7 Effective Social Media Marketing Strategies You Should Know.

Let me just say this right off the bat; if your business is not online, you are wrong. Now, of course you could decide to limit your business to your immediate environment. But why do that when you can have access to many more people considering the number of social media users around the world as of July 2021? Plus, many businesses like yours have gotten with the program, so, operating a business without social media is shortchanging yourself. 

However, that is not all. There are many businesses that exist on social media but have a hard time keeping up because as expected, the large number of social media users also means a large number of businesses are on social media. And so, the competition is quite stiff; if you want to have a piece of the pie, you have to make sure to get your social media marketing strategies down pat. How do you do that? That’s what this article hopes to address. So, I have highlighted 8 effective social media marketing strategies you should know to help with your social media marketing. 

 

Create Quality Content

This is quite obvious, right? Well, that’s why it is first on the list. Don’t be one of those businesses that put content out on social media for the sake of putting out content. You need to make sure your contents are well-thought-out, well-researched, easy to understand, relatable, engaging, visually appealing and valuable. It is better to post quality content thrice a week than to post fluffy content every day of the week. Of course, I’m not asking you to be inconsistent because that is a problem as well. Make sure to be consistent with whatever schedule you decide is good for your business. 

 

Create Visual Content

While text-based content is not completely useless on social media, most people really do not go on social media to read long texts. They want a post that can pass the message as briefly as possible. If they need long text, they will probably read your blog post. So, try to keep your text as succinct as possible and complement it with a lot more visual content. Granted, some platforms are more visually structured than others. For instance, Instagram is more visual than Twitter. But there is a reason visual content do very well across the board, it is because man is largely a visual being. So, take advantage of visual content to enrich your social media content. 

 

Create an Audience Persona

Ever heard of buyers’ persona? If you have, the context is similar to an audience persona. Every business has its unique audience. For instance, a brand selling hair clippers has a different audience from a brand selling make-up. Except for exceptional cases, the core audience of the former are men and the latter female. So, the marketing strategies of both brands will differ. Sometimes, even environment and income level will determine the marketing strategy. In the same vein, you need to create or determine your audience persona and align your social media marketing strategies to your audience persona. 

 

Monitor Your Competition

Determine your competitors and follow them to see what they are doing. Chances are you already know your competitors, just search for their handles and even if you don’t want to follow them, regularly go through their accounts to see what they are doing. You can learn a lot through watching your competitors; especially as it related to what and what not to do. So, don’t limit yourself to competitors that are doing well, check those that are not doing well as well. Besides that, you should practice what is called, social listening. That way, you can find out what the general view of the public is about your brand and that of your competitors and that can give you an insight into the audience’s expectations. 

 

Decide Your Social Platform

One social media marketing mistake that many people make is forgetting that each social media platform is unique in its style and therefore, the audience it attracts are slightly different. Even the set-up of each of them makes it necessary to define each platform’s strategy. So, for instance, it will be more productive to post long text-based content on Facebook than on Instagram because Facebook is more structured that way. 

On the other hand, as a business, a particular platform might work for you better than others. It is only advisable that you invest more in the said platform that works while finding out why others are not working for you. You may or may not find out what the issue is and it could simply be that your target audience is not on those other platforms. 

 

Engage Your Followers

What you don’t want on social media is to keep churning out content that nobody interacts with. If you keep posting and getting no engagement whatsoever, you may just be doing something wrong. Now, you might be wondering how to engage your followers; one great way is to engage their content. Social media is one place where the law of reciprocity works. You might not see the result immediately but you will eventually see it. Follow certain similar brands and certain followers and engage them. That would make you more visible to them and they will feel the need to reciprocate when they come across your content. 

Another great way is by creating engaging content like asking them questions, asking their input, doing giveaways and encouraging them to comment on what you have posted. Besides that, you can also user-generated content (UGC) by reposting or retweeting posts where you are mentioned – for good, of course – or posts by other social media users that you agree with. Remember not to lift without credit but to either repost or tag them as the source. That will do two things; get their audience to hear about you if they acknowledge and also encourage them to engage your posts.

 

Track Your Performance

Experimenting is a big part of marketing in general and this is no different for social media marketing. After applying all your brilliant social media marketing strategies, it is only expected that you track their performance to see if they are achieving the desired result. If they are, you can do more of that and if not, you can check what’s wrong and fix it. In fact, you can and should test different tactics to determine what works best.

 

And there you have it; we hope you have enjoyed reading this article and found it useful. Let us know what you think in the comment section.