Social media marketing is the process of building awareness about you, your products, or services through various social media channels.<\/p>\n
The ultimate goal of any social media marketing campaign is to drive traffic to a website, increase the visibility of a product, gain more social media followers, or find more customers.<\/p>\n
The most popular social media networks today are Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram, Tik Tok, and Linkedin.<\/p>\n
Social Media Marketing is important because:<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the fastest way to spread the word about a new product, service, or news item<\/strong> \u2013 A tweet can go rival in minutes and spread a message around the Word faster than TV or other traditional media<\/p>\n It\u2019s a trend<\/strong> \u2013 Millions of people spend a good amount of their time on social media networks so if you \u2018need them\u2019 you know where to find them<\/p>\n It\u2019s the new marketing<\/strong> \u2013 Back in the old days, marketers found out that many people spend time in their cars driving so they thought of the billboards on the roads. Today, people are spending time on social media so as a marketer you have to start thinking this way too.<\/p>\n It\u2019s the new influencer<\/strong> \u2013 Recent studies show\u00a0that social media is becoming a great sales channel and more and more\u00a0companies are stating that they get\u00a0customers from Facebook or Twitter.<\/p>\n How can you take advantage of social media? How can beginners build a proper social media presence fast?<\/p>\n 1. Decide which social media platform(s) to use<\/a> As a beginner to social media, you have to choose one or two social media platforms and concentrate on those rather than trying to work on all platforms at the same time.<\/p>\n This is a mistake that many beginners do and in the end, they quit without having any benefit.<\/p>\n A nice way to find out which platform is best suited to your niche is to find the influencers and analyze where they have success.<\/p>\n For example, find out the leaders in your niche and check out the number of Facebook fans, Twitter followers, Pinterest followers, etc.<\/p>\n If they have 100,000 Facebook fans but only 1000 Twitter followers then this is a good indication that FB is more suitable for your niche than Twitter.<\/p>\n It is also a sign that you are more likely to have success with FB than on Twitter, so you can use your time more efficiently and engage more on FB rather than any other platform.<\/p>\n Once you decide which social media tools<\/strong><\/a> you will use (at least for the beginning), the next step is to optimize your profiles on those sites.<\/p>\n By optimizing your profiles you increase your chances of getting more followers and it is also a good way to boost your SEO efforts.<\/p>\n Some general rules that apply to all sites are:<\/p>\n After you have your social media profiles ready the next step is to connect your website with your social media pages.<\/p>\n There is a certain procedure to follow for each platform and it is very important that you do it correctly.<\/p>\n A correct binding between the two means that search engines and social media websites know which website corresponds to which social media page.<\/p>\n Besides connecting your website with the respective business pages on social media, you also need to add social media buttons on your website so that readers can easily share your content.<\/p>\n Depending on the platform there are many ways and plugins to do that, I suggest you search Google using \u201chow to add social media buttons to xxxxxx\u201d \u2013 replace xxxxx with the platform your website is based on.<\/p>\n For example, if you are using WordPress search google for \u201chow to add social media buttons to WordPress<\/em>\u201d.<\/p>\n As a general rule of thumb, keep the buttons above the fold to increase exposure and have in mind that larger buttons get more clicks than smaller buttons.<\/p>\n So far we have selected the most appropriate social media tools for our niche, optimized our social media profiles, connected our website with the social media pages, and added the buttons on our pages for more interaction.<\/p>\n The next obvious step is to find people to follow but most importantly to gradually build our tribe of followers.<\/p>\n I would say that there are 5 basic steps to follow to get more followers and these are described in points 6-10 below.<\/p>\n Before getting into that, you should first find and follow the influencers in your niche.<\/p>\n It is almost certain that they will not follow you back because you have a new account with no followers but doing so is important for 3 reasons:<\/p>\n Once you start following people you should always have in mind that it\u2019s better to keep a balance between the number of people you follow and the number of people they follow you back.<\/p>\n This is important especially on Twitter and Pinterest and the reasons are a lot:<\/p>\n A strong profile, in this case, is someone that has more followers than following and someone that is followed by people who are considered influencers in the niche.<\/p>\n This is the foundation for having a successful social media marketing campaign. When we talk about publishing content we always say that \u2018content is king\u2019 and this is true in social media as well.<\/p>\n If you share interesting and useful content you can get more re-shares, more visitors to your website, and under some conditions more customers as well.<\/p>\n What is interesting content? From my experience (and certain studies) this is a combination of:<\/p>\n A common question by people who are just beginning on social media is \u201chow many times should I post per day?\u201d<\/p>\n The answer depends on the network.<\/p>\n There are many studies analyzing the effect of posting frequency<\/strong><\/a> and some best practices are:<\/p>\nSocial Media Marketing tips for beginners<\/h2>\n
\n2. Optimize your social media profiles<\/a>
\n3. Connect your website or blog with your social media pages<\/a>
\n4. Add social media buttons on your website<\/a>
\n5. Find and follow the influencers in your niche<\/a>
\n6. Keep a balance between following and followers<\/a>
\n7.\u00a0Share interesting content (text, images, videos)<\/a>
\n8. Post many times per day but don\u2019t overdo it<\/a>
\n9. Don\u2019t forget to follow back<\/a>
\n10. Follow the rules and be patient<\/a><\/p>\n1. Decide which social media platform(s) to use<\/h3>\n
2. Optimize your social media profiles<\/h3>\n
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3. Connect your website or blog with your social media pages<\/h3>\n
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4. Add social media buttons on your website<\/h3>\n
5. Find and follow the influencers in your niche<\/h3>\n
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6. Keep a balance between following and followers<\/h3>\n
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7. Share interesting content (text, images, videos)<\/h3>\n
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8. Post many times per day but don\u2019t overdo it<\/h3>\n