8 Social Media Tips to Improve Your Marketing Strategy

Social Media Marketing is one of the most powerful channels for your business, it drives, engagement, traffic, and sales. 

If your target audience is on social media, you should be there with them. It's nearly impossible to make the most of each platform, but you can pick a few and put into practice some fundamental social media tips.

Define Your Social Media Goals

Be very specific on what you want to achieve, it’s not just a case of posting anything, have a target in mind, "I want to sell more of Product A", or "I want to get 100 more members to my Facebook Group". Remember the SMART Acronym, be SPECIFIC, be MEASURABLE, be ACHIEVABLE, be RELEVANT, be TIMELY.

Know your Target Audience

In Marketing and Sales this should be a given, but it gets missed by so many. If you don’t understand and know your audience, how the hell are you going to communicate with them. Always keep the 3Ms of marketing in mind - MARKET, MESSAGE, MEDIA. Market – Whom do I serve? Message – Define the copy and positioning to get them excited. Media – Which platforms do my market hang-out on?

Select the Social Media Platforms That Work For You

Unless you’ve got loads of free resource to plough headfirst into all the platforms, it’s best to focus on the One or Two Core Social Media Platforms where your target audience hangs-out. Better to be great on one or two than second-rate on five or six. 

Build a Winning Game Plan for Social Media Marketing

Organic Social Media is essential, it allows you to build and maintain your presence with your ideal prospects and customers. When you put time and energy into planning your posts it becomes invaluable to your business.

Paid Advertising done right can have a massive impact to your business, especially when put into the hands of experts, you can push out multi-layered campaigns that hit your target audience at most stages of the Customer Value Journey, utilising methods like Retargeting.

Documenting your Strategy is a priority in my opinion, planning and aligning your organic campaigns and your paid advertising campaigns is a Win-Win. 

Organic Posting is about engagement, joining in with conversations, building relationships. Mixing Paid Advertising with the Organic Posting means people that see your advert may well check your Social Pages out, looking to see how your brand fits, and there’s nothing better to see the posts align with a compatible message to the advert, added with the additional impact of engagement and conversation.

Setting Up Your Social Media Content Calendar

The old quote is still Powerful “Failing to Plan is Planning to Fail”.

If you don’t plan, you’re spraying and praying, and that just doesn’t work. Use Social Media Planners - what am I going to post, the copy, image, and link, then organise your posts and campaigns utilising a Social Media Content Calendar. 

There are loads of templates, here’s ours [FREE] Monthly Social Media Content Planner, there'll be others available on the internet.

Just make sure you create and update your calendar monthly (not weekly), remember to build in your campaigns, if you have a team get them involved.

Deep Dive into Social Media Analytics

Analyse what you’ve posted, both Organic and Paid. With Organic some of the platforms do the analysis for you, if not, you can download our [FREE] Social Media Effectiveness Tracker here. 

Paid Advertising you can start off with Google Analytics and Facebook Ads Manager, these do need to be setup correctly, we can help with that of you’re stuck.

Just make sure you're analysing your posts and adverts, you want to know which ones are the best performing, understanding why, then optimise them next time round. Analysing helps you uncover a lot about your Audience and how they interact with your business.

Hashtags

Hashtags are brilliant for categorising and organising your posts, you can click on the relevant hashtag and all the content for that event becomes visible. But be careful, too many Hashtags can restrict your reach and engagement. 

General Rules

• LinkedIn – No more than Three
• Twitter – One to Two per post is the sweet-spot
• Facebook – One to Three 
• Instagram – Use up to ten for best reach, but you can use as many as 30
  

Treat Each Social Channel Uniquely

This goes without saying really, each platform has its own unique little nuances, LinkedIn is more Business-to-Business knowledge sharing, Facebook is great for communication to your communities, Twitter is real time news and information and personal interactions, YouTube is video (you don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to figure that one out 😁), and lastly Instagram, high quality visuals. 

There is the 70/30 Rule in Social Media posting, 70% of your posts are information your target audience will find valuable, 30% dedicated to advertising your website, products and or services. I personally use an 80/10/10 Rule, 80% Inbound Valuable Content, 10% Personal, 10% Sale/Promotion.