Want to climb the heights to become your own social media manager? Want to quickly master your social media? You’re in luck ! Make yourself, your business and services known to the masses! Social media is a great tool to accomplish this purpose. However, the difficult part of social media marketing is knowing where to start and how to build a following.
Let’s dive in!
• Understand What Social Media Is All About
It’s important to know the fundamentals of social media and understand whether the social media site is a right fit for your business and you. Each platform has its own demographic and effective content strategies / formats (blog, video, images etc).
For example, Hashtags are very popular and useful on Twitter and Instagram, but they work differently on Facebook. When it comes to posting on Facebook, things like videos, photos, and or any curated content that they can share, comment on, or tag a friend in are going to elicit better results.
While for Instagram, it is all about visual content and the recent hit – Instagram stories, which serve as a perfect opportunity for you to post in real time and connect with your followers. In terms of age group, Facebook skews significantly older than Instagram too.
But if you choose to write an article about social media marketing. You are probably going to post it on Linkedin as it can draw much attention compared to Instagram or Snapchat. Knowing your way around the different uses of the platforms will allow you to maximize your brand reach on social media, engage with the right people, and achieve your social media goals.
• Humanize Your Social Media Updates
Run weekly contests to make it interactive and fun, thanks someone for sharing your content, engaging directly with people on social sites individually; It’s time we start working on building meaningful relationships with our customers, between humans.
If you really share a good message and show people that you care, you’ll expand your followers.
Try to imagine how annoying it is for people who follow you on multiple channels but keep seeing the same contents every time. Instead, mix it up slightly; you can share the same link but with different descriptions on each site. This gives people a reason to connect with your brand on multiple platforms. Be “Follow” worthy!
• Listen to Customers
A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all. Social media isn’t just a special perk that promotes brand awareness; it’s a great way for you to gather enough business-important information, as many customers nowadays are turning to social media to engage with the brand for feedback or complaints.
Thus, by listening to customers instead of just putting up advertising posts, and using these feedbacks to guide your business and marketing decisions.
According to HundredX, some feedback from your clients may be negative and unpleasant to hear. Many companies try to listen and understand problems and channels faced by their clients and turn it into a solution.
Compared to hard selling, you may even learn more by just listening to customers and collecting feedback. By measuring customer satisfaction, you can determine whether you meet, fall short of, or surpass your customer expectations.
Besides, customers also can serve as the best source of inspiration for content; you can simply find ideas by looking at their enquiries or frequently asked questions.
• Eye-Catching Design / Feeds
Great visual post is 40 times more likely to be shared on social media than any other type of content. Things like photos, videos, illustrations, infographics, and memes are few forms of visual content that have a huge impact on the way people consume information.
What matters is that you provide some eye-candy to go along with your message. There are some design principles to follow for engaging social media graphics, such as:
#1 Aware of the color contrast (advice not to use more than 3 colours),
#2 Use high quality imagery,
#3 Use fun icons to reinforce your message,
#4 Clear font and good spacing, and
#5 Keep the composition simple, clean and clear.
The best thing visual design can bring to your social media marketing is that it allows people to stop scrolling to just see what you have shared. Use Canva or Hubspot for free design templates that can help alleviate your workload and express your story.
• Good Copywriting
You may master your social media marketing starting from a good copywriting, something that is worth reading and interesting! Even if you have nothing interesting to say, your delivery can make people read, or engage with you.
It all starts with planning; And most importantly, a powerful statement on “why” people would follow you on social media, what kind of content you plan on creating and posting, and what you hope to achieve. How to catch people’s attention with your ad copy?
Here’s the way:
#1 Mention the key value proposition fast
#2 Ask a question to get the reader hooked
#3 Avoid long intros and get to your point fast.
The more specific your copywriting is, the better it’s going to convert. Keep it simple and concise; one of the easiest ways to achieve this is by using active verbs instead of passive. This will help get rid of any fluff and whittle your post down to a sharp and clear point.
Want to make sure each post is well-written and avoid embarrassing mistakes? A good copywriting skill not merely engages with your audience, but will persuade your customer to buy something you’re offering.
You can even use a free online grammar check on Grammarly to proofread before you post !
• Focus On Helping
Focus on helping doesn’t mean that you do merely help out people by not profiting from business.
If that is so, what is the point of starting up your business?
Profiting through helping means that we solve customer’s problems by providing them a solution. This concerns how you market your brand and product, and the more you try to sell it, the more your audience feels annoyed with your brand.
For example, many companies are trying to hardsell their product by allocating a big budget on advertising and packaging. This will annoy your audience and they will think that profit is your top priority.
If your followers ask a question regarding your brand or your product on social media, present it like a way you are solving their problem but not trying too hard to sell your products.
It has some connection with so-called social selling which means by bonding and building good relationships with your audience. Helping can be many forms such as replying to a customer’s comment, engaging with your audience or even writing something from your customer’s point of view.
If you’d like us to personally help you, drop us a message here!
Prepared by: HYG LIM