When you’re just starting out, considering plans to market your product or service, your friendly neighbourhood social media network becomes a whole new demon. To date, your interaction with Twitter or Facebook was limited to just positing updates and liking things.
You didn’t need to really venture into the murky depths of marketing on your favourite social media sites. Now, most people would recommend that instead of trying to find which social media network is the best for you, just market on all of them. However, a keen person might realize that marketing on all of them isn’t as important as marketing on the one platform that hits the right target.
Do your research
Before planning your social media marketing strategy, do a little research on your own. See where your competitors are hanging out. In fact, first identify your most established competitor and see where they’re most active. Instead of focusing on their followers, see just how much effort they are putting into their content. If you find that they’re posting more frequently and posting good quality content on LinkedIn instead of Facebook, you might have just found the sweet-spot.
Identify where your customers are
Before embarking on any sort of marketing, you really need to identify what your customer base is. If your target audience is young, a simple search would tell you which social network is popular amongst the youth of today.
The statistics are plainly available online but a great example would be Facebook. These days, the core demographic of Facebook is actually 35 and above. If your target audience is 18 to 35, you’re actually likely to find more success on networks like Instagram, Tumblr or Twitter.
Identify what they want
It is vital to identify what your customers want and what need your product or service is fulfilling. For example, if you’re in the business of selling organic foodstuffs, posting a few recipes on Pinterest using your organic ingredients and pinning photographs of them on the website would serve you better.
That way, with the new Buy It buttons, you can direct your target audience to your e-commerce website. You’ll have a higher success here than in other sites like LinkedIn or Twitter. However, if your company offers recruitment services, you’re obviously going to be better served at LinkedIn.
Little goes a long way
If you keep bombarding your customers with a constant supply of content, they’re eventually going to unfollow or unfriend you. These days, people are constantly facing a barrage of information, they’re always on the run, too busy or too stressed out to actually pay attention.
Send great, quality content once in a while, put effort into it and always keep the customer’s need in mind. You’ll actually be more memorable this way. With people becoming more and more selective about what they read and spend their time on, keeping your efforts short and sweet is vital.
Time
And finally, think of just how much time you have to deal with this entire social media marketing hassle. You’re a small business owner, not a magician and your marketing campaign isn’t more important than actually running the business after all.
