Ten Social Media Marketing Rules Every Business Needs to Adopt
Experts have said it time and time again that in this digital age social media marketing is a vital aspect of marketing for businesses. The question is: why are many businesses not seeing tangible results in spite of their efforts to elevate their customer base and maximize sales through social media marketing?
Success with social media marketing involves more than just making efforts. To get it to work for you, there are basic fundamentals you must follow. Without them, you social media marketing efforts will all be a waste.
Here are the fundamentals:
Listen More on Social Media
You want success with your social media marketing? Then learn to listen more and talk less. It’s only when you listen that you understand. Read the online content your target audience posts. Join their discussions. Learn the stuff that is important to them. Doing this will help you create social media content that add value to their lives. It will help you initiate conversations that they care about.
Focus
What’s that popular saying? Yes, “Jack of all trades, master of none.” If you are this person, then you are wasting your time. Having a focused social media strategy and content will help your target audience assign an identity to your social brand. It will help you build a stronger brand, a more targeted leads pool, and give you a better chance at success.
Favour Quality on Social Media
As Steve Jobs said, “Quality is more important than quantity.” Five hundred social connections that engage with and share your social content is better than fifty thousand connections that never engages with your content after liking or following your brand or social media. Always keep that in mind as you grow your connections.
Patience
There’s nothing like overnight success. Success with social media marketing takes time. If you are looking for overnight success, chances are that you are the type that buys social media followers and likes and then end up regretting it in the end. Of course, it’s possible for a post to go viral and pull in thousands of followers or likes in a day, but it’s more possible that, like everyone else, you will need to commit months or even years of hard work to growing your social presence. Just be patients.
Virality
When you build your social audience by publishing quality, amazing, and thought-provoking content, chances are that they will share your posts with their audiences. By so doing, they will open up new entry points for people to find you on social media.
Influence
Search for influencers in your niche which have quality audiences that are interested in your product or service. Try engaging with these influencers, but be careful so that you don’t appear stalkerish or trollish.. Make relevant, thoughtful comments on their posts. Chances are that if you stick around long enough, they will notice you, check out your page, and possibly even share your content with their audience.
Value
Direct promotion is a bad social media strategy. Social media is where people go to make friends and interact with one another. Direct promotion will only make you appear trollish. Sooner or later, people will stop paying attention to your posts. Some will even unfollow, unlike, unfriend, or block you. Instead of direct promotion or focusing on conversion, try creating and sharing posts compelling posts and building healthy relationships with your audience and influencers. With time, when these people become curious about you and what you do, this strategy will pay off.
Acknowledgement
Nobody likes to be ignored. In fact, ignoring someone on social media is one of the easiest ways to lose their connection. Always reply to comments on your social media posts and wall. Even when you can’t reply, give the comments a like at least. Also, always check your social media messages and acknowledge people that send you messages. You might also want to talk about your audience and share their posts that you love. That way, you show them that they are important to you. People typically reciprocate kindness.
Accessibility
In a way, this is related to acknowledgement. Never post content on your social media and then vanish. You have to be available, not just to monitor the conversation your post has initiated but also to participate in that conversation.
Consistency
If you truly want your social media marketing to be fruitful, then you need to be consistent. Don’t post today and then disappear for a week. You need to post regularly. Better still, post at an interval your audience expects. Perhaps at 1pm every day or or two. That way, your audience will look forward to your next post, just as people look forward to the next episode of their favorite TV show.
There you have it. Follow these rules of social media marketing and improve the chances of your efforts yielding favourable results.
Find out how Macaulay Gidado and Republic Digital can help your business find success on Social Media.
