In this article, you will learn about the beginner’s guide to social media marketing.
To start off, let us first check the definition of social media marketing.
What is social media marketing?
Social media marketing is the means of using social media platforms for the purpose of creating awareness about your brand, products, or services.
The main goal of social media marketing is to drive, either organic or paid traffic to your website, blog, or online store; where the proposed customer you find there will get access to purchase your products or services.
Depending on how many followers you have on your social media platforms, you can really harness the power of social media marketing.
The most popular social media platforms best for social media marketing are Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, and Tumblr.
Social media marketing tips for beginners.
Below are the social media marketing tips for beginners:
- Understand the right social media platforms to use.
- Optimize your profiles on social media platforms.
- Connect your social media platforms to your blog or website.
- Add social media share buttons on your website.
- Join groups and forums that target your niche.
- Only publish and share contents that are interesting and relevant.
- Be consistent in posting, but mind some rules.
- Follow influencers in your niche.
- Also follow ordinary people.
- Exercise patience.
1. Understand the right social media platforms to use.
The key does not lie in joining all the social platforms available, but in joining the right ones you will understand and use them to your own advantage.
The algorithm is the brain box of every social media platform, but the problem is that they don’t all work the same way.
So the simple trick to know which social media platform is the best is to study those who are ahead in your niche and check the social platforms where they are getting more success based on how many followers they have in their accounts and engagements on their posts.
Once you know the right social platform for your business, you won’t find it hard to become successful in social media marketing.
2. Optimize your profiles on social media platforms.
After discovering and settling for the right social media platform that will be good for your business, the next step you have to take is to optimize your profiles on those platforms.
When you optimize your profiles, you make it easy for people to learn about you once they find your account; and the result is an increase in your followership
You can read this article and discover How To Get More Followers On Social Media.
3. Connect your social media platforms to your blog or website.
After optimizing your social media profiles the next thing you have to do is connect them to your websites.
There are several ways to do so, but the easiest is using a plugin that will provide you with a widget area that’s optimized for connecting social media.
Make sure you connect it in the widget area that will enable it to be visible on all the posts and pages.
4. Add social media share buttons on your website.
On the last point above, you only connected your website to your social media accounts, and now is the time to add a social media button that will help both you and your fans to share your content directly on social media.
If you are using WordPress, it is a plugin that will enable you to do this.
After each post, you can put a call-to-order for your fans to share your article on their social media platforms if they find it helpful and interesting.
5. Join groups and forums that target your niche.
Various groups and forums exist online, and what’s good about it is that they are all formed based on specific niches.
So go on Google and search for online groups and forums you can join that will enable you to present your business in front of the right audience.
6. Only publish and share contents that are interesting and relevant.
The foundation of having a successful social media marketing campaign is to publish contents that are going to captivate people on social media.
We keep saying that ‘content is king in the online community, and social media is not the less.
If the contents you share are useful and interesting they will be rewarded with shares or repost, and that means more and more people will be getting awareness of your business.
Below are some useful contents you can publish on social media.
- Articles and stories that are related to your niche; you can sometimes get them from other websites and not only depend on your own.
- Statistics that are interesting and related to your niche
- Motivational Quotes that are also related to your niche or otherwise.
- Research studies that will reveal things people do not know.
- Tutorials and images that show how interesting your business is.
- Memes, funny images, or videos that will keep your fans smiling and happy.
- Use hashtags to help make your posts reach people who do not follow your account. This will help you beat the algorithm.
7. Be consistent in posting, but mind some rules.
Consistency means you have to keep posting every now and then.
A common question often asked about posting on social media is “how many times should people post on social media”.
The answer however depends on the social media platforms.
Below is a little insight into how many times you should post on social media platforms:
- Your Facebook personal page – As often as you want
- Facebook business page – Not more than 1-2 times a day, and not more than 7 times per week.
- Twitter – More Tweets will give you more exposure.
- Pinterest – Few times a day is ok.
8. Follow influencers in your niche.
You should aim to follow as many social media influencers as possible. But be mindful of the fact that they will not follow you back because your account has very few followers.
Below are some of the benefits you will get from following social media influencers:
- Following people on social media who are in your same niche will help social media algorithms understand your account more.
- You will also have the opportunity of getting followed by those who are following the influencers.
- The influencers may also share important and useful information about your niche so that you have a chance to learn something new and utilize it for your business.
9. Also follow ordinary people.
The ordinary person you follow today might become an influencer tomorrow or connect you with potential customers or even do a big business transaction with you in the future.
But one rule to keep when following people is that you should keep a balance between the number of people you follow and the number of people who follow you back.
This is very important, especially on Twitter and Pinterest below are the reasons:
- Social media algorithms are using this ratio of followers/following to make suggestions on ‘who to follow. Therefore if you have a very high ratio you will definitely minimize your chances of getting new quality followers.
- You must be able to recognize trust, that is will someone with 1000 followers who follows 2500 or someone with 550 followers who follows 510 yield great results?
- Now that SEO for social profiles is building momentum, you need to feed into it; because it is more likely that people with strong social media profiles are in a better position than those with weak profiles.
10. Exercise patience.
After all said and done, the only thing that remains to do is to exercise patience because success in the online world can never happen overnight.
But with consistency, you are gradually going to move from zero level to the top.
This is your stepping stone to branding yourself and your business on social media platforms.
