Our 8 Top Tips for Social Media Marketing Beginners
Social media plays a big part in the majority of people’s lives these days. To be precise, a whopping 38 million people in the UK actively use social media. This is why it so important to be involved. So here are our top tips, for you social media marketing beginners.
1. Decide what you would like to achieve from Social Media.
First of all, as a beginner, you need to ask yourself some questions. The most important one should be this; what is your social media for? For example, is it to drive sales of a particular service/product or to promote your business as a whole? You need to have a clear purpose behind your social media activities so that your audience knows what you are all about.
2. Who is your target consumer?
So you’ve established the purpose of your social media, now you need a target consumer. One important factor that may be obvious is defining who your target audience is. Do your research. What do they like? Are they mainly female? Do they tend to be aged over 40? What do they want from you as a business? What type of content/topics do they interact with the most?
Gather a depth of research. This will make it easier when you want to start targeting your audience with content. The more specific for that group, the more they will interact with your posts/tweets.
3. Create relevant and up to date content.
As I said in the previous paragraph about content, you now need to create 2 things;
- Relevant content – Your content needs to be something that is relevant to the needs and/or interests of your target audience. Something they can relate to and will want to interact with.
- Up to date – Your content needs to be up to date, it’s no good having something from 4 years ago that is nothing to do with your business or industry. These days, everyone likes to keep up to date with most things, for example; technology, fashion, cars etc.
4. Who will create your Social Media content?
When it comes to managing your social media accounts, there are a lot of different tasks involved. Some quite big and challenging and then the smaller, less time-consuming tasks. So (if at all possible) you may want to delegate different tasks to others. For example; who will be keeping all the accounts up to date? Who will be responsible for creating the posts for you to share across your social networks? Graphics? Branding!? By delegating tasks it will be a lot less stressful for a start, but also it gives you the opportunity to be organised.
If you aren’t in a lucky enough position to be able to delegate tasks, then the next tip is especially important.
5. Get your Social Media organised.
Because there is so much that needs doing on such a regular basis, you need to be organised. Set up a daily schedule for weeks, if not months in advance. Then you can set out how much time you can devote to each task. For example, this could be the first 40 minutes of every Wednesday; 20 minutes designing a graphic, 10 minutes uploading the graphic across various social media channels with different messages and then another 10 minutes looking for content to share.
A schedule will also work as a checklist, each day you can go through and tick off what tasks you’ve done, what still needs to be done and how long it should take. Also, it will help to maintain a routine. And everyone loves a routine.
6. Get the right balance.
You need to adopt the right balance when it comes to social media management and self-promotion. You should be spending more time providing your social media audience with interesting or funny content, rather than pushing your products in their face every other post/tweet. Ain’t no customer got time for that!
This is where the 80 – 20 rule comes in; 80% of your content should be educating and entertaining and the other 20% should be self-promotion.
This is a great way to gain likes/subscribers/followers, build up trust and most importantly, a good reputation.
7. Audience control.
Let your audience take control when visiting your social media channels. Engage with your audience in a way that will make them want to engage with you! Encourage them to interact with your content. But be careful how you do this. No one likes being told what to do, so don’t directly tell your audience “share this, share that, retweet this” etc. Nor is it good practice to get people to like and share content as part of a competition. It could be that you just add “Read our full post to find out more” at the end of your post/tweet or it could just be as simple as creating some flawless, killer content.
On the note of killer content, last but absolutely, certainly, definitely, 100% not least…
8. Quality, not quantity.
It’s all about quality, not quantity! People like short and snappy articles that get straight to the point. They don’t want to sit there all day reading a five-page article which they probably got bored of after 2 minutes of reading it. Speak to your audience on a human-level. Ensure your content is unique. And, keep it interesting! Whether it’s by finding out some jaw-dropping statistics or by including a tenuous link to a funny dog related video. Who knows, be imaginative. People like that!
Every week that goes by you will learn more and more. Both about your target audience and about the do’s and don’t’s of social media. In social media marketing, you always need to be open to change and be flexible; go with the time and keep up to date.
I hope you can take something away from this post. Whether it just be the one tip or all 8. With any luck, you may even give us a like or a follow!
Also, you could be the one to shed the light on social media marketing to your friends if you fancied it? If indeed you do, then you will be happy to hear that it takes just two clicks to share this post using the links below.
