You've spent time designing your website (
responsively, we hope),
boosting your SEO, and you have a good content marketing strategy with new blog posts. This is all great!
Except none of this helps if no one visits your site. Your social media marketing plans matter and can bring you a lot of traffic.
But social media marketing plans are not a "one size fits all" solution. You need a unique plan for your company, organization, products, and goals. You need to work smart to be effective.
Start by assessing your goals. Do you want more traffic to your website? Do you want engagement? Do you want leads? Do you want sales? Do you want to offer downloads to capture emails? Do you want referrrals?
Of course, all businesses want
all of these but
you must decide what is most important to you and focus on getting results there first. By honing in on the most crucial elements for your content goals, you can make smart decisions about how to be effective on social media.
After deciding your biggest goals, you can choose the social media platforms that will take you closer to fufilling those goals. Remember that not all networks are right for your organization.
The big places to be are Twitter, G+ (yes, Google+ is very important), and Facebook. You may also want to consider Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Of course, there are other networks which can be powerful, depending on the customer you are trying to reach, such as Vine, SnapChat, MeetUp, Flickr, FourSquare, and Tumblr. Some companies even spend time developing campaigns on Reddit, Digg, Wikipedia, and StumbleUpon.
But wait! This can seem quite overwhelming! Again, the key is understanding what will meet your goals. Not all of these social media platforms are necessary if they aren't going to help you get where you want to go. So focus your efforts, start with 3 or 4 of the big networks, then expand from there as you learn.
It is also important to know who your audience is, because that will dictate where you should be. Make sure you know who you are selling to and who your content is talking to. Once you know this, you can make smart decisions about what social media platforms to use because you will stick to the places where your audience is!
Each social media network offers different demographics. Make sure that the demographic on the platform you commit to is the person that will benefit from your services and products!
Once you decide where to be, get sharing. Social media is all about being, well, social. Don't promote only your own stuff. The rule is to provide value and then, as followers begin to trust you and realize that you are an industry leader, you can encourage them to invest in your quality product. So share and engage, don't just promote your own articles.
Finally, one last piece to a basic, strong social media campaign is to be active. It is not good to create a social media platform and then not use it. This becomes especially dangerous if customers are tweeting to you and you are not responding. This is terrible for an organization's image!
But if you commit only to the platforms you can engage on and the ones that make sense for your company you can be successful without being overwhelmed. Don't sign up for all social media networks that exist if you don't have the time and resources to stay active managing them.
Social media can really help your company be seen in new, powerful, and usually very budget-friendly ways, if you work smart and efficiently.
BP Studios can help you develop a unique and tailored social media marketing plan. Contact us at info@bpstudios.com today to get started.
By Allison Carter
Allison Carter is a Senior Content Strategist with BP Studios. She loves writing blogs, tweeting, Facebooking (which she still thinks should be a verb), and helping companies get their message out.