Establishing a social media presence for your business allows you to interact with your target market on a platform they frequent. You create a more personal relationship between you and your customers. However, reaching out to them isn’t as simple as clicking publish on a post.
Social Media content has to be researched and written in such a way that keeps your followers entertained so they continually interact with you, increasing your reach and helping you secure a place in their newsfeeds. When people are intrigued or amused by your content, they are more likely to react or re-post, which means they do the advertising for you! Shares and likes are the modern form of word-of-mouth marketing.
Anyone can manage a Social Media account but there’re a few things you should know to turn your usual posting into real Social Media Marketing.
Here’s how to kick-start your campaign on Social Media for Businesses!
Research
- Check out trends and fads that your target market are interested in then find a way to integrate your brand with it.
- Look for relevant content that you can use, be sure to check usage rights or give credit to the authors.
- Review related hashtags and people to follow so that you know how to get your content in front of the right people
Draft
- Create a draft of the content you need to use. Follow character limits and don’t forget to include your links and hashtags.
- Make sure you have enough content and some spare to last you the duration of your campaign.
- Keep it short and clever, be entertaining and fresh. Remember that people are constantly on the go. You have to hook their attention with a witty one liner they won’t forget.
Schedule
- Map out posts over the length of your campaign. Figure out the days you’ll post, time and frequency.
- Plan the type of content you’ll post and the sequence like images followed by articles, status updates or videos.
- Consider special posts for holidays and events like Christmas and Anniversaries.
- You can use scheduling tools like Hootsuite, Facebook Scheduler or Sprout Social.
Post and Interact
- Scheduled posting is great but there’s nothing quite like a daily personal touch that makes you less of a brand and more of a person.
- Reach out and interact with your followers. Not only does this build a relationship with them, the more you interact, the more relevant you are in newsfeeds.
- Don’t forget to like and share posts from people with authority or feedback from your customers.
Measure & Analyze
- Pay attention to insights and analytics. Facebook provides you with this but for other platforms, you can download apps or sign up to different services. Often times the scheduling tools you use also come with reports.
- Evaluate what kind of posts perform the best and what time and day you posted them. Also, pay attention to when your followers are online. It’s a shame to post great content when it’ll just get buried in the rest of their news feed. You want to be on point and on time.
Adjust
- Go back to your scheduled posts and revise them based on your observations from the insights and analytics.
- Adjust the time and day of your posts to fit in with when your target audience is most often online.
- You can also edit future posts to fit in with the latest trending topics. Take advantage of hashtags and news.
These are the basics to getting your campaign up and running but in fact, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. You’ll definitely experience a whole lot of highs and lows that you can’t control because it’s extremely difficult to keep your posts in front of the people you’re targeting.
If you want to get more technical and reach an even broader audience, try paid social media ads like Facebook Boost Posts, Instagram Sponsored Posts or TrueView videos on YouTube. But before you do, make sure you completely understand how social media marketing works because often times, without expert advice, people end up spending more money on ads than they’d receive from the business the ads bring in.
Considering getting serious with your Social Media Marketing? We can give you a boost. At Project Assistant, we’ve got a team of content writers, marketers, and SEO analysts that dedicate their time to managing Social Media Campaigns so that you can focus on running your business and entertaining clients. Just get in touch with us and we’d be more than happy to help create a campaign that suits your brand and budget!
