By eric on 04/03/2016
Social media has become an integral part of marketing in the past five years. Companies have been able to connect with their audiences, while still promoting their business. Adding a social media presence to your marketing strategy will undoubtedly broaden your horizons and bring in the customers you’re looking for.
Start a Plan
First thing’s first: determine what you want to accomplish with your social media marketing campaign. This includes everything that you do across all of the networks you’ve decided to use. Some general tips would be to have a unified vision across all of the different sites, which is very easy to do thanks to the ability to share posts from particular websites, i.e. from Facebook to Twitter. Determine how you want to appeal to your customers and work towards your overall business goals while doing it.
Have a Complete Page
There’s nothing worse than going to a business’s Facebook page and seeing that it’s missing vital information for understanding what the company is. An incomplete social media page will make you look professional and dedicated to using the service for building up your brand. Fill out every possible field you can to give users the most amount of information about your business.
Engage your Audience
Having an active social media page means interacting with your customers. If they post questions or need assistance with one of your products, be polite and help them out. Even if the questions don’t even pertain to anything relevant, responding to them in a friendly manner will show everyone who sees the post that you know how to handle situations like that. The Wal-Mart Facebook is notorious for having elderly users post gibberish or search queries on their page, but the administrators consistently respond with respectful answers to the seemingly ridiculous posts.
Keep people Coming to your Website
Remember that your social media accounts are tools meant to drive potential customers to your service or website. If your business strategy begins and ends on Facebook, you won’t be able to bring in the revenue you need to uphold your business. Give people incentive to visit your website; things like blog posts hosted on your own site or special offers for your followers will drive sales and keep people watching your page for more of what they want. Facebook and Twitter are great ways to connect to your audience on a more personal level, but remember to use it as a way to drive sales, too.
Understand the Purpose of Each Social Media Site
It’s one thing to sign up for the latest and greatest social website, but knowing what it’s main focus is for is detrimental for avoiding looking like you’re completely inept at using it at all. While it might not look like it on the surface, Facebook and Twitter are vastly different services. Facebook is primarily used for sharing photos and making longer announcements. Posts have a dedicated comments sections where your fans can discuss your post and share their reactions with each other. Twitter is better at delivering quick up-to-the-minute updates on your business’s activities. Companies that develop applications or other online services have been able to efficiently address any issues with their service to their followers. Just recently the Walmart Twitter page was able to alert their customers of an important pacifier recall.
Keep these simple tips in mind as you set out to make your mark on the social media marketing game. It can be a dangerous venture, but also a very rewarding one.
