Social Media Marketing – Where Do I Begin?
Social Media should be a part of every company’s marketing mix for any business. With today’s fascination in being social with one another, it is imperative you have your company or organization on social media. Now before you go to every social media channel you can think of, let’s start with the setting up a goal for your social media efforts, then the basics of what social media site is right for you and how often should you post content to your channels.
Which Social Media Channel Is Right For Me?
The biggest mistake made in social media is setting up multiple accounts on sites like Facebook and Twitter and not having a real goal set in mine. Would you start a business with out a business plan? Most individuals would answer an emphatic no. Same rules apply for social media, would you like to generate leads? Attract your target audience to your website? Convert customers on social media channels? These are the type of questions lots and lots of social media marketing departments have to ask before beginning their journey. The next step is to determine what channels are best for the business. Facebook is engagement driven and interacting with the company fan base, while Twitter is also interactive but with more quick SMS type messages to your audience. As always, companies should perform their due diligence to determine which niche best fits the goal of the business and how social media can help achieve that goal.
What Social Media Site Is Most Effective?
It depends is the honest answer. Let’s say you are an IT company who specializes in remote and onsite support. You can use Twitter as a ticketing system where your customers, or followers, can input a request on your Twitter account and have the appropriate individual(s) answer the tweet appropriately. By using Twitter as a ticketing system, this helps tracking customer tickets and can help generate more customers with potential followers engaging with you on Twitter. Having non-customers pose questions on Twitter can help establish an organization by answering questions, therefore it presents the company as an expert in the IT industry. The same can be said for Facebook, it boils down to what is the goal and how can we achieve the goal by using social media.
How Often Should Accounts Be Updated?
Posting content to social media sites can be tricky. How much is too much? What type of content should be posted? As a social media marketer, the optimal posting is different for each individual company. The first step is finding when the optimal time is. Are morning post more engaging versus afternoon posts? This is where the analyst in you begins to track social media posts for engagement. One tidbit we advise customers is to post on weekends as not a lot of companies are active during Saturdays & Sundays. The second question is what type of content should be posted? Lots of companies post content related to their industry, sticking with the IT company example above, uploading IT industry articles, blogging about the IT industry and posting the blog to social media channels are just a couple of examples that can help get the ball rolling.
