There are some best practices to follow to ensure your social media marketing strategy works. These proven best practices are used by leading brands to help startups and small businesses succeed on social.
Diversify your content
Diverse content is just as important as regular content. If you want to keep your audience engaged, offer them a variety of posts that help sell your products or services and establish yourself as a leader in your industry. Consider a mix of how-tos and quick tips, polls, questions, contests, announcements, and industry news. Also, make sure your content is in a variety of formats, such as images, videos, live streams, and online stores.
stay consistent
Each social media platform has its own voice and environment. However, your brand and identity should be the same no matter where you post. For example, if your brand is fun and trendy, communicate that message through posts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other platforms you use.
join the conversation
Don't overlook the importance of talking to your audience. Pay close attention to the types of users who engage with your content and come back through likes, comments, and shares. To facilitate conversations and set up polls, live streams, and live questions. You can also host contests and giveaways.
Leverage content creation tools
To engage your audience and gain loyal followers on social media, you need to post photos, videos, infographics, and other engaging visuals along with your text. If you don't have the luxury of an in-house graphic design team to create them for you, don't worry. There are many content creation tools, such as Canva and Freepik, with templates that make it easy to create visuals quickly and affordably.
use hashtags
Hashtags are words or keywords that are preceded by a hash symbol and are used within social media posts to help users find topics of interest. Using hashtags in your posts can increase brand awareness. Let's say you sell accounting services. Examples of hashtags you can add to your posts include #CPA, #taxseason, and #accounting.
Content reuse and recycling
If you already have content related to your brand, there's no need to start from scratch. Content you already own can and should be reused. For example, get customer reviews and highlight them on Facebook and Instagram. Another idea is to share articles from your website's blog or press release section.
Measure success using analytics
You can't tell if your social media strategy is successful unless you use analytics to track your data. While each social media platform has its own analytics capabilities, you can also invest in a social media analytics tool that tracks all your platform data in one place. Track clicks, comments, reach, engagement rates, impressions, shares, saves, video views, follower growth over time, responses, and more.
Explore paid social
If you have the marketing budget to spare, it's worth taking the time to try paid social advertising. You can put your ads in front of users who may be particularly interested in the products and services you offer. You can start with Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, Instagram ads, and Pinterest ads.
be patient
Social media marketing results don't come overnight. But with patience and consistency, you will succeed. Make sure you target the right audience, post interesting content, and talk to your followers regularly.