In digital marketing, every link matters.
Whether it’s anchor text pointing to another page of your site, a promotional email for your new product page, or a Facebook link to a fresh blog post, each visitor generated is a win for the company.
Even though social media links are ‘nofollow,’ i.e., they don’t generate any link equity for higher search rankings, they have a huge potential for customer outreach. A startling 51% of the world’s population is active on at least one social media platform today, and the numbers keep growing every second.
With such a broad scope for lead generation and brand awareness, these networks must be juggled perfectly to maximize business ROI and supplement the other digital marketing strategies in place. That’s why social media management is integral to your business.
What is Social Media Management?
It involves understanding your audience, and curating, publishing, and managing content that provides value. You must also interact with them on a one-to-one basis to boost engagement and mold a unique brand identity. Simply stated, SMM makes your brand more human.
Social media management is especially useful for those companies that have just entered the online marketing world and are trying to claw their way to the top of search engine ranks. Even larger names, such as Starbucks, T-Mobile, and Mac Cosmetics, rely on social networks as an ideal source of gaining customer information and building meaningful relationships.
Contrary to popular belief, managing social media isn’t as easy as it sounds. It requires laying out a comprehensive content posting strategy that takes research, analysis, and often, trial and error to get right.
To make things easier, we’ve laid out this 7-step guide for you to craft the ultimate SMM strategy for your business.
Let’s get started.
Step 1: Understand Your Customers
Identification of your target customers’ key demographics is essential.
What region are they from?
What jargon do they use?
What income group/profession do they belong to?
What is their age group?
Beyond such vital data, you must discover your buyers’ desires, needs, and challenges. By collecting such details, you can modify your message tone to highlight the solution you’re providing for customer problems.
Your marketing department’s reports or tools such as social media and web analytics, surveys, and data-storing CRMs can easily deliver this data. AI insight tools such as Quantcast and SimilarWeb are also highly useful for gaining in-depth buyer information.
If your site is new, or if you want an inexpensive alternative to pricier software, you can conduct some manual research into your closest competitors’ audiences by scouring their social media profiles and identifying customer demographics.
Create buyer personas based on the information collected. The characteristics identified will help you post valuable social media content for customers in keeping with their stage of the marketing funnel.
Credit: Hubspot Make My Persona Tool
Step 2: Choose the Right Social Media Platforms
Maintaining a heavy presence on all possible platforms isn’t a good strategy. You must focus on only those platforms your customers are active in, posting content, and regularly engaging with them.
Here’s an overview of some social media networks, and when they best fit your business needs:
Facebook:
Facebook has 2.7 billion monthly active users from all over the world. There is a roughly equal distribution of male and female users belonging to different age groups. It is highly lucrative for text, photo, and video-based content and adverts.
You should use Facebook if you have a wide and varied audience and want to attain maximum outreach.
Instagram:
The photo-sharing app has over 1 billion monthly active users and 500,000 influencers. It is more popular among younger audiences between 18-34 years old and has a roughly proportionate male to female ratio.
It is especially useful for businesses selling visually aesthetic products, such as in the fashion, art, and catering industries. If your target audience comprises young adults, Instagram may be an ideal promotional medium for your brand.
YouTube:
The video-sharing website has over 2 billion monthly users from more than 100 countries, watching videos in over 80 different languages. Nearly two-thirds of users are males, while audiences vary in age from Millennials to Boomers.
Due to YouTube’s capability of streaming high-quality videos, including tutorials, adverts, and movies, it can help any business investing in dynamic assets reach a vast audience. However, if you’re opting for advertising on the platform, make sure your videos are highly intriguing to catch attention immediately.
Twitter:
Twitter has over 340 million monthly users hailing from around the world. It has a roughly equal gender distribution among users, mostly younger adults, in terms of age demographics. Interestingly, it has a greater percentage of individuals with an above college-level education and over $75k salaries.
The high earning potential of Twitter users exposes them to a more extravagant living standard that is ideal for promoting tech-based, financial, and luxury products. If your product conforms to a current trend, you should also engage on Twitter to start meaningful conversations around it and boost awareness regarding your brand.
LinkedIn:
LinkedIn has over 675 million monthly users from 200+ countries over the world. It is utilized typically by older age strata between 36-55 years, and over half of its users are college graduates. Most of them earn over $75k, and over 30% hail from urban areas.
LinkedIn is ideal for B2B marketing with its high percentage of upper-management users, including Fortune 500 execs, CEOs, and founders. The typical customer is high-paying and hails from an urban populace; thus, technical services can be easily advertised on the platform.
Pinterest:
The photo-based app has over 355 million active monthly users, with over one-third hailing from the US. It has a predominantly female user base, with younger adults utilizing the platform for purchase research and shopping.
Pinterest is perfect for businesses that rely on visual cues for product sales, like Instagram. However, the distinct advantage with Pinterest is that its female-majority population uses it to guide buying decisions, whether for home, lifestyle, or other shopping. This means that the platform has a very high conversion potential if utilized correctly.
Based on each network’s benefits, choose what best fits your audience, product, message tone, and business goals.
