It’s literally impossible to market effectively without a heavy social media presence these days, and for some businesses, social media can be enough of a platform to fulfill all marketing goals.
No matter what you’re looking to market, you absolutely can’t afford to make social media marketing mistakes in an increasingly connected world, so follow these tips to get your message across as effectively as possible!
#1 Client Comes First
This is really important to remember. You might want to expand your client base or focus on different products, but remember that your current clients are your followers, and to keep them as clients then you will need to speak to them too.
This doesn’t mean you can’t market your new stuff and reach out to more people, but never forget to post content directed at your loyal customers.
#2 Keep Your Word
To be successful in any business, you need to do what you say you’re going to do, or your client will lose faith, and you will lose them. On social media, this is even more important, as everything is time-stamped and what you said is right there on their screen. If there’s a competition, an announcement, vlog, or new product that you say you will post on Friday, then it really does need to be there on Friday.
#3 Focus!
This encompasses a lot of factors. Focus on what you want your customer to do, whether that is to ‘like and share’ or add something to their basket, or sign up for something.
Don’t ask them to do all three.
Also, focus on information relevant to you, don’t post random things that are irrelevant, and never forget your target audience in your post – focus on them or your message could be lost.
#4 Know Your Audience and Engage With Them
You need to know what your audience wants, and social media is a really great way to get to know them and make them feel valued.
Respond to comments, like other relevant pages and posts, link back to yourselves on relevant posts so your audience really feels like they know you, and that you care.
#5 Always Have a Plan!
Having a plan is essential, followers won’t just come to you. Decide how much you’ll invest – if not in money, but in time – in social media marketing, and stick to it. Plan your content, have a clear strategy, don’t rely on likes for random posts, as those likes may not be from your target audience, or anyone interested in your product.
#6 Use Tech To Track
Use everything at your disposal, though google analytics is normally the first step, to see what time, day, and content is attracting the most content, and try to build on that.
Figuring out what times and whether articles, videos, gifs, or whatever is driving traffic is a great thing to know and build on.
#7 Use the Right Platform
If the majority of your users are finding you on Facebook, then focus on that, you don’t need to be on every single platform to be effective.
There is no use using Snapchat to get through to people on Instagram, you are wasting your time and energy when you could have a time-saving and effective strategy.
#8 No Fakes
Everyone can tell when your followers are fake, it’s very simple when your base and your likes are so drastically different. While it may be harder, having an organic base that has supported you and interacts with your feed looks way better to the public.
#9 Make Sure You Proofread!
The public in general on social media are extremely unforgiving when it comes to grammar mistakes, and factual errors are so easily checked by google that you will be called out straight away.
And when you’re looking to market something, whether it’s yourself or a product, you need the trust of a customer, they need to feel that they can put their faith in you.
That is unlikely to happen if your posts are accompanied by a bunch of negative comments regarding your accuracy.
You need to appear smart, competent, and reliable, and a great way of doing that is making sure your content is perfect before you post.
There are some amazing online resources specifically designed to ensure your content is awesome, and there is no good reason not to use them!
Some of the best ones to ensure grammatical correctness are:
- Ginger Software– this app is really great for non-native English speakers, as it includes a dictionary, grammar checker, and will even help rephrase complex sentences to ensure your writing is clear and high quality
- Hemingway App – this is an amazing site for marketing as it emphasizes strong writing styles, removing adverbs, overly long sentences and other awkward features that may appear in your work
- Type my essay – some people, however, will always prefer a real person looking over their work and providing suggestions, comments, and improvements. For a personal touch from an expert, you can try the following online writing tool.
- Readability-score – it’s essential to write your marketing posts with your audience in mind. Check the reading level of your text with this website to make sure you’re not treating doctors like thirteen-year-olds or vice versa
- Edit Minion – this is a new site, but really effective at analyzing short passages and picking up on the common mistakes that spelling and grammar checkers often miss. This is super quick and completely free
- Assignment help – here experts will review your work and will be able to improve your language and strengthen your message.
- Autocrit– is an awesome way to review your texts in an in-depth way, that picks up on mistakes a human often doesn’t – like too many adverbs or the passive voice
- Word count tool – if you’re not using word, this little site is a handy way to monitor the length of your content – you should be aiming for at least 300 words per post, and this can make sure you’re hitting those targets.
- PhD writers – the tool suggests a professional to look over your work and pick up writing errors that a computer can’t, and offer helpful suggestions.
As all of these resources are available online, and many of them ae actually free, it would be madness to not utilize all the help you have available to you, and produce the most effective social media marketing ever.
There are no excuses for inefficient or ineffective social media marketing – follow the above steps and success will follow you.