Always Create Unique and Compelling Content
Content matters a great deal on social media. If your content is unique, educational, informative and of high quality, it helps to establish a distinct personality for your account. That is what makes your business distinctively different from your competitors and your customers notice. It evolves into some unique social identity for your business. You can nurture this identity with your own unique style of posts, unique content, visuals, graphics, logos, comments, interactions and unique hashtags. Doing these things regularly and consistently helps to build a great audience of followers for your business. You can validate and amplify your USP by posting links to blogs and articles that are talking about your business, highlighting its accomplishments or promoting its news. That helps your business a great deal because third party validation is one of the cornerstones of a successful social media marketing strategy.
Make Yourself Valuable
Social media users are always online to look for value. Without providing real value, you cannot hope to build a good following fast enough. Your first major challenge should therefore be to go about building a community of followers that are organic, relevant and engaging. Expert marketers recommend that you can go about this by introducing yourself to the social media community and getting them to notice you. Follow other accounts, engage and interact with these accounts by way of intelligent, relevant and unique comments. You can deliberately comment on popular influencer accounts and offer genuine input, feedback or expertise, helping your followers find what they’re looking for online, answering their questions and meaningfully engaging with them online. If you can do these things consistently, genuinely and intelligently, more people will start to pay attention to you. That helps to build your own audience of followers pretty quickly.
Take Advantage of Social Media Tools
Every social media platform has its own unique tools to assist marketers. You can take advantage of these tools to market effectively, promote your brand, grow your online authority, schedule your posts, share your posts, and interact with like-minded marketers by joining groups and suchlike marketing activities. You can save good time to create more content if you use tools like HootSuite to link all of your social media accounts together and schedule posts to appear at per-determined times across multiple social media platforms. With the help of these scheduling tools, you can develop a calendar of the best times to post based on the audience you would like to interact with and let the scheduling tool do the rest. Doing this allows your content to be automatically posted for you without having to manually do it yourself multiple times a day thereby enabling you to have audiences in different time zones and servicing them all adequately and simultaneously.
Network with Your Connections
Even when new in social media marketing, you can leverage the power of your connections when it starts growing. You can effectively market on social media and generate sales if you are able to use the media as a great tool to create a wide global network you can dependably leverage on to market your business. It allows you to get to meet a lot of people in your industry you can relate with and do business with. To enhance this, you can purposefully create relationships with thought-leaders and people of influence that have a wide group of followers in their own right. That helps to expand your network exponentially. You can identify influencers in your business niche, reach out and collaborate with them and they will in turn reciprocate by helping to promote your brand. On Twitter, a single re-tweet from the right influencer can help your brand/content to get in front of a whole new lot of hundreds or even thousands of potential customers.
Be Genuine and Authentic with your Followers
Reputation matters a lot in social media marketing. The reason you must endeavor to be authentic and genuine at all times in the content you post. Why people respond to authentic content positively is because they always want to interact with real people and not computer bots. That way, they tend to take appreciations and acknowledgments more personal if they know it is from real people. To enhance this, never fail to acknowledge and thank members of your audience/followers for complementing, posting and sharing your content. If you endeavor to return these little favors whenever you can, it will help grow your community/followers. Your audience engagement will grow in tandem as well.
Adhere to Community Rules of Each Platform
This is hugely important. Many social media platforms take their community rules very seriously. If you breach any of these rules, you get sanctioned. Such sanctioning may include but not limited to cautioning, taking out your content, temporary suspension or outright ban. You are visited with these sanctions when for instance you use the wrong or abusive language, bullying or when you promote any prohibited merchandise like drugs and firearms. Most social media platforms can greatly enhance your business if you stick with their community rules. Opening an account on social media platforms is free of cost. All they demand from you is to strictly comply with their community rules and regulations. That in all fairness is not too much to ask when weighed against the huge benefits you derive from being on the platforms.