Step 3: Determine the Type of Content to Post
Formulate content that will best adapt to your chosen platforms.
Each piece should address a problem faced by site visitors and provide an effective solution to it. Social media users are split across different stages of the buyer’s funnel. Some are gaining awareness regarding a topic, others are evaluating multiple solutions, and yet others are active buyers making purchases.
Your content should be diverse enough to cater to all such groups, without becoming irrelevant to your services. Decide on the right content format, such as list posts, how-to posts, or guides, that can adequately cater to customer challenges. Your audience insights should further guide your content structure as you begin the curation process.
You can also repost third-party content that will provide value to your followers to reinforce your authority in the industry.
When posting content links on social platforms, compose intriguing, specific article headlines to capture user attention. Moreover, ensure that you write adequate CTAs and previews. Do not write long texts. Instead, stick to a valuable point made in the article to catch the reader’s attention.
Step 4: Create a Schedule
Posting content erratically will lead to you losing out on potential customers. You need to have a consistent post schedule across all social media channels to maintain an active presence and attract the highest possible impressions.
Laying out a schedule in advance, such as in the form of an editorial calendar, saves time, as you won’t have to rifle through existing content every day when deciding what to post. Moreover, it keeps your operations organized. It limits the reposting of content and helps plan future publications.
Credit: Hootsuite
Scheduling content across various platforms can be a tedious process to do manually. That is why you can choose from one of the many premium social media management schedulers such as Hootsuite, Buffer, and Hubspot to help you plan and time content effectively.
Step 5: Engage Actively with Users
User engagement paves the way for long-term relationships with customers. This is because responding to their queries, concerns, or interests shows them you care. It adds a personal touch to an otherwise automated online strategy.
Including CTAs such as “Share your thoughts below” or “Retweet if you agree” can substantially boost customer engagement. Reply to comments that carry merit by thanking users for responding, asking further questions, or heartily agreeing with their words. Be sincere in your thoughts, and do not be pushy, as this can drive them away.
Do not disregard complaints and negative reviews. Apologize for any inconvenience caused and ask unhappy users to contact customer support for better assistance.
Beyond reciprocal engagement, you can also create dynamic content, such as polls, quizzes, or games, to boost user activity. Such posts convey to the audience that you have an energetic, customer-oriented brand, and is likely to increase conversions.
Incorporate customer engagement and interactive posts into your schedule to time and execute these tasks effectively.
Step 6: Be Consistent
It is essential in social media marketing to never give up. The going can get rough since there are numerous competitors within the same niche scrabbling for greater market share.
However, you must stick to your posting schedule and implement it religiously, so your brand hits off. Engagement with customers should be steady as well; plan to respond every few days to keep activity up as trends die down very quickly, and users lose interest.
It is fundamental to keep the quality of your content consistently high. Ultimately, SMM is part of the broader digital marketing sphere, where content is always king. If you stop providing value to your users, they will switch to a competitor who offers them something better. To maintain superior quality, revisit your buyer personas to understand what customers want and keep an eye on current trends to craft relevant and useful material.
Step 7: Track your Performance
To gauge your effectiveness in the social media management process, you should monitor your campaign results over time. By comparing KPIs before and after the SMM strategies were implemented, you can determine which to abandon and sustain. You can also evaluate the overall lead generation and revenue gains supplemented by the campaign.
Social network marketing isn’t always free; posting on multiple platforms can be complicated without premium social media scheduling tools. Advertising campaigns on networks such as Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram can bite into a sizeable chunk of your finances, depending on the customer outreach you desire. Thus, ROI tracking is essential to realize maximum profits.
Platform analytics such as Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, and YouTube Analytics make it simple to track impressions, clicks, and shares for each new post. They also detail when your business’s followers are the most active to better time content.
Should I Hire a Social Media Management Company?
Many activities accompany an SMM strategy, from creating quality content to monitoring performance. These responsibilities can be overwhelming for a novice in the field, and they may not be able to execute them as desired.
Getting professional social media management services can be better for your business’s long-term expansion. Such companies have highly skilled SMM experts and resources to devise optimized tactics for boosting content popularity among users. Regardless of your business size or site newness, they can effectively manage content production and post scheduling to drive social traffic.
At GoDigital World, we use AI-driven user insights and industry research to understand your audience and best meet your business’s marketing goals at reasonable monthly retainers. You can benefit from expert recommendations, automated scheduling, and social media maintenance at a lower cost than subscriptions to multiple software.
Social media marketing is an essential cog in the modern digital marketer’s toolkit. In terms of traditional marketing, it is akin to the floor manager who regularly interacts with potential customers, discovers their pain points, and provides personalized suggestions to fit their needs. Thus, your social presence is your brand’s personality and needs to be managed effectively to leave a positive, lasting impression.
This guide will help you create and deliver a winning business personality so that you can gain followers who value your content. With consistency and dedication, you can soon convert this throng of users into frequent buyers and loyal customers.
If you still feel a little flummoxed, that’s okay. We are here to help. Contact our social media management experts at 609-323-5507 or email us at info@thegodigitalworld.com.
Happy Marketing!
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