Social Media is a key ingredient to a successful marketing platform. It gives you the power to engage with your customers and following, while simultaneously promoting your brand to generate leads and revenue. It’s very difficult to come across a profitable business that isn’t utilizing social media. To begin, let’s break down the concept into its two categories, social and media.
Social
Socializing is one of the most important aspects to business and marketing. Before technology, the only way a business could grow is by the owners or employees physically going out to market the company, expand their network, and hope that the people they met utilize, or at least spread the word about their services. If a business is not social, how will anyone ever know about it?
Media
Media has always been a great tool for businesses to promote themselves. Circling back around to before the internet, businesses would try to get in the newspapers, pay for billboards, and post tangible flyers. The businesses that were able to successfully execute, 9 out of 10 times were successful themselves. Just before the internet, bands like The Grateful Dead would send out handwritten letter chains to promote their shows and records.
Social Media Today
Although old school social marketing and media techniques still strongly apply today, the internet has birthed social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. These social media programs allow businesses to bring all of these old school efforts into one place. On top of that, to establish a page on any of these programs is free, although you can still pay to boost your posts to have a higher level of impressions.
Modern Technique
Setting up a social media page is great, but that isn’t going to make you successful overnight. You need to consistently post quality content in order to build your following, engagements, and reputation. Many people will automatically reconsider your business if you don’t have a strong following.
You also need to set up more than one social media platform. Facebook is the holy grail of social media, so this would be an important page to set-up first. Instagram and Twitter are also really successful social tools. They are similar to facebook, but add their own twist. Although there are other social media programs like LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Snapchat, you can create an alignment between your Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter which will ultimately turn all three platforms into a powerful singular social marketing unit. If you wish, Instagram even allows you to share your posts directly to Facebook and Twitter at the same time.
Creating a social media alignment is only one aspect to a successful social media marketing strategy. You need to make sure that you practice proper hash tagging and tagging. Hash tagging will put your content into social categories, while tagging will allow you to directly shout out and engage within your network. Creating a hashtag for your business, and tagging itself in posts, will only add quality to your efforts.
One final piece to the puzzle is your social strategy. In order to bring everything together, your business must post consistent and balanced quality content. The only way to grow your following and generate revenue funnels through your social media efforts is by constantly being in the social feeds with visually appealing content. There are even programs (social media bots) that you can set up to target particular markets, tags, and locations, so your social media platforms are engaged 24/7.
