Improve Results With These 4 Social Media Marketing Tips

If you were to stop and think about where social media marketing ranks on your company’s list of marketing priorities, where would it fall? Be honest with yourself and take a genuine look at how much effort goes into it. Do you simply throw stuff out and hope it sticks, or is there a calculated approach that shows you truly understand the value of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter?

Why Social Media Marketing Matters

Few marketing channels allow for more engagement than social media. In fact, it would be safe to say that no other modern marketing channels are more interactive than social media. It allows you to speak directly to customers, gain valuable feedback, answer questions, solve disputes, and build excitement. It’s everything a marketer could ask for, yet few know how to truly unlock its value.

Specifically, social media marketing matters because it humanizes your brand and capitalizes on the most basic marketing principle in the history of business: word of mouth.  Social media gives you a voice, allows you to share your opinions and values with your target market, and then encourages them to share ideas with their followers. It’s this viral nature of social media that gives small businesses an even playing field when it comes to facing the giant corporations and billion dollar organizations.

Proven Social Media Marketing Tips

As Jakob Marketing always reminds clients, just because it’s free to set up a Facebook business profile, doesn’t mean your time is. You need a well-developed strategy with a refined focus and quantifiable goals. Otherwise you’ll end up throwing money down the drain and scraping up your competitors’ leftovers. Here are a few proven tips to jumpstart your strategic planning:

Focus on number one. A funny thing happens when you start to focus on your competition and what they’re doing on social media – you end up either mimicking their efforts or making poor decisions to try and keep up. While it may be useful to occasionally glance at your competition, your primary focus should be on your own efforts and strategy. You want to be the one your competitors are looking at, not the other way around.

Start using Twitter. Everyone uses Facebook, and while there’s nothing wrong with that, you need to expand your horizons. Twitter has an entirely different flavor and can connect you to a new group. As a side note, sharing images on Twitter is far more effective than simple text tweets. You can expect to see a significant uptick in clicks and retweets when you use an image.

Learn to curate. Regardless of the social networking platform, content curation is a key component of successful social media marketing. Nobody wants to see you continually push self-promotional content. Instead, mix up your posts by curating relevant industry information that adds value to your users and informs them about pressing issues. There is a science to content curation, though, so be sure to read up on the do’s and don’ts.

Have patience. Finally, you must have patience to be successful on social media. There will be weeks, maybe even months, before you see any return at all. In fact, you’ll feel like your talking to a wall most of the time. However, after putting in time and effort, you’ll eventually find that your target market is willing to engage; and that’s when everything will start to fall into place.

Taking Actionable Steps

In the coming months and years, social media will only become more powerful as a marketing channel. As a result, it should be moving up your priority list – not down. Are you ready to take action and make 2015 the year that you learn to integrate social media into your overall marketing strategy? Using these helpful tips, you can enhance your efforts and improve your results.

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