Social media has become an essential platform for businesses to reach, engage with, and ultimately convert their target audience. With billions of active users spending hours across social networks daily, the marketing opportunities are immense. However, simply creating social media profiles is not enough. Businesses need effective social media marketing strategies to capitalize on social platforms fully. This post will cover the top 10 tips for social media marketing success. These social media commandments will help boost brand awareness, increase qualified traffic, nurture leads, and drive conversions.
Tip #1: Set Measurable Goals
The first rule of stellar social media marketing is having clear goals. Setting S.M.A.R.T. goals gives your efforts direction and allows you to benchmark success.
Examples of measurable goals include:
- Increase social media followers by X% within 3 months
- Get X number of social mentions/backlinks each month
- Drive X amount of monthly traffic from social referrals
- Generate X new leads per month via social platforms
- Increase social media engagement rate by X%
Tip #2: Research Your Target Audience
You can’t create content and campaigns that resonate without intimately understanding your ideal buyer personas. Extensive audience research should guide your social media marketing.
Useful areas to investigate include:
- Demographics like age, gender, income level, education status, etc.
- Geolocation and psychographics like values, interests, personality, etc.
- Social channels and influencers they engage with
- Content formats and topics they respond best to
- Problems they want solved with your product/service
- Preferred platforms and how they use them
Tip #3: Choose The Right Platforms
With so many social networks, new platforms emerging, and limited marketing budgets, brands must be selective. Rather than spreading yourself thin across every channel, maintain a strong presence on just a few relevant platforms.
Evaluate platforms based on where your audience is most active and engaged. Analyze each network’s advertising capabilities, opportunities for organic visibility, and built-in analytics. While major networks like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn are safe bets, consider newer options like TikTok for certain niches and demographics.
Tip #4: Create A Content Strategy
Quality original content fuels social media marketing success. A documented content strategy ensures you sustainably produce and schedule valuable content instead of posting inconsistently.
Your content calendar should outline a mix of content types, including blog posts, videos, visuals, short-form copy, and more. Define the topics and angles you’ll cover based on target keywords, trending news in your industry, awareness campaigns, etc.
Tip #5: Leverage Visual Content
Posts with visual elements like images, infographics, videos, and more tend to drive higher engagement across social platforms compared to text-only updates. Developing cohesive visual assets for your brand is well worth the investment.
Creative, eye-catching visual content formats to experiment with include:
- Infographics
- Photos/photo galleries
- Custom graphics and caricatures
- Animated gifs and video clips
- Interactive polls, quizzes and contests
- Product images/videos
- Behind-the-scenes footage.
Tip #6: Stay Active and Engage.
Gaining followers is just the start. You must keep them engaged by maintaining an active presence and interacting regularly. Brands that consistently post valuable updates and respond to followers will keep their audience returning.
Reply to comments and questions, participate in relevant conversations, give social media shoutouts, and leverage user-generated content. Also, join in global trending days like #ThrowbackThursday by putting your spin on them.
Tip #7: Use Analytics to Identify Opportunities
The built-in analytics on social platforms provide a wealth of insights to help refine your approach. Closely monitor follower’s growth, engagement rate, clicks, traffic, and conversions driven.
Analyze what types of content, posting times, influencer collaborations, etc. perform best. This will reveal what’s working so you can double down on those success factors. Tracking ROI will also uncover underperforming areas ripe for optimization.
Tip #8: Experiment and Optimize.
Do not get complacent with a single social media strategy. Consistently test out new tactics and types of content to see what resonates most with your audience. Experimenting also keeps your brand innovative and exciting.
Potential experiments include:
- Testing different content formats – live videos vs. static visuals, long-form vs. micro-content, educational posts vs. contests, etc.
- Publishing at different times and days of the week to determine optimal scheduling.
- Promoting content more heavily to your existing base vs. trying to expand your audience.
- Running A/B tests of different post captions and CTAs.
Tip #9: Make it Mobile-Friendly.
Since social media usage on smartphones continues to rise, ensure your content displays properly on mobile. Use large, legible fonts and text. Avoid long blocks of copy. Select landscape image orientations. And include clickable CTAs for mobile users.
You can reference your analytics to determine the proportion of mobile vs. desktop users to guide optimization priorities. Also, regularly test your posts and ads on mobile to identify any issues.
Tip #10: Promote Your Profiles.
Do not rely solely on organic reach to grow your social media followers and visibility. Proactively promote your profiles and content via other channels to maximize exposure.
Potential promotional tactics include:
- Sharing blog content on social media
- Email signature containing social media handles
- Guest posting on other high-authority sites with social follow links
- Running social media contests, giveaways, and sweepstakes
- Taking out paid social media ads
- Partnerships with influencers in your niche
- Adding social icons and links across website, ads and offline content
Conclusion
Implementing these 10 fundamental tips for social media marketing will significantly amplify your strategy and presence. As you master each area, your brand visibility, community, and conversions will dramatically improve. Social media changes rapidly, so continue optimizing and keep your finger on the pulse of new developments. With consistent effort and creativity, the opportunities to engage your audience are endless.
Want to take your social media marketing to the next level? The social media gurus at Zenscape Marketing can help.
Our data-driven social media marketing services are designed to help brands boost engagement, leads, and sales on social.
Zenscape Marketing offers:
- Custom social media strategy and management
- Audience research and targeting
- Creative content production
- Competitor benchmarking
- Performance tracking and optimization
We focus on the platforms that matter most to your brand and audience. Our social experts will help you apply these top 10 tips for social media marketing. Let us customize a results-driven social plan for your business. Schedule a free consultation today to amplify your brand on social media. Contact Zenscape Marketing now to fuel your social media marketing success!
