Social Media – The New Mantra
Social Media is the new mantra of marketing in the technology world, as it provides instant access to information at one’s fingertips, thereby causing companies to switch over to social media marketing. In a recent survey conducted, around 86% of marketing/PR personnel admitted that social media marketing played a vital role in their business and provided increased exposure for their products or services.
Benefits of Social Media Marketing
“Social Media is about the people! Not about your business. Provide for the people and the people will provide for you” quoted by Matt Goulart, a Canadian digital marketing expert. This statement perfectly justifies why connecting with people is more important, as they are the ones who will now be acting as marketing agents for you in carrying forward your campaign through various social networks.
Social Media Marketing provides the following benefits to your products/services:
Cost-effective
Currently, social media marketing is the fastest/easiest/most cost-effective way to spread the word about your products or services across the world in a split second.
Traffic
If you post a popular news, for instance, in Reddit, and it gets traction, you will notice that your referral traffic from Reddit will increase enormously with a potential to maximise return on investment (ROI) with a good landing page in place.
Connect
With the help of social media tools, you can connect to a large number of people, which cannot be achieved through conventional marketing.
Competitive Advantage
In your product category, if your competitors are not into social media, then entering the social media will a big boost for your product/service.
Social Media Tips and Tricks
Are you wondering how to improve your social media marketing? Are you wondering how to use the social media tools better? Below are some of the tips and tricks provided by influential social media experts:
Schedule your Posts
The real power of social media marketing tools is achieved only when it really delivers the expected results. If you are posting many blog posts throughout the day, it is only benefited if the post is being viewed by many people. So if you want to achieve this, then you should analyze the behavior of the users and when they usually log into the social media network and schedule your posts.
If your target audience are business people, who are engaged in business meetings all day and they usually log into their social media accounts before and after the meeting. Most meetings might be scheduled for after lunch around 2 pm – 3 pm, so scheduling your posts around that time will be very effective in your posts reaching your target audience.
Competitor Analysis
You need to be always on the run in analyzing your competitors and what posts and feeds are popular among the users of your competitors. If a particular post is popular, then it is wise to create a post on the same topic on your blog or website. In this way your blog will also become popular, as it has been proven that people tend to read and spend time on hot trending topics.
Minimal Approach
With countless social media platforms in the market, where some may be irrelevant to the brand, it will be time-consuming to be very engaging and responsive. Selecting top performing social media channels for active marketing will not only give the brand enough time to engage the audience or prospective clients but also have to offer the best of services to their customers.
Provide Tailored Content across Channels
Users won’t want to see the same format or tone of the content across different social media networks. Some kind of users will like to see content with quality graphics and photos, say for example Instagram users, whereas Twitter users are used to the short messages and conversations. Mint Social, a popular social media marketing company, says that an effective marketing strategy is one which caters to the needs of the target audience with content specific across various channels in the social media network.
Track – Analyse – Track
Tracking your customer behavior is one of the key aspects of social media marketing. Some of the vital statistics to focus on your tracking are:
- Follower growth
- Popular posts
- Geographical analysis
- Number of Clicks
- Number of Impressions
- Number of Pageviews
- Number of Likes / Shares
Use the Social Media Tools Wisely
Since social media has emerged as the game changer for many companies, many companies have started embracing social media marketing by reaching out and communicating with their customers on a daily basis. The tools you use for social media marketing is critical when you plan your social media strategy, as these tools help a lot to manage your social channels.
Listed down below, the leading social media tools adopted by most of the companies for their social media strategies:
The leading social media network with an estimated 1.23 billion active users and growing daily.
YouTube
“A Picture/Video speaks more than words”, as YouTube connects to more users than any other TV Network around the world, which puts the fact that watching TV has fallen behind watching YouTube. So many companies use this to their advantage by launching Ads and campaigns on YouTube first.
With a user base of around 240 million active users, Twitter allows companies to build a strong network around it, as it allows users to share links and messages across the network within minutes, allowing users to company to gain more traction and awareness about their product or service.
Hootsuite
One of the best social media marketing tools with a dashboard for managing social content over multiple networks. Hootsuite also provides an analytics feature to view and analyze how your social channels are performing and also provides ideas for how to optimize them. One can also view your Twitter lists and your Klout score, get detailed graphs and charts and view all your streams of multiple social channels in one place.
Mention
An alternative to Google Alerts, Mention is a powerful social media marketing tool to monitor your brand presence across the web. With a clean and simple UI, it does a fantastic job of providing you all the list of mentions about your brand or keywords across social networks, blogs, forums, etc. It also allows you to respond to or delete the Mention.
Buffer
The Buffer is emerging as one of the best social media publishing tools online utilized by many social media marketing experts to update their posts across various social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. The built-in analytics tools help you identify which posts are performing well and when the audience are viewing your content etc. Recently it has launched Buffer for Business tool with more updates and analytics.
Tagboard
Tagboard is a social media tool to monitor the use of keywords across multiple social channels. All conversations around specific hashtags on Twitter, Google+, Facebook and Instagram are charted out in a custom board with all your content. Tagboard is useful in various ways to social media marketing experts in for Content Curation, Brand Monitoring, and Lead Generation.
Socialbakers
Analytics Pro from Socialbakers is a very effective tool in identifying how your product or service stacks up against your competitors Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
Feedly
Feedly being one of the top content discovery tools in the market allows you to find great content to share with your target audience. It also provides you options to subscribe to RSS feeds of the top industry blogs to discover and keep you updated on the latest news on the topic of your interest.
Komfo
There are a large number of Analytical tools for Facebook pages, but most of them provide too much data that could be hard to understand and analyze. One of the major advantages of Komfo is that it not only provides analytical data on the user activities on your Facebook page but also provides insights on how to improve your engagement with Facebook users.
Social Oomph
Social Oomph is one of the coolest social media marketing tools around, that not only allows you to schedule your tweets, but also provides you options to make them recurring.
Conclusion
“_Social media is like a snowball rolling down the hill and picking up speed. Five years from now on, it’s going to be the standard_” – A famous quote on social media by Jeff Anataya.
Posting advertisements on billboards and sales copies and handouts, no longer work these days, as new customers have turned to become more social-savvy consumers. Businesses need to take an alternative approach in utilizing the social media in garnering customers’ attention.
If you haven’t climbed aboard the social media bus already, it’s time to hop into to catapult your business from the dark ages to the modern, social era. Mistakes do happen but try to learn from the mistakes and handle them professionally. Always keep yourself updated on the latest trends in social media to harness its power, to increase the brand awareness of your product, and to generate more leads.
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