32 Best Social Media Marketing Tips for Online Business

These social media marketing tips will help you set up and launch your marketing campaign on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram or LinkedIn.

To have social media presence or not to have? For most companies, it’s not even a question today. Yet, not too many of them care to lead a proper SMM-strategy.

Social media act pretty much like word-of-mouth promotion, spreading the information worth sharing from one person to another. To distinguish yourself in this endless stream of content you need to build a reputation of a business, which can be trusted.

Before you even begin communicating with your potential audience, make sure your social media account is unified in its corporate style and presence (logo, corporate slogan, colors etc.). Doing that will help your future visitors understand what your page is about at first sight by recognizing your corporate look.

Next up is social media marketing strategy.

The first thing you need to do here is set your goals. What exactly do you want to achieve by launching social media marketing campaign? What are the key objectives and how do they correlate with your goals?

Take some time to answer these questions – this will yield you a brief plan of action.

Then, you need to decide how much time and effort you are going to spend on the social media marketing. The answer usually depends on such common factors as the nature of your business, personal preferences, type of content, and target audience.

Moreover, the time you spend in social networks may vary depending on your personality and general strategy.

So what is this all about?

Chances are your social media activity is sporadic at best and is not backed by certain objectives. You may want to be everywhere, on every social media channel, but that inevitably gets you nowhere.

A good idea would be to start from just one or two social media websites and only if (and when) you succeed in those, you can move on to the other ones. This article contains 32 valuable social media marketing tips to get you started on your successful SMM-strategy.

32 Social Media Marketing Tips for Beginners

Facebook

1. Make Facebook No.1 priority of your social media marketing campaign. The official survey data suggests that 36% of people use just one social network, which is Facebook. If it’s not the case for your type of business, find out which social network has the most of your potential audience and concentrate your efforts on it.

2. Develop a detailed content strategy for your page:

• write down the subjects, schedule and overall style of your posts;
• define the proportion between neutral (entertaining) and promotional posts;
• define your key metrics;
• set the minimal amount time and money you’re going to spend on SMM.

These are the things that need to be done before you even create an account in social networks. If it already exists, complement it with a strategy anyway. It’s always nice to know exactly where you’re heading and once you’ve had your strategy ready, you’ll see how easier it becomes to manage your social media marketing activities.

3. Create engaging content. It could be images, famous quotes, videos, humor, nostalgic notes, questions, useful articles, tips and recommendations, contests or the interesting snapshots of your team. It usually takes a few months of testing to see which content resonates with your audience better. Once you’ve tried all the types of content, you should understand what your audience wants and likes the most. To learn everything about creating effective content, read this article “What is Content Marketing: Guide to Successful Content Strategy”.

4. Define the period during which a post stays relevant. You’ll probably get maximum amount of likes within 2-hour period; engagement can last up until 5 hours from the time of original posting. Remember, that not all posts can be equally successful. Don’t hesitate to learn from the others – check on your competitors’ pages to see what they’re up to.

5. Create catchy headlines. This is a rule of thumb for all social media platforms.

6. Utilize advertising. Organic reach is good, but proper advertising can never hurt. It’s not that expensive (if you set your campaign right) and it’s much more targeted. Not only should you create more posts – you should also use social network ads to achieve maximum ROI. The goal here is to make people interested and get more of them involved.

7. Use Facebook to attract potential clients, build your sales funnel, and sell directly to your audience. Whenever showing ads, don’t forget to collect email addresses instead of directing traffic to your sales page. Keep on checking the metrics to see where you’re heading.

8. Keep most of your content ad-free. People use social networks for their personal needs (pictures, video) and the least thing they want to find there is your product ads. What you need instead is interesting shareworthy content.

 

Twitter

9. Make sure you realize what your goals are with Twitter. For most entrepreneurs, Twitter is an excellent tool for spreading such content as product launches and announcements. Share your opinion on various subjects, which may not be directly connected to your products or business in general. This way your can earn loyalty and respect from the audience.

10. Create your own unique business story, or biography. Spend some time searching for the right words to describe what your business is and how it helps make other people’s lives better. Place the link to your website and “Subscribe” button. Choose a professionally made picture, which represents your brand best.

11. Subscribe to other pages. Twitter offers a very intuitive contact-list system, which makes it easy to interact with the other Twitter users and follow their activity. Don’t forget to subscribe to the most popular and influential people/companies in your market segment to see what they’re up to.

12. Grow your Twitter audience. The number of your followers won’t grow by itself, obviously. Treat your followers right – ask them questions, answer theirs, publish the answers, post retweets. This will stimulate them to share your tweets and attract new followers. Participate in Twitter chats. Additionally, you can interact with people who are not yet following you, and that would be a good incentive for them to follow you. Provide the link to you Twitter account wherever possible, including the signature to your emails.

13. Develop your own Twitter strategy. To achieve success on Twitter, you need to diversify your content and schedule it the proper way. Use services like BuzzSumo or Buffer for scheduling posts.

14. Get the best you can out of your tweets. They have a very short lifespan – about 20 minutes, and not all your followers will even be online during that time. And out of those who will, not everyone will see or open your tweet. To increase visibility, you can add an image to your tweet, retweet it a few times, adding a new call-to-action. Add something new to each retweet you make. Share content relevant to the current world events.

15. Employ additional tactics. Include relevant hashtags in your message text to make it easier for people to find your tweets. Mention people in tweets, contact them via email to see if they’re interested in sharing your content with their followers.

