Social Media Marketing Best Practices

What is so frustrating about social media is you clearly know it works like gangbusters for some businesses. How is it working out for your business? Yes, of course there are common guidelines you can follow for social media campaigns. And you must determine exact approaches that are aligned with your business and goals. But for now, let’s explore general best practices that will give you a good foundation for social media marketing.

Social engagement is not all about promotional updates.

This is one of the most common misfires especially at Facebook. A good analogy here is taking a look at email marketing best practices. You know the feeling when all you receive are sales pitches in newsletters. It’s boring and creates the impression that the business behind the emails has no interest or desire to help you, the subscriber.

Times have changed, or rather; people are no longer willing to endure constant promotional bombardments. The fact is all along email and social media marketers should have been focusing on engagement and building trust.

In addition to providing variety in your content, think about related content (topics) that your audience may want. You can easily get ideas by reading the post on using Facebook Graph Search. All of us have many areas of interest, and you can use that fact to make your content broader and gain wider appeal.

How can you add value to the conversations on your social platforms of choice?

Ask yourself how you can make your audience’s lives easier. As you read various conversations, you may get a spark that leads to content about useful tips. You know your audience and should be able to add helpful and actionable ideas they can use.

Constantly scan social media for ideas you can use and even take a step further. Always think in terms of conversations and how they occur in real-life. People engaged in conversations chime-in with thoughts, comments, opinions, ideas, etc. Do the same in your social media marketing. Do not ever be shy about engaging others in conversation.

Maybe you hate Twitter and think it’s useless and a waste of time. But did you know you can do keyword searches at Twitter? Simply search for Twitter conversations that are relevant to your business, service, brand, or products. You can get ideas and use them elsewhere or you can join the conversation.

Maintain consistency to build trust and condition your audience.

You can also think of this as always be working on your brand. There are other aspects such as conditioning your audience to know your unique voice. So you will be consistent with engaging your audience in conversation. Understand that you have the power to define what their experience is with you. You can also define their experience and expectations of what your service or product(s) can do for them.

Going back to email marketing, you know it takes roughly 5 to 7 exposures to a message before most people will buy. That means repeated audience exposure to your conversations which means being consistent.

Tags: social media best practices, social media content marketing, social media marketing