15 Tips to an effective Social Media use

Effective Social Media Use

The social media marketing world is getting bigger every day. It’s an important aspect aof promoting your small business. You need to understand the relationship between business and social media to set up an effective social media marketing strategy.

The real value of social is not just as an outreach-and-engage platform, but as a listening and learning tool. You want to reach more of your target market and properly position your brand but with so much competition you have to work hard and smart to stand out.

Here we’ve put together a list of a few tips to help you along your social media marketing path.

01- Go to where your customers are

Try to reach your target market using the social media channels they use. Go to where your customers are.  If your target demographic is on Facebook then make sure that you are on Facebook.

02- Interaction

A huge part of social media marketing is about interacting with your customers and potential customers. Use social media as a means for obtaining feedback about your product or service and for allowing your customers to interact with each other.

03- Keep it updated

Visitors like fresh new content so keep your content up to date. Don’t let them get bored with stale content. Keep them coming back for more.

04- Special offers

Make it worth their desire to become a fan, join your group or follow your page. Consider offering a coupon to those who frequent your social media pages. Give something valuable.

05- Patience is a virtue

Building your presence on social media networks requires patience. You will not receive a few thousand fans or followers on day one. However, by consistently being a part of social media communities you will have a better chance of succeeding.

06- Avoid using your blog as one big ad

Don’t just use your site only as a marketing tool. Don’t let them think that you only care about them as customers. Try to share your story as an artisan or business and provide content that is interesting and helpful. People love good content. It pays off with time.

07- Add a share, follow, or like button

When you providing a share, follow, or like button on your website, your visitors can easily share your content with their friends, helping you reach more customers.

08- Negative feedback is not always negative

By becoming a social entity, your business will more than likely receive negative feedback. Don’t lash out. Take this feedback, analyze it and learn from it. Perhaps there is an area of your business that needs to be improved.

09- Think before you share

Share things that matter and provide value to your audience.

10- Encourage comments

Create interest by asking questions. Encourage your audience to comment on your posts. Ask them about their experiences and opinions about your post

11- Twitter

Before posting on Twitter, always ask yourself: Is it true? Is it necessary? Is it kind? Is there anyone this might harm? Sometimes we post thoughts without considering how they might impact our entire audience. It’s easy to forget how many friends are reading.

12- Offer random tweets of kindness

Every now and then I ask on Twitter, “Is there anything I can do to help or support you today?” It’s a simple way to use social media to give without expectations of anything in return. By reaching out to help a stranger, you create the possibility of connecting personally with followers you may have otherwise known only peripherally.

13- Be active, not reactive

You may receive email updates whenever there is activity on one of your social media accounts, or you might have your cell phone set to give you these types of alerts. This forces you to decide many times throughout the day whether you want or need to respond. Another approach is to choose when to join the conversation, and to use your offline time to decide what value you have to offer.

* Be careful with this point here as distractions are a powerful enemy of the productivity. You can read a little bit more on productivity here.

14- Respond with your full attention

People often share links without actually reading them, or comment on posts after only scanning them. One of the greatest gift we can give someone is our attention and social media allows us to be endlessly generous. We may not be able to reply to everyone, but responding thoughtfully when we can, makes a difference.

By the way, when you reply to an article or post, don’t do it saying only: “Good post“, “Nice“, or with the phrase “Excellent article” or even with a thumb up icon. Those are useless. That does not contribute to a conversation. When you reply, do it thinking carefully, do it with your heart. The author and the other people will really value your words. If you’re not going to do so, simply do not make any comment. Your words demonstrate your inner wealth or poverty.

15- Write in a correct way

When I say in a correct way, I mean that you not only have to express your opinion in a decent way, but also, write without spelling errors. Writing with good spelling is a good discipline and it pays off a lot.  Understand and accept this: Poor Grammar affects your website and yourself!  Poor worth people often DO NOT pay attention to poorly written comments.

Finally I might say that there are many different approaches to social media marketing. Find your niche and put in the time and you will reap the rewards.

For a more advanced description, please refer to our article titled The Power of Social Media.