisements while taking purchasing decisions.

Social media marketing is a marketing technique which can be used effectively to grow a business. We at Webguruz Technologies have a skilled team who can provide excellent social media marketing services to our clients.