Social Media marketing is the process of building awareness about your products or services through social media platforms. Your goal is to drive traffic to your website, increase the visibility of your products and gain more customers. It’s the fastest way to spread the word about your new product or service and millions of people out there, who spend an impressive amount of time on social media networks, will get to know your business in a few minutes.
But how can you take advantage of social media? Howcan beginners build a proper online presence on social media platforms? Read our tips below!
As a beginner to social media, you have to choose one or two social media platforms and concentrate on how each of them works better for you. Try avoiding to use all of them at the same time, since it can get confusing and overwhelming for a beginner.
A nice way to find the best social media platform for your business is to find your competitors and check out the number of Facebook fans, twitter followers and any other metrics for other social media channels they might be using. If they have 6000 Facebook fans but only 500 twitter followers then this is a good sign that Facebook is a more suitable social media platform than Twitter for your brand. It is also a sign that you need to engage more on Facebook than spending your time on any other platform.
Once you decide on which social media platform to use, the next step is to create or improve your respective profiles. By doing this, you increase your chances of getting more customers. If you want to have a trusted profile, try using a real photo or your company’s logo. After that, write a description about your company and include all your contact information. Do not forget to add a link to your website.
Now that your social media profiles are ready, you should connect your website with your pages. There is a certain procedure to follow for each social media platform, and you should spend the time in doing this properly. Ask your developers to have a look at your desired social media, and its API in order to achieve this.
Besides connecting your website to your social media channels, you should also add social media buttons to your website content so that readers can easily share them. The Follow button on Twitter allows users to follow your account directly from your website. Indeed, you can visit: https://twitter.com/about/resources/buttons#follow choose a button, copy & paste the code into the HTML of your website. Same applies to Facebook and other social media channels.
Another important tip is to find people to follow and build online ‘relationships’. Social media platforms make suggestions on who to follow, based on the people you already follow or their area of interest. Do not forget to follow back those who have already followed you, as you might see most of them un-following you for that reason. However, you should carefully decide who to follow back.
You should have in mind that it is better to keep a balance between the number of people you follow and the people who follow you back. This is important as software applications are using this ratio (followers/following) to make suggestions on ‘who to follow’ so if you have a very high ratio you minimize your chances of getting new quality followers.
If you share interesting and useful content you can get more re-shares, more visitors to your website and why not… more leads.An interesting content might be articles written by you or from other sources, relevant statistics or charts to your industry, motivational quotes, jokes, images & videos.
But how many times should you post per day? Well, that depends on the network. For example, a Facebook business page should be updated no more than 2 times per day and no more than 7 times per week. On the other hand, on Twitter the more you tweet the more exposure you get.
Social media networks have rules. There is a limit on the number you can follow per day (Twitter) or the number you can delete from your circles (Google+), etc. This means that it takes time to build your network and you need to be patient and not try to rush into breaking the rules (like spending money in ‘buying followers’ or anything else).