 

Youtube

16. Quality content only. From your very first day on YouTube, make sure you create quality, interesting, and memorable content. Of course, you should do the same on every social media website, but on YouTube it matters the most. Your visitors won’t give you a second chance – if there’s something they are not pleased with, they’ll leave and never come back. Moreover, crappy videos can hurt your brand reputation.

17. Publish new videos regularly. Create a schedule and make your audience get used to it. Ideally, your subscribers should be eagerly waiting for every new video with great anticipation.

18. Visually appealing thumbnails. Create thumbnails, which people will want to click on. Come up with your own original style and use it in every video you make.

19. Always fill in meta data. Add keywords to distinguish yourself among competition, make your keywords more powerful by adding catchy words and phrases.

20. Use call to action in the videos.

 

Instagram

21. Come up with an interesting concept for your profile. Brands, which are popular on Instagram, often have some unique features. Instagram is probably the least formal of all other social networks, so this is your chance to be as creative as possible, just don’t get too overexcited. Try to find something that makes you special, perhaps it can be a certain informal way of communication.

22. Share pictures of people who already use your product or simply your fans. Such pictures can often be found via hashtags. Save them on your page along with the author’s name using @ mention.

23. Too many hashtags = bad. A good practice would be to use not more than 6 hashtags per picture. Instagram posts with excessive use of hashtags look awful and do not really bring that much traffic. In other words, stay focused and use only relevant hashtags.

24. Follow other people. In order to grow your audience, you need to be active yourself and follow the ones you want to follow you. These people are usually found among your competitors’ subscribers.

25. Do contests. Another great idea for growing audience is doing contests. No matter how simple they are, don’t forget to state one major rule to enter: subscribe to your page. To achieve maximum effect, create custom hashtags for every contest.

26. Respond to every single comment. Take some time to communicate with your subscribers every day. Try to solve whatever problem they may have. If you do so, this will help create a sense of friendly and open community, which in turn will attract even more people.

 

LinkedIn

27. Start from creating an appealing profile for your company. You can also create an employee profile, if there is such need. Tell the story of your company in a short and engaging way.

28. Define the type of information suitable for this channel: professional content, which helps people learn new things, build their own network, and increase their rating. Develop a content strategy based on this information. What you probably need for LinkedIn is long texts (2,000 words and more). Stick to the facts and don’t provoke people with something too creative. Write on topics, which are featured in LinkedIn Top-10.

29. Target your content at the audience with average skills. People mistakenly believe that LinkedIn users are generally more educated and skilled than those on other social networks. In fact, this is not true. Create easy-to-read-and-understand texts and your posts will gain much more likes, shares and comments.

30. Use short and informative headlines. Any kind of “how-tos,” “best-ofs” and other listicle-type headlines are a win.

31. Use images to attract people’s attention, yet try to avoid slides or videos, as they’re much less effective. To make your text more readable, type your headlines bold and use more sub-headlines.

32. Pay attention to the posting schedule. The best time to post on LinkedIn is between 9 and 11 a.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Share valuable content at least once a day.

These were the basic social media you should follow, if you want to succeed on the social media. Now let’s try to learn how to build an effective social media marketing strategy.

5 Steps to Effective SMM

1. Set Up Your Metrics Properly

Before you even start, define the result you are expecting from your future campaign. Not just “I wanna be the King of the World” – some hard metrics. These usually include the amount of leads and various sales figures. If you calculate ROI, that would be just perfect.

For example, you invested $100 dollars in advertising on a social network. After a week passed, you got some results. Based on those results, you should decide if your campaign breaks even. If it doesn’t, try adjusting the value proposition.

2. Define Your Target Audience

Who is your ideal client? The more targeting you use, the more precise your efforts get. This means spending less while earning more, which is what we all want, don’t we? And if you’re still unaware of who your clients are, this article “How to Create Buyer Persona for Your Business and Get More Clients” will get you started nicely.

3. Testing Rules!

In order to increase the ROI of your social media marketing campaigns, target at your prime audience first and then delve into other segments. For example, you can start from a certain age, gender or interests, and see where it gets you. If you’re satisfied with the results, move on to another segment of your audience.

4. Tracking Tools

How do you know if you’re making any money at all? It’s easy when you’re a small company using 1-2 social media channels. It’s different when you’re a major player with many incoming traffic sources – in this case you should consider using specialized tools.

One of these tools is, of course, Google Analytics. It’s free and allows you to set up effective marketing campaigns.

Another cool thing you could do is set up links with special UTM parameters to track the results of each channel you employ. In order to hide your link from public view, use goo.gl.

5. Constant Monitoring

Any advertiser will tell you that Facebook ad campaigns have a very short time span and require constant monitoring. The CTR (click-through rate) of your ads essentially depends on how well you created them.

Make sure you go through these 5 steps whenever creating and launching a social media marketing campaign on Facebook or other social networks. They’ll help you expand your sales funnel and increase sales.

One last thing to consider: increase your social media marketing gradually. Do the small-scale testing first, and then roll out the guaranteed result on the rest of the audience.

Conclusion

If you want to become a social media marketing guru, do it right. Learn as much as you can about the social network you’re in now and its possibilities.

Schedule your content and create it in advance. Find the time to look through the posts and communicate with your subscribers (at least, twice a day). Set up a reminder if you need one – just remember that social networks are essentially people – regular people with their worries and wishes. If you treat these people nicely and respectfully, they’ll be more likely to follow you.

The right thing to do would be share this article with your friends on the social networks – just click on one of the icons of social media, it’s that easy.

If you have further questions on the subject, please write them in comments – I’ll be glad to answer.