Create an Effective Social Media Strategy

The best social media strategy is the perfect marriage of content, business goals, and audience. It’s easy to be intimidated by the vast number of options when crafting your social media strategy, so we’ve put together 6 simple steps to help you build your digital brand. Common goals include: product promotion, brand awareness, and customer engagement. Once your goals are defined, remember everything should map back to them—that includes social media marketing university the messaging of your posts. Then, think about how you plan to measure them. What are metrics will you want to use to evaluate your efforts? Clicks? Comments? Retweets or Shares? All of that should be clearly defined in your social media strategy. You might be wondering how many social media outlets you should start with. The more sites you choose, the more content you’ll be responsible for producing. It’s better to do one thing well than to do four things just OK … so make sure to focus your efforts and choose wisely so that you don’t stretch yourself too thin. As you’re choosing the best social media outlets what is social media marketing for your business, keep in mind that each channel requires different types of content. The content format of some channels might be more of a natural fit for your business. For example, some retailers have experienced a boost in sales by posting their product pictures on Pinterest. You should also do some market research to identify which social networks are most commonly used by your target audience.

Create the Right Content for the Social Media Sites You Choose

Don’t make the mistake of posting the same exact content with the same exact messaging on all of your social media outlets. Each of your social media networks is likely to have a different target audience, and therefore different content will appeal. Diversify the type of content you’re developing. According to Quick Sprout, some common, popular content types include memes, videos, guides, how to’s, lists and research-based data. Your audience will respond to different content shared on Facebook than on Instagram. Facebook studies show higher engagement with an emotional story, which includes a compelling social media marketing jobs image to connect the reader to the post—whereas LinkedIn has higher engagement rates on B2B content with a link to the post. This chart shows which types of content drive the most engagement on each outlet. Now that you know what content to create, an editorial calendar can help you manage your content production process. An editorial calendar can be an asset for your social media sites, as well as for your blog. It’ll tell you what to post and keep you on track with a balanced array of posts. Sharing and following tools can help you target your audience and keep track of relevant buzz around your business and trends. AddThis Sharing Buttons is a great way to enable sharing which helps to drive traffic to your site by enabling users to share your blog posts on social media. Social media listening tools can also social media and marketing be useful. Hashtagify.me allows you to follow trending hashtags related to a topic of your choice. You’re doing all this work, but if you’re not checking to make sure it’s effective it’s of no use. This means you need to monitor analytics on your posts. Clicks, shares, retweets, likes, and comments are all important measurements of engagement. The AddThis Analytics dashboard helps give insight into how people are sharing and consuming your content.

Essential Steps to Success in Social Media Marketing

Social media accounts for 27 percent of all time spent online and has become a popular way for customers to discover and research brands, and for marketers to reach out to potential customers. 93 percent of marketers currently say they use social media for business, and in 2013 there was a surge in popularity of new networks like Pinterest, Vine, and Instagram. This year, expect more sites, specifically Google+, to gain additional traction and become a people’s daily lives. Before businesses jump into social media, here are the five essential steps to success in social media marketing. As customers social media marketing agency and fans flock to a business’ social sites and post comments, they are going to expect the company to be social as well. Microsoft and Xbox support are two of many examples of businesses using Twitter for customer relations. The Xbox Support feed is one of the most active and responsive brand feeds found online. It boasts an impressive 1.3 million tweets calls itself the most responsive brand on Twitter.It is important to remember however that just responding is not enough. Automation has the ability to get brands in trouble because it can lead to inappropriate responses. For example, companies that respond to every mention with a boilerplate response could inadvertently promote negative attention or come off as uncaring. When it comes to public perception, this is a big issue because consumers demand to feel like they’re interacting with a human on social media, not an automated response. There are hundreds of millions of interactions across social media sites every day. Even though the majority social media marketing company of businesses believe social media is important, 25 percent of them have no strategy in place for measurement. Businesses that spend time and money on social media want a return on their investment, and measuring metrics is one of the best ways to see if this is happening and what can be improved.