Key to Mastering Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing has become a vital necessity for any business making its name in the business world. It can become a little confusing to determine what is the best social strategy to use, keeping in mind, the burgeoning numbers of social media platforms and the complexity of data analysis. In addition, many business owners may underestimate the importance of social media marketing as compared to traditional platforms. So, if you want to know how to make better and fruitful use of social media, read on to find out more.

Create great content!

One of the biggest must-haves to achieve success in the social media-marketing arena is great content. Many successful users of social media marketing testify to the importance of quality content as a vital requirement for your social media efforts. Great content will pull in a great audience. Great content could be anything- images, text, documents, videos, and podcasts- anything which is of high quality and capable of engaging people’s attention. Your members, their friends and so on can pick up sharing interesting content on social media platforms. Outstanding content can go viral and thus lead to exposure. The more people like your posts, tweet your tweets, and share your Instagram pictures, the more prominence you will obtain. Showcase all your achievements, interesting activities, which involved your company, your employees; show the human side, you will certainly achieve more marks on the social media front.

Go social, rather than digital!

Digital marketing was already there even before the arrival of social. Digital marketing revolves around delivering of business material on the platform and monitoring how customer responds to that advertising. It is more impersonal. Why this strategy has not paid many rewards is due to the fact that often, the responses are not satisfactory as engagement is poor; returns are poor, as a result. When digital strategies are used on social media platforms, it does not work out that well because companies forget a fact: people are on social media for engaging and building relationships and not for commercial purposes. A better approach would be to use a social strategy. Work on building long lasting relationships with the target audience base; Build relationships by offering them thing interesting and asking them to help out. In return, the participation of the crowd will benefit your company. This is how most social media interaction between companies and their customers are occurring: there are mutually beneficial interactions, which provide benefits to both sides.

Communication is two–ways!

One very important thing social media marketers have to remember is that: you are not doing a favor to your customer. Rather, you need them to help bolster your business. Hence, businesses should develop appropriate communication styles, understanding their audience in mind.

Do your research

Before trying to start social media marketing for your business or for your own products, it is good to have some research done on current statistics of social media. These include determining the statistics with reference to the most popular platforms in use; strengths and weaknesses of different platforms and determining what best fits your purpose. Some of the statistics which would help you include data on: number of users per site on different devices (desktop and mobile); which site is used the most by businesses in your industry; Which is the easiest and most customizable platform (as per your requirements); rates of engagement ; social media distribution on the basis of age, sex, profession, interest etc. There are many research companies, which produce such statistics, and you can use them as a reference for determining your strategy.

Monitor your social media

Creating an engaging social media marketing strategy is not enough. You should be able to monitor regularly to determine the kind of returns on investment you are getting. The planning should be dynamic so that it can incorporate any changes, which you may make along the way. Monitoring manually is tedious and cumbersome and impractical; especially when you may be using many platforms to promote your product. Help is there, however. There is analytics software which will help you monitor your social policy.

Be genuine

Remember that today’s online customer is not a fool. They can differentiate between a good quality and poor quality product and the corresponding marketing, which goes along with it. So, it is important to be honest, genuine in your interactions and communication as well as the marketing strategies you use

Source :http://www.business2community.com/social-media/key-to-mastering-social-media-marketing-01248568