10 Tips on How to Get Started on Social Media
Social Media Marketing has become one of those buzz words in this day and time. Marketing on social platforms is a great way for businesses small and large to build their brand and reach their targeted audience. Whether you like it or not, you need to develop a strategy, and start engaging to grow your business.
Did I mention you need to develop a strategy? It’s always a great idea to start with a plan and develop SMART goals so you can capitalize on the social platforms you choose to market on. If you’re new to social media marketing no problem, we’re going to share 10 tips to show you how to get started on social media. If you’re not new, we got you, stick around for our Marketing tips where we’ll dive deeper into creative ways you can market your business.
Let’s Dive In
Setting Strategic Goals
The first question you should always ask yourself is what are your objectives? What do you want to get out of marketing your business on social media? Is brand awareness, more engagement with customers, promoting a new product, generating sales? Whatever your objectives are write them down. These will be crucial to the type of content your produce and how you interact with your customers on social media. These goals are the stepping stone to creating your social media strategy.
Who is your audience?
Next, you need to know who you are targeting and where they spend their time at online. How does your audience interact and conversate online? What excites them? What gets them upset. We’ve seen too many big brands make the mistake of posting something that offends their audience. We want to avoid this by learning our audience inside and out. Aside from knowing your audience, you need to know your brand as well. When you’re posting online the last thing you want to do is come off like one of those automated phone calls, your voice needs to be authentic, and personable.
Perform A Social Media Audit
Normally when you perform a social media audit, you’re evaluating your current social media profiles. You’re looking at your data to see if there are any patterns i.e. where is my traffic coming from, what are my demographics, what’s my engagement rate, what social media platform my audience is engaging on. If you’re new to social media this data will not be available for you, but no worries, this is a great thing! You’re starting with a fresh clean slate.
One tip we like to share when you’re just coming onto social media is perform a social media audit on your top three competitors. Look at their content, followers, and engagement. This will give you an idea on how potential customers in your industry interact on social media. This will also take us into our next tip on knowing which social media platform to choose.
Choosing the Right Social Media Platforms
There are so many social media platforms. We have Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube, TikTok, Snap Chat and the lists goes on and on. But which platform is great for you? If you’re following our tips in order, performing your social media audit will help you gage which platform you should be marketing on. If you skipped that step, back up and perform your audit. Knowing your audience and where they spend their time at will help you determine the right social platforms to use.
Creating Fire Content
Once you know your audience and where they spend their time at, it’s time to create the content they want! A content strategy is key to maximizing your engagement. When you create content be sure it’s content your audience likes and not content you like, that is key! For example, I’m creating content right now that you’re reading, and the reason you’re reading it is because it’s content you were looking for. We know are audience and we know most of them come to use for our expertise in Marketing and Design.
Apart of creating great content is creating quality content with quality visuals. Don’t half step on this part, if you put out crap your audience will pick up on it, and it will be hard to convert them in the future.
If you offer great content, you will get great conversation in return, and this is the step needed to really start building a loyal following online.
Create a Calendar and Schedule
We have our fire content created now we need to organize that and put together a calendar. Creating a social media calendar is simple and allows you to decide what day and time you will post. The calendar at minimum consists of the caption you’re going to use for each social media platform, the graphic or photo you’re using or web link, a CTA, and any relevant hashtags you want to use. Once you’re calendar is all set, you can preschedule your content using services like Buffer, Later, or Hootsuite. We’ll dive a little deeper into these services on another Marketing Monday.
Publish and Market
We’re over hallway there with getting our Social Media rocking and rolling. Now it’s time for us to publish and market. Like the top above once you have your calendar completed, you can schedule out the time each post will publish to each platform. All of your social media marketing should be in sync with one another. Once a post is published be sure to cross promote it on and offline. Yes we live in a digital world but never count out the traditional marketing efforts, they play a vital role in your overall marketing strategy.
Share your post via email marketing, share it with your friends and mentors, and share it with other blogs that have similar content as you.
Quality over Quantity
Many people think social media is about how many followers you have. Yeah it’s nice to have 10k followers on IG and 1k on Youtube, at these levels you do unlock new features of these platforms, but don’t become obsessed with these numbers. It’s better to have 100 engaged followers than 10K followers that don’t interact at all! Those 100 will be your loyal followers, your brand ambassadors, your sales leads. Focus on the quality of your content and not the quantity of followers, likes and subscribers.
Delegate, Delegate, Delegate
Once you’re through all of the tough parts of getting started, it’s time to let go of control. Now this one I can relate to! Creating your own content and maintain your own social media channels takes a lot of time and effort, and if you’re running your business this is time you may not have, and your social media may start to suffer because of it. Some questions to think about as you’re diving into social media.
- Who will curate my content
- Who will manage each social profile
- Who will create our visuals
- Who will respond to our customers
- Who will track our analytics
These are just a few questions to keep in mind when diving into marketing your business on social media.
Consistency
Being consistent online plays a vital role in maintaining and gaining loyal followers and cracking most social platforms algorithm. Setting this up starts with our first tip, setting strategic goals. So how do you stay consistent without getting burned out? Here are a few things to keep in mind:
- Decide how many times a day and what you will post on each social platform, for example, On IG I will post 3 times out of the week, one post will be an in-feed post, one post will be a set of stories, and my last post will be in IG reel or Live.
- Batch create your content. Pick a day or two to create all of your content for the month. This helps so you’re not creating content week after week.
- Pre-schedule all of your content using Buffer, Later, or Hootsuite
