Social media is the preferred marketing tool for business promotion. This has led many business owners to merge social media into their marketing campaigns. To use social media for your business, you must learn how to overcome your competitors. The following tips will help you do just that.
Analyze your Social Media Competitors
Before you launch your campaign, it is important to understand your competitors to know who you are up against. This will help you to identify the amount of resources and effort that you will put in to reach the top.
Your search for competitors should start from the following sites:
These are the most popular social media sites that can help you grow your market reach. Your analysis should also give you an idea of the best social media sites for your marketing strategy. List down your competitors, visit their accounts on a regular basis and record the following.
- Number of subscribers and followers
- Frequency of posting (content, status updates, etc.)
- Type of content published (audio, video, image or text)
- Engagement with followers
- Competitor created content vs. outsourced content.
You must also check your competitors’ websites and blog to determine their dependence on social media. This should be done every month to test their performance.
Creating Content for Social Media
You need killer content to help you stand out. With content, you can hire someone to develop it from scratch or you can reuse your old one.
How to Come Up With Great Content
- Introduce guest bloggers in your blog.
- Develop flowing content.
- Have a good FAQ section that is helpful to your followers.
- Publish interviews on your social media accounts and websites.
Besides text, video and audio content, you can create engaging visual content that grabs the interest of your audience. The following are the best:
- Memes
- Cartoons
- Infographics
- Statistics and graphs
- Your company or industry photos
Know Where your Content is Going to Be Posted
An effective social media marketing strategy should clarify the type of content to be used and where. Social networking sites have different audiences and you should offer content type that is appropriate and relevant to your audience.
- Facebook: use engaging visual content, colors and bold text.
- Twitter: short and engaging content with the use of powerful and compelling words.
- LinkedIn: long and informative content with lots of useful information. This includes case studies, reviews, and research data.
- Pinterest: post attractive and expressive visual content like images that are relevant to your business and industry.
Quick Social Media Tips
Post images in tons to get more shares, comments, and likes.
Post both long/shot posts to attract readers, get shares, comments and likes.
Post more content during the weekends since many people are likely to be online.
Create posts for afternoon and night
Tweet content between 120-130 characters.
To get more clicks, make use of ‘RT’, ‘check’, ‘@’ and ‘via’.
Generate more tweets during weekends.
Use verbs and not nouns when tweeting.
Have descriptions of 200 characters on your posts.
Your description should have phrases such as quotes, ideas, DIY, inspirations and products to get more repins.
Post tall images.
Enhance Social Media Upkeep by Being Efficient
You should check your progress to know the strategy that works best for you. For effective monitoring and tracking, make use of the following:
- Calendar for social media
- Scheduling tools
- Monitoring tools
Set aside one day for social media monitoring and tracking, this will allow you find errors and problems and make the necessary adjustments.
Boost Social Media by Leveraging Other Market Channels
Integrate your social media accounts with other marketing channels to extend your audience reach and market more easily.
Email and social media: you can integrate your email marketing tools with social media to send emails, notifications and other offers to social media subscribers. You can also send emails with social media content to keep your email list subscribers informed.
Blog and social media: link your blog with your social media accounts to help readers share your content.
SEO and social media: apply your SEO strategies on your social media to allow people using search engines to find you. Keywords should be on your social media, blog, and website. This strategy will extend your reach.
Keep monitoring your strategies and progress while making the necessary updates to make sure that they aren’t outdated.