Social Media Marketing was quite simple during the early days. All you have to do is tell people online about your brand, share some promotions, or organize a couple of contests now and then. However, because of the extremely competitive landscape, social media marketing tactics have changed a lot over time. There is a lot more to handling a Facebook page or a Twitter account to promote your business. Here are some of the tricks that you need to try out to boot organic traffic or conversion rates.
Understand the Core Principle
Before we dive deep into the details, you need to understand that social media marketing exists to help both businesses and consumers. The idea is to project the brand as an object of common interest for your customers and therefore, knowing the customer is the essential part. Once you know the target customer, you can craft your marketing strategies accordingly.
The buyer persona is at the core of social media marketing. You need to know the personal and professional information of your customers – what your customers generally do for a living, what their values and fears are, what are their goals in life and what challenges they face on a daily basis. Social media marketing for a fitness brand will be much more different from that of a vehicle manufacturer.
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So, understand your target customer and start accordingly.
1.Cater to niche content
As opposed to creating brand pages, create pages that cater to a particular interest of your target customer or audience. So, if you are a brand selling beauty products or fitness products, you can create a page about body positivity or health, in general. From there, you can share your blogs that fit into that niche and along with those blogs, you can promote your product. You cannot directly ask people to buy your products, and you need to give them back something. So, maybe after reading a blog post, people may consider buying a specific product.
For example, a fitness brand can share a blog about the benefits of cardio exercises and at the end of the blog, they can ask people to have a look at their new running shoes. Just sharing a product on the page does not work. When you have good, engaging content on your pages, more and more people will follow the page, and more people will get to know your product.
Simply pushing people to buy your products is not a good idea. On the contrary, it repels people from following the brand online. Therefore, creating useful, engaging content is a must. You can write your own content and also share content created by others that fall into the same niche.
2. Post Frequently
One of the most important parts of growing the social following of your brand is to post content frequently. Depending on your posting frequency, your audience will have different responses. So, you need to find out the right cadence for your brand. Moreover, you can also check out the posting frequency of other competing brands. This works as a good starting point.
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Moreover, there is also an optimal time to post, depending on what channel you are posting to. Facebook may have peak engagement time at a different time of day than Instagram or Twitter. Similarly, engagement also varies over the different days of the weeks. So, find out what is the best time and day to post content and make posts accordingly.
In social media marketing, being regular with posts plays an extremely crucial role.
3. Make use of hashtags
Hashtags are nothing new. However, a lot of brands fail to utilize them properly. Hashtags are a great way to have your content discovered and reach out to a lot more potential followers. You can also use hashtags to run campaigns, check the effectiveness of campaigns, collect feedbacks on content and even run content with another competing brand. Hashtags are not just there on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts have them too, and they work just as well.
4. Make Use of Social Media Publishing
Guest posting is something that all brands should consider. It is a well-established SEO technique. For social media marketing, it works equally well. You can ask others to make a post on social media platforms that come with a publishing feature. This includes LinkedIn Pulse, Quora Blog, Medium or Facebook Notes.
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When other people write something about your brand, you get a lot of traffic from them. You get a whole lot of additional exposure as well as traffic from guest publishing on social media.
5. Chat with your audience
Be engaging. Talk to your audience, reply to their comments, send them messages or even like their posts. Twitter is a great way to have a conversation with your audience. A Twitter chat is a fun and engaging way to improve sales, collect feedback or to promote a new product. You can co-host an existing Twitter chat, or you can even start your chat. If you are co-hosting a chat, you can directly tap into the existing audience. However, if you are starting your own chat, you will have to wait for a little for others to take part.
6. Invest in Infographics
Infographics are a great way to improve traffic and even create backlinks that will be beneficial in terms of SEO. You can hire a professional to build an infographic, and the cost depends on how skilled the person is. However, it is a sound investment. Suppose, you run the account for a bicycle brand. You can do some research on how to take care of bicycle gears, or how to address bad riding habits, or how cycling is good for the planet and so on. Then you can design an infographic and post it online and links back to a particular blog or a product. If the content is good, many other blogs and news sites will also pick it up and then link you back.
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7. Pin the best photos
Most social networks, on their profile, allows you to pin the best photographs on top of your profile. Utilize this feature to increase product discoverability and to make your profile look more attractive.
8. Automate the processes
There are a bunch of tools that allow you to automate social media posting. Tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, IFTTT allow you to automate posting so you can manage all your social media accounts more efficiently.