5 Simple Tips for Optimizing Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is one of the most effective ways to build awareness of your skills, business, or services. It is important to first define your goals. Do you want to increase followers, find more customers, or increase awareness of a new service or product?

More and more businesses are finding new customers via social media networks. Millions of people spend large amounts of time on social media and targeting customers and potential customers through social networks just makes sense. If done right, social media marketing has the potential to spread the word faster than any other marketing channel. Social content can go viral in minutes and spread a message worldwide almost instantly.

Ok, so you get why it’s important and effective. What’s next? How can you take advantage of social media to help you reach your personal or business goals?

If you’re just getting started, it doesn’t need to be complicated. Think of it in two steps. The first is setting up your social media profiles, the second is using your accounts. Here are some basic tips to get you started.

Outline which social media platforms you are going to use

• Choose one or two to start and fully commit to those rather than taking on too many and failing to produce enough content.
• When deciding which platforms, it makes the most sense for you to use, identify those in your industry that are the biggest influencers, and see which platforms they use. This will help you identify where your customers and potential customers are.

Make the most of your social media profiles

• Write an effective summary of yourself or your company and what your expertise is. Also, give users an idea of the type of information and content you will share with them.
• Use a real display photo either of yourself or your staff. Social media is all about connecting people, and if you’re starting out you want your potential followers to see you as real and approachable.
• Include a link to your website. Your social media profiles are a great way to help boost SEO and drive traffic to your website. This also goes for connecting your blog with your social media pages.

Integrate social media into your website

• Along with connecting your website to your social media profiles, add social media buttons to your website.
• Social media buttons can be added to any of your web content so that your visitors can easily share it on their social media networks.
• Make sure you have social media icons clearly visible on your homepage so visitors can easily click through to view your social media profiles.

Find and follow the influencers and grow your followers

• Select those who you will follow based on their potential to help grow your tribe of followers.
• Don’t forget to follow back, but make sure you decide strategically who to follow and they fit into the niche of followers you are trying to attract.
• Balance followers and following. This is important because you don’t want to dilute the quality of suggestions for ‘who to follow’. A strong profile of more followers than following is also far better for SEO.

Share relevant and interesting content

• Share content using all three mediums (videos, text and images).
• Share a combination of articles, tips and pages that are related to your industry, but are not yours.
• Interesting statistics, research studies, exercises and how tos are all quantitative pieces of information that people find useful.
• Motivational quotes and funny content can be shared once in a while to make your audience smile, but don’t overdo it.
• Use hashtags (#). They help make your content searchable, and your posts will come up when any keywords you have tagged in your posts are searched.