A Beginner's Guide to Social Media Marketing
Did you know that 90% of all marketers say social media marketing has increased their business exposure?
Social platforms help you connect with your customers, increase awareness about your brand, and boost your leads and sales. And you can get your company's social media off the ground right now. You don't need to know everything or have the magic number of followers. You can get started immediately—and even enjoy yourself in the process.
Here are some basics to get you started:
Facebook:
It's not a secret for anyone that Facebook is the most widely-used social network to date. Presently, there are over 2.32 billion monthly active users (MAU) in the world.
Let's take a look at some of the most important things you need to consider if you plan to use Facebook as your marketing tool.
- Facebook Pages is a must for businesses. It will serve as a hub of information you will provide to your fans. A company logo as a profile picture and a good "About" section is the bare minimum to set it up for success.
- Users will automatically receive updates from that page in their news feed when they "Like" a page and "Follow" it.
- Allocate a small budget to start running ads. They will place your brand directly in front of your target audience.
- The cornerstone of your marketing strategy is regular updates. Facebook has a wide variety of options - videos, offers, leads, canvas, carousel, events and many more. You need to experiment with the type of posts to figure out what will best resonate with your target audience.
- Make use of Facebook Page Insights tool to measure the results of your efforts and tweak your strategy accordingly.
- Create a Facebook group. The majority of business pages on Facebook lack the type of engagement that Facebook group can achieve with ease. So if you want to have a constant conversation with your customers and prospects you will need a Facebook group.
- Live videos are the latest trend that is quickly growing in popularity.
Instagram:
Since its launch in 2010, Instagram has taken the world by storm. It seems like everyone is on the platform.
Instagram users aren't just active, they're engaged:
- 80% of users follow at least one brand on Instagram, with 60% of these users saying they've discovered new products or services through the platform.
- At least 30% of Instagram users have purchased products they discovered on Instagram.
- 65% of top-performing Instagram posts clearly feature products.
- Set up an Instagram business account and provide all the necessary information including contact details, bio, and address.
- Set goals and objectives in order to keep the company on track and focus all of your efforts on achieving real business objectives.
- Understand who your target audience is. Before you decide what type of content to share, you need to think about who's going to see it
- Instagram is all about sharing great content. For this, you have to create visual content for your brand and make use of quality and trending hashtags. If you are not a savvy designer, you do not have to worry about it. DesignPro is an intuitive drag-and-drop design tool that offers more than 3000 free social media design templates. You can easily create professional-looking graphics that get clicks
- Take advantage of the Stories. They are full-screen visual posts in which you can share photos and videos with your audience that last for 24 hours
- Measure the performance of your posts and tweak your Instagram strategy.
LinkedIn:
LinkedIn is a business-oriented social network. Well, this may surprise you, but LinkedIn has become an effective tool for generating B2B leads that many businesses haven't explored.
The biggest winner here is that 93% of B2B marketers feel that LinkedIn is the best place to win leads. 64% of corporate website visits originate on LinkedIn.
What can your business accomplish with LinkedIn?
Whether you want to generate leads, build brand awareness, or establish strategic partnerships, LinkedIn can connect your brand with more than 450 million professionals across the globe:
- Create a LinkedIn company page. Focus on providing opportunities for prospective customers to learn more about your company, the services you offer, and the people who work there.
- LinkedIn recommends posting at least once per weekday. Sharing informative blogs, news articles and inspirational images can set you as an industry expert. You can also keep your audience engaged with professional updates, latest job openings and corporate press releases.
- Define your audience and goals. Common LinkedIn marketing goals involve generating leads, raising brand awareness, or most likely both.
- Become a part of LinkedIn Groups or create a group. It will enable you to connect with other professionals and businesses from the same field. It also helps in being a part of valuable interaction and group discussions.
YouTube:
Video content is cited to be the top disruptor in the marketing world. More than ever, consumers want to learn and connect with brands through video content. One-third of the total time online is spent watching videos.
YouTube is the most popular video-sharing website. It has more than a billion active users and can be accessed in 76 different languages, accounting for 95% of the world's population.
With over 50 million content creators posting videos regularly, if you're planning to begin marketing on YouTube, you need to do your homework.
- Creating a YouTube channel. Before you do anything, open a Brand Account on Google. When you create your YouTube channel using a regular Google account, only one person—the Google Account holder—can log into that channel. By creating your YouTube channel using a Brand Account, multiple authorized Google Accounts can log in simultaneously.
- Do your research. This is, of course, the first step to any content marketing strategy. Competitive analysis is essential if you want to pull ahead of other businesses in your niche on YouTube. Fortunately, you can find everything you need on their channels. Browse your competitors' YouTube channels and take note of which videos got the most and least views. Watch these videos get a sense of what kinds of content your audience likes to watch (and what they don't) and use that to inform your own content strategy.
- The next step is to create the video itself. Once it's done, you need to upload it on YouTube.
- Optimize your videos for SEO. Your YouTube videos need to be optimized for search if you want to get the most value out of them. The important elements you need to keep an eye on includes: an eye-grabbing title with the required keywords in order to reach the right users; trending hashtags in the video description; and appealing thumbnails to catch the immediate attention of a large number of audiences.
- Organize your videos into playlists. When your YouTube videos are organized into playlists, they'll autoplay until the playlist ends, keeping viewers on your channel for longer, increasing that important average watch time statistic on your channel.
- Promote your channel and videos with YouTube ads.
About The Author
Elena Velikova is the co-founder of the great social media tool, DigitalOcto. It makes it easy to schedule and automate your content on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn! From creating visual posts for you (seriously) to re-posting evergreen content, DigitalOcto has you covered!
Free Download PDF