With almost one in four people around the world
Due to this potential and the growing popularity of social media, many companies have set up profiles across various platforms.
It is a big advantage for customers to see a company’s social media activity, including reviews, comments and recommendations, and it is becoming increasingly important to have a strong online presence.
With this in mind, the main advantages of social media marketing are:
Brand recognition
Social media sites can increase the accessibility, visibility and popularity of your company.
The more recognisable you are and the more often you share your brand’s voice, the more customers are likely to remember you, buy from you or use your services in the future.
Brand loyalty
Social media can be used to improve customer loyalty.
By posting updates and news, as well as interacting with your potential customers on a daily basis, the trust and credibility of your brand
Inbound marketing opportunities
Including backlinks in your social media posts will direct traffic to your website, bringing new opportunities and opening new doors to advertise your products or services.
Customer insights
Social media
Getting started
Social media marketing involves developing relevant, interesting and engaging content including text, images and video.
There are a wide number of social media platforms that you could use, including Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Linkedin, depending on the results you want to achieve.
Below are three simple steps your business can follow in order to begin getting to grips with social media.
Step one: Planning your campaign
Before you do anything else, consider what you want your social media marketing campaign to achieve. Is your goal to increase website traffic or to simply raise brand awareness?
If you aim to increase website traffic, you should including links in your posts to redirect followers to your website.
Instead, if your aim is to increase your brand’s awareness, then consider adding engaging branded images to your posts.
It is also essential that you consider your target audience and the social media sites they would use. The table below should help you choose which platforms best suit your company.
As well as this, it may be useful to check out the sites that your larger competitors are on and the engagement that they receive. This will help direct you to the most relevant platform for your business.
Step two: Generating content
To help you generate content ideas, you should consider performing
Doing these things will help you understand the type of content that interests your target audience and will guide the type of content you should aim to produce (though you should work to ensure this content is better than your competitors!).
Your content should be helpful and interesting, as well as align with your brand’s identity and voice.
Social media is also great for sharing articles, be these articles from your blog that will drive traffic to your website, or news articles that are relevant to your industry.
Be wary, however, not to post links to your competitor’s content and make sure your posts do not contain any mistakes before publishing!
Finally, remember to include hashtags that are relevant to the topic of discussion – tools like hashtagify can help you come up with these.
Step three: Measuring success
In order to continually improve your social media marketing strategy, keeping an eye on how your posts are performing is essential.
Most of the popular social media sites have simple, built-in analytics tools that are freely available to use, or you can invest in a dedicated analytics tool.
If your goal is to increase your website traffic, Google Analytics can be used to measure success. You can see whether your visitors have reached your website through social media by navigating to the ‘acquisition’ section of this tool.
There are also various social media planners on the market, enabling you to manage and analyse multiple platforms as well as plan and schedule future posts and campaigns. These include Hootsuite, Buffer and the like.
Whichever tool you choose, you will have access to useful analytics that can be used to determine the best performing content and the time of day to post.
Considering these results will help you strengthen your social media presence and help you build relationships with your target audience.
The disadvantages
Unfortunately, improving your online presence can be time-consuming as you will need to commit plenty of time to plan your campaigns.
It is not realistic to expect increased conversions from simply creating a profile – you need to be constantly present, creating inspiring content and engaging with your target audience.
Additionally, it takes time to analyse what works well and what doesn’t.
For these reasons many companies need help with setting up social media platforms, as well as creating engaging posts, blogs and campaigns.
We’ve helped many companies that don’t have the time or resources to dedicate towards building or improving their social media presence. For help and advice with social media marketing, feel free to get in touch.
