1. Intro
Social media marketing is not easy, but the more you understand it, the easier it becomes.
Social media marketing is a lot different from traditional marketing. It’s about understanding the audience and about creating an experience that will engage them in your brand’s direction.
No social media strategy without social media itself - your audience can only be reached with real engagement. As such, you need to own your brand’s social channels. You have to be there first and people will follow if they like what you have to offer first and foremost - they won’t follow if they don’t know who you are first or if they aren’t engaged with you first.
2. Crafting a social media marketing strategy
Social media is a great tool for driving sales, but it can also be a bit more difficult to use than you might think. The best way to get started with social media is to get some basic rules and tips down.
You want to make sure your social media marketing strategy is executed properly from the start — this includes setting up and organizing your accounts, so people can find them (and create those accounts) easily. It’s also about making sure you have a presence on multiple platforms and channels. If a customer searches for something specific (like “led phone lights”), you want them to be able to find your product on all of your channels.
Sometimes that means building new campaigns, or creating content specifically for social media channels. When people are searching for something specific, they tend to share things they like or are interested in online — that’s why Pinterest has such a large community of pins centered around crafts, cooking, and other hobbies.
If you’re starting out with social media marketing, don’t rush into it! A lot of the time it will take time and practice before you develop the skills necessary to use it effectively in your business — if you need help getting there, let us know!
3. How to create the perfect post for each of your social networks
Creating the perfect post for each of your networks is a lot easier than you may think. Just follow these few simple steps:
1. Find the post that you want to be featured on. You can do this by searching for it, or by posting it yourself.
2. Search for relevant words in the title of the post (like “social media,” “linkedin”, “pinterest”) and paste them into a code within a comment, tag or with any other tool you can find online (like Google Sheets).
3. Search again for similar posts on these same networks (using keywords), and copy them into an image or video file that can be used as an example.
4. Upload the file with a link directing people to your post and voila! Follow those steps in your social media account now & keep posting!
5. Keep in mind that social media posts are a different beast from blog posts — don't expect instant results, especially if you've only been using one network for a few weeks — but they're great to get people acquainted with your brand and/or product(s) and keep them scrolling through your network until you decide to make changes!
4. Optimizing a post for maximum reach and engagement
Social media marketing is an area that many startup founders are still not fully aware of, because it’s not a “thing” that they have been asked to do. As the saying goes:
You don’t need to know how Facebook works in order to use it, but you do need to know how to optimize your post so that people see it. And while there are plenty of tools out there for this (and you can find them on almost any social media platform), nothing beats a good ol’ finger on the ‘share buttonengagement .’
After all, this is the one thing that should come down to: everyone wants share buttons on their Facebook posts, right? And if you don’t have one, get one. Searching for “share buttons” on Google will show you dozens of free ones everywhere from startups all the way up to big publishers like Forbes and Business Insider.
The key point here is to be up in front with your customers and give them what they want with what you can provide (as opposed to optimizing for clicks vs shares). You may also want to check out some of our other posts about optimizing content for social media in general.
5. Measuring Your Strategy's Success
Social media is an ever-evolving frontier and the tools that help you achieve the best possible results are constantly evolving. There are too many tools to list here, but you need to measure your strategy's success before and after launch to determine how it performed.
It can be hard to know what measurement even is, as every single piece of data can be useful and all examples fall into different buckets. But knowing what marketing metric to use is key because of the varying goals of social media marketing:
On one end, we want to gather as much data as possible about people’s experience with our product so that we can improve it and make it more user-friendly. On the other end, we want our customers to notice us and tell their friends about us so that we can get more sales.
The goal is a goal: measuring success or failure in social media marketing should have a clear meaning for you — a means by which you will be able to define success. Especially if you are trying something new, like social media marketing for your product — it is important that you understand the metrics that tell you if your efforts were worth it.
In the end, I think it’s always a good idea to put together a short outline of your goals, a list of your accomplishments, and some key takeaways. You can then use this outline as the basis for your marketing strategy.
As I mentioned in the first part of this post, there are some key things you should keep in mind:
• Make sure you have a clear value proposition, something that you believe is worth sharing across space.
• Make sure you have a strong story that informs and excites people about the product. If it’s too vague, people will be less likely to share and more likely to send a negative review/review somewhere else (e.g., reddit). If it’s too specific and detailed, it’ll get lost in the sea of content (e.g., LinkedIn).
• Make sure that whatever content you share is aligned with your valence (see below).
• Create content that engages new audiences, not just existing ones (and remember: “engage new audiences” means “inform existing audiences”).
I hope these tips help you get started on your journey towards marketing success!
