Golden Rules to Successful Social Media Marketing

Tight competition. Diverse audiences. Varied platforms. These are only few of the challenges you have to face if you are using social media for your marketing strategies. However, with all the benefits social media can bring to businesses, this couldn’t just be disregarded if you want your business to thrive. Now if you want to succeed within the social space, you have to be guided with these golden rules.

1. Know Your Purpose and Focus on It

You have to make sure that you know what you want to achieve when starting your social media marketing. Is it to introduce your business to the public? Is it to get more loyal customers? Is it to send new messages and establish new image? You have to determine your purpose and design your social media marketing strategy based on your purpose.

You have to make sure that you follow this strategy and keep in mind your purpose regardless of what may come your way. With the consistent changes in this medium, new things and trends come every time. That doesn’t mean that you have to use and follow these trends. Ignore them if it won’t help you achieve your purpose.

2. Only Publish Quality Content and Regularly Update It

“Content is King” is an overrated phrase in the social media world. However, as common as it sounds, it’s also that important. What you post on your social media pages is what people will perceive about your brand. It takes good research and well-thought-of writing strategy for this. Without quality content, your strategy will never be a success.

You also need to know the 80/20 rule wherein what you are writing and posting should not be recognized as marketing posts. 80% of your posts should not be promotional. Write about trivia, motivational messages and entertainments.

Aside from writing quality content, you have to make sure that you also post regularly. Varied quality contents will assure you that your followers will see your posts and in that way, you will be able to give your message and achieve your purpose.

3. Connect and Link

Although there is competition in social media, you need to know how to connect with influencers. Choosing the right influencers and those of the same purpose as you are, is the key to more followers who will likely turn to loyal customers. If you have successfully connected with these influencers, you will thrive in your social media marketing.

You also need to link to relevant articles that would add to your quality content. You don’t need to own all the contents of your social media pages. You are always allowed to share contents from others. That would also build connections to influencers and other followers.

4. Give Due Credit
Since we mentioned that you can share other’s work, let’s not forget to give credit to the author of the content. Giving proper attribution could be done by tagging the writer or linking back to the article. You don’t want to be involved into law cases just because you copied content without authorization or crediting.

5. Observe, Research and Be Patient

If you are starting your social media marketing, it is really important to observe how things are done and what the effective strategies are. You have to pay attention to your customers and observe their behaviors. You have to pay attention to competitors to know their strengths and weaknesses. You have to pay attention to the platform you are using. Doing this step gives you data to work on.

You have to make a thorough research on what you have observed. The data you’ve gathered is important to know how you can strategize your own social media marketing strategy. This won’t be easy and quick so you also need to have patience. You will be required to give more time and effort. Just be patient and continue the work.

6. Cross Promote

​Your target audiences are found not in just a single social media platform but on across all these social media spaces. You have to share your content across multiple channels. In doing this strategy, you have to make sure that your content is appropriate to the platform you are using. You have to understand that what is a great content in Facebook may not necessarily elicit the same response on Twitter. You have to make sure that while you are targeting more audiences across social media platforms, you are also sharing the right content.

7. Utilize Hashtags properly

Hashtags has been used to reach a broader audience who are looking for that tag or keyword. This is also a way to make your post appear on trending topics. Just as important as using Hashtags is not overusing it. Limit your Hashtags to a number that is needed to include relevant keywords. You can check the Hashtags used by competitors to see what tags are working for them.

8. Ask Questions and Host Contest

Get more participation on your page by getting people involved on answering questions and joining contests. This is not just to get followers engaged but also it lets you hear their opinions on your business. This allows you to establish a meaningful connection with them. Knowing how to host a social media contest is an exciting way to get more followers by having them share it with their friends.

9. Check and Monitor

Make sure that you have set a way to monitor your social media channels. There are varied tools and software that you can download and use. You have to monitor what contents are appealing to your followers so that you will know what kind of content to focus on in the future. This also includes making sure to respond to comments, messages and questions. It would also help to have regular reports of how many followers you have gained to check if this actually resulted to better sales.

10. There is No Single Rule That Applies to All

With the constant change in social media and marketing itself, it’s important to understand that there is no single rule to follow. What works for one business will definitely not work to all other businesses. As a business, you have to figure out what is best for your own business and what sells to your customers. You need to keep in mind that you can’t work on social media marketing overnight. It’s a long term process so you need to discover what would work for you.

Now, you are equipped with the rules to successful social media marketing, you now need to know when to follow and when to bend the rules. If you want to make sure you are doing it right, a versed social media management team can surely help you.