Social Media – A Strong Marketing Tool to Increase Your Online Exposure
Social media marketing is one of the greatest digital marketing tools that you can use to market your products/services to the targeted audience. As per Social Media Examiner, 83% marketers believe that social media is important for their business. Whether you have an online business, local store or international brand, social media is helpful for every type of business. According to Statista, in 2015 73% people in America had a profile on at least one social network.
Potential Benefits of Social Media Marketing
- With social media, you can target your audience more effectively
- Social media lets your customers connect and interact with your business. Social media is a great opportunity to develop your brand and gives it a voice.
- If used correctly, Social media can help in attracting new customers and serving existing followers through personalized campaigns.
- You can receive instant feedback from customers’ perspective.
- Social media drives traffic to your website and helps in improving search engine rankings.
- You can use social media channels to build meaningful relationships with customers.
- Social media also helps in expanding the reach of your business and its products/services.
Tips to Promote Your Brand Effectively On Social Media:
Facebook is one of the most popular social network in the world with over 1.5 billion users. Facebook provides great opportunities to businesses for promoting their products and services online. With organic and paid Facebook marketing, you can reach your target audience within your budget.
You can create a Facebook fan page for following six categories:
Quick Tips to Optimize Your Facebook Business Page
- Make sure you complete the profile page info such as description, website, contact email and phone number, etc.
- Use interactive cover images. Product based businesses can mention their product releases, discount offers or special sale in the cover image.
- Timings play a vital role to get wider reach and engagement on posts. Posting in the afternoon from 1 PM to 4 PM can get your most likes, clicks, and shares.
- Don’t oversell! Your posts should be a mix of informative, funny and product-related posts.
- Use different media types. If you share the same kind of posts without changing your media types, you might end up bore your followers. Use images, videos, GIF animated images to keep your audience engaged.
- Consider EdgeRank components, i.e., affinity, weight, and decay while posting on Facebook. Affinity includes level and frequency of interaction. The more you will interact, the more your posts will be shown to users. Weight includes the number of likes, comments, and shares a particular piece of content receives. Higher the weight, better the visibility. Decay refers to the time since you posted the content. Old content unless it has great weight, will be pushed down.
- Don’t forget to add hash (#) tags. Put hashtags to relevant terms contained in your content. However, make sure you don’t spam.
- To make your page look attractive, you can also add custom tabs with the use of free apps like Static HTML iFrame Tabs. Below is an example of custom tabs:
- Social Meta or open graph meta is another important element that you must not overlook. By using social meta, whenever you will be sharing any link on Facebook, it will pull the page content and images.
Paid Facebook Ads
You can also run paid ads for your promoting products and services. You can also run ads for getting likes from relevant people, promoting posts shares on the Facebook page, promoting a call to action on Facebook Page, App installs, etc. Here are the different types of FB ads that you run:
Twitter is a powerful social network that has 271 million monthly active users. Using this social network, you can reach to the potential customers who might be interested in your products and services.
You can use Twitter for your business to:
- Connect with your audience and influencers
- Build your brand and increase its online visibility
- Respond to your customers’ queries
- Understand what is latest in the industry and what is being liked by your potential users
- Promote your products and services
- Share informative articles, blogs, eBooks, and other useful resources
Quick Tips to Use Twitter for Your Business
- Use relevant hashtags in your tweets
- Timings are essential in case of Twitter too. 1 PM to 3 PM is the best time to post updates on Twitter
- Participate in discussions by adding relevant hashtags (#) and users (@)
- If your post is about specific person, group, brand or organization, you should use .@ to mention them. By adding a period (.) before @, you can show your posts not only to the followers of that account, but to everyone.
Example
@seo_whizz I loved your #SocialMediaMarketing post!
For getting more followers, Twitter offers Promoted Accounts, while for wider reach on tweets, you can use Promoted Tweets.
Businesses can use powerful targeting capabilities of the LinkedIn network to target potential customers. Start with establishing your brand presence by creating a company page. Next step is to build a community of followers and engage them by sharing informative content with them.
Note: You will need company email address like info@seowhizz.com to create your business page on LinkedIn as it doesn’t accept free email services. Watch a 2-min demo shared by LinkedIn on how to setup your company page.
Quick Tips to Best Utilize LinkedIn Platform
– Complete your company profile. Below screenshot shows what information you need to add to complete LinkedIn Business Page creation.
- Add interactive banner and logo
- Ask your employees to add your company to their profiles
- Add “follow” button on your website, newsletters, blogs, etc.
- Share informative and valuable content in different media formats. Read the best practices of LinkedIn content posting here
- Track and monitor engagement on posts, followers, comments, etc. through LinkedIn Company Page Analytics
- Use Sponsored Updates and Follow Ads to reach your prospects
- Join groups that are relevant to your business. However, make sure you don’t spam
Google Plus
If Google Plus is used rightly, it can help you getting huge engagement and traffic to the website through organic ways. There are three categories that you can select for your business for creating G+ Business Page, and those categories are:
• Storefront
• Service Area
• Brand
Quick Tips on How to Post on Google+
– Use different media types. GIF images are quite successful on Google+
– Post not only on your official page, but also in communities. You can search communities that are relevant to your business and join them. You can also add people to your circles or join circles which are shared and relevant to your niche. Here is a huge list of G+ shared circles: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ao1OX3UN25EvdHRWR3lwWXQ0a0RhWnFuWml5RnJHdkE&hl=en_US&ndplr=1#gid=0
– You can use these communities to find like-minded people that you can add to your circles. This is one of the best practices to gain followers on G+.
– Like other social networks, hashtags are important on Google Plus too.
– If you are posting same post in multiple communities, then make sure you hide those posts from your profile. To do this, go to Settings > Profile
Pinterest is an interesting and rapidly growing social network that is used for image type content. This social media platform is quite popular among female internet users. So, if your business’ target audience majorly covers females, Pinterest is a must for you. Though, every business can use Pinterest; however, it yields better results for specific business types like embroidery, crafts, clothing, florist, beauty products, etc.
Quick Tips to promote your products on Pinterest
– Complete your profile by adding profile picture, name, description, tagline, etc.
– Create relevant boards. Boards are the categories in which your will be posting your images/pins.
– Add pins (images) from your website, if you want to drive traffic to the website. If you upload a pin from your computer, then you might get engagement, but you will not get any traffic to the website.
– Follow like-minded people on Pinterest to get a follow back from them
– Re-pin posts of others in order to get connected with them
– Choose relevant board for posting your pin and use hashtags
Must-have Social Media Marketing Tools
There are some third party tools that can be used for better social media marketing (some are free, and some are freemium):
- Tweepi (To manage your followers)
- Static HTML iframe tabs (https://www.facebook.com/games/static_html_plus/?fbs=-1)
- Hootsuite (To schedule your posts)
- Empire.kred (This is a great site to promote your posts further on social media through influencers)
- https://www.befunky.com/ (To create awesome images for social media)
Social Media Time Table
Here is summarized view of best and worst time to post on social media:
We hope this post will certainly help you implementing social media marketing in a more efficient way to get the desired results. If you have any queries or suggestions regarding the post you can write in the comments section below.