Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms and websites in order to promote a product or service. To create a successful strategy you will need to identify your audience, engage with them and keep delivering content so that they can regularly see your brand in their feed.
The following tips are just a few ideas that can be used to improve social channels and increase the traffic coming to your website.
Social Media Strategy
A plan for each of your social media accounts is really important as it will help your team prepare for future activity. You should have a separate plan for each social channel, each with its own goals. For example; Linkedin will be an important channel for law firms because it offers a lot of potential to reach relevant audiences by harnessing the combined reach of multiple lawyers profiles, which can create brand ambassadors.
It is important to make sure that the information is relevant to your audience. Ensuring your content is of good quality and helpful for your visitors will enable you to achieve higher levels of engagement.
SMART goals can work well when trying to find the best way for a social media plan to benefit the business. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable or achievable, Relative and Timely. It is important for a business to plan their SMART goals so that they can focus on the specific factors they want to improve.
Build Relationships with Influencers
Research from Twitter shows – “49% of consumers rely on influencers to make purchase decisions.”
Building relationships with influencers in your industry can help to expand the brand message for your company by allowing its social content to be shared more widely. Opportunities can arise when networking and communicating with others around you, but building relationships with influencers can help raise the social profile for yourself and the business, as well as helping to increase the levels of traffic arriving on your site.
Linkedin is a great social network to use in order to impress your influencers. This is because it provides you with large opportunities to connect with the top business influencers and customers.
“There are over 500 million business professionals from around the world on Linkedin”
Connect with influencers on Linkedin and always send them a personalised message with the request. Remember that if they do not know who you are, it is important to introduce yourself and your business.
Using the endorsements feature can help give your profile more visibility. Endorsements are skills that people display on their profiles, and the more endorsements they collect, the better the impression they will create. Make sure that you endorse your connections to show that you value their knowledge and skills. If your influencer has a business page, follow it to receive Linkedin updates which you can then like share and comment on. Commenting on their updates will mean that their followers will also see your posts which allows more opportunities to ask questions and respond to others in their community too.
Measuring Results
Making sure that you are measuring results achieved from social media campaigns is crucial because it means you can see areas where you are achieving success and importantly, areas that require additional work.
Plotting the social growth on a graph allows a business to see which social media channels are performing the best, making it easy to see which areas they need to be working more on. Using visual analysis tools is good because it makes it easy to spot trends.
Being able to measure followers, likes, shares, comments, clicks and other metrics can be helpful for a business because it ultimately helps them to see where their social media leads are coming from and helps them work out how certain campaigns are succeeding. If a particular social channel clearly achieves good results for your company, continue to work on posting more content and potentially expanding the campaign in order to achieve even better results.
You should analyse different social channels to build up a picture of which platforms will appeal to different parts of your audience. Linkedin may be the best platform for serious, business-focused campaigns or communication, while Instagram may work better to attract a younger audience by posting content about graduate careers.
As a business, you will need to understand each of your audiences, understand what channel will work best to reach them, then publish content through the channel which has been designed and developed to appeal to them.
Businesses should use social media marketing to promote their product or services, as it can be a cheap and easy way to promote a brand and drive traffic. Make sure that the information is engaging for each audience in order to increase incoming website traffic.
