Social media platforms are no longer platforms that connect two people but platforms that connect businesses to people. In the last decade, social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc have updated themselves keeping in mind the user as well as the businesses (large and small). If your business hasn’t yet started with your social media marketing, then this beginner’s guide on social media marketing will definitely help you!
What is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing is defined as the use of social media platforms to engage the audience with your brand and generate leads, website traffic, and sales. The most popular social media platforms include:
- Youtube
- Quora
The social media strategies for all of these social media platforms have to be in alignment with their respective USP and target audience.
For strategies to market your business across different social media platforms to reach your target audience, check out the infographic below!
Infographic created by Clover, a POS system company
Apart from brand recognition, the benefits of social media marketing include being cost-effective, high conversion rate, better customer engagement, and increased inbound traffic.
Beginner’s Guide on Social Media Marketing
As a beginner, this guide on social media marketing will help you kickstart your business’s social media strategy-
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Omnichannel Marketing
The first and foremost tip under the guide on social media marketing is omnichannel marketing. By omnichannel marketing, I mean that your brand’s message should be uniform across all social media platforms. This way you are creating a consistent and qualitative user experience and a brand identity that stays with the users.
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Clear Goals
It is important that as a business, you make a list of the clear objectives that you wish to achieve over a particular period of time via social media channels. Social media marketing goals could be based on KPIs such as engagement, lead generation, conversion rate, followers, product inquiries, etc.
Ensure that you do not create an excessive amount of objectives especially those that are unrealistic and hard to achieve as a beginner.
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Focus on Relatable Content
The thumb rule of this guide on social media marketing is to create user-friendly content. Relatable content has higher chances of going viral and one or two viral content pieces can get you months’ worth of engagement. You can also use moment marketing to create relatable and fast content.
The more the youth interacts with your content, the higher the chances that the social media platform algorithm shows your content more than others. So creating relatable and user-friendly content is always a win-win situation.
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Show Sensitivity
Many businesses believe in their work and community ethics but fail to bring that out on their social media platforms as one of their USPs. Support local causes after you have understood the cause and ensure that you loop in your audience as well.
Apart from this, you can also use social media to convey your brand’s progressive and optimistic image to even those who think otherwise.
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Online Reputation Management
You must use social media platforms as your opportunity for online reputation management. You can use various social listening tools to understand what is being said about your brand (positive or negative) and use the platform to cater to the same.
It is important that you reach your troubled customer on social media before your competitors reach them.
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Content Calendar
The point of focus for this guide on social media management is to understand the importance of consistent content. Consistency will bring the desired results even if not at that very moment.
Before you start your social media marketing journey, you must have two weeks’ worth of content bank with you. Creating a content calendar helps in scheduling an entire week’s social media content and even publishing the posts. Try to keep your content calendar are flexible as possible as with moment marketing, you might have to change content frequently.
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Social Media Management Tools
There are some popular social media management tools that help you manage multiple social media platforms and their content in one place. Instead of having a complex opinion about tools, try experimenting with atleast one at a time to understand their true benefits.
You can use social media tools to track your metrics that will help you know whether there is growth in your business through social media platforms or not.
How can you learn Social Media Marketing?
Before kicking off your business’s social media marketing journey, I strongly recommend that you get trained in the A-Z of social media marketing. With Influencer Marketing emerging successful and impactful, it is important to learn how each platform can help you achieve the best results.
Social media marketing training is often offered as a module under an advanced online digital marketing course but you can specifically get trained for social media marketing with short-term certificate courses that span over a few hours.
Conclusion
Platforms that were designed to bridge the gap between two long-distance friends are now fine-tuned to become marketplaces. Businesses must tap into this opportunity and up their social media game with relatable and quality content. Hope this quick guide on social media marketing for beginners will help you create an omnichannel social media marketing strategy.
Author’s Bio
Karan Shah
Founder and CEO at IIDE
Karan Shah is an Edu-preneur, Tedx speaker, Harvard alumnus specializing in eCommerce, and the founder of IIDE – The Digital School.
He is a reputed author on the topics of education, digital marketing, and Ed-techs. Over the years he has penned a plethora of articles in leading news outlets such as Entrepreneur, BusinessWorld, Education Times, and Youth Magazine to name a few.
