Social media is an instrument on communication that facilitates social behaviour online. It’s also a medium that can be used to build brand awareness and influence the perception of your brand online. It’s a digital word of mouth medium and can be used to engage directly with your target audience.
Social media marketing has many benefits for your brand and company if you have a solid social media strategy to help you reach your business goals. It can be used to generate targeted traffic to your website, blog and other online media channels. It can even help you with your SEO campaign to gain better rankings online.
Before you jump on the social media bandwagon and start promotion your services and products, take a step back and plan carefully what you want to accomplish. Do you want to build relationships with your target audience? If the answer is yes, don’t take the hard sell approach with social media. How do you launch your social media campaign? Find a couple of tips below in creating a social media marketing strategy.
Launching a social media marketing campaign
What are you going to talk about? To the point: what do you want to achieve with your social media campaign? Generate leads and sales? Increase brand awareness? Once you have chosen what you want to achieve, tie these into measurable goals with milestones so that you can track and monitor your progress.
Who’s your target audience? What do you know about the people you want to attract with your campaign? This doesn’t mean you should know their age which is also good, but what content do they like online and on which social media channels can they be found? What interests them? Once you know who they are and what content they like, you can formulate your strategy to provide the best content for them.
Be active: You can’t just create your social media profiles on popular social media channels and think you are all of a sudden a “social business”. Be active and engage with your target audience. Join the discussion everyday and become an integral part of the community. Comment on blogs, retweet industry related tweets, news, and valuable information.
Monitoring: With social media, listen to what is being talked about your business, services, products, and even your competitors. Use a monitoring system like Google Alerts to be notified when someone mentions your name. What you monitor and measure on the social web will all be based on the goals you are chasing with your social media campaign. Setup measuring milestones so that you can track your progress.
