Social media marketing is a vital ingredient for the success of any business! Do you know where to begin with your strategy?

Here a list of social media marketing experts and industry professionals.

Social Sharing Strategy

Get more of your website visitors to share your content—you can easily double the number of shares of the content on your website by implementing a good social sharing plugin. This makes sure your sharing is very visible to all users when they are browsing through your blog post, it works really well on mobile and it allows you to customize the images and text used for different social networks.  Pay more attention to how people share your content and you can easily double the shares.

Use an Awesome Visual Storytelling Tool

Find a tool that helps you create visual content that you can use to promote your core content on social media with visual storytelling. With so much content out there, it’s important to create visuals that catch attention and encourage your followers to take action.

There are a lot of visual content creation tools that offer:

  • professional quality templates for everything from social media images to posters, banners, ads, business cards and more.
  • awesome templates for visual storytelling with visuals such as infographics and Instagram story templates including multi-page Instagram story templates.
  • cool filters, text-effects, color palette matching and more!

Most of these tools are super easy to use and are very “drag-and-drop”.

Don’t Be Afraid to Pay for Social Advertising

Most people see social media as a pure organic play, but you can use it more and more frequently as a paid marketing channel.

All of the social media platforms have their strengths and weaknesses, but don’t be afraid of paying for social media reach and clicks. It’s often a good investment!

Make Video a Part of Your Content Strategy

If you’re using social advertising on Facebook, especially for a local or B2C market, make sure that video is part of your content strategy. In our experience, video ads get maximum engagement on Facebook and it is easy to create a video or moving image slideshow using Facebook’s own advertising tools.

Unified Social Inbox

Once your social media marketing starts to gain traction, managing your accounts is going to take up a significant portion of time. And that’s only amplified if you’re managing social accounts for clients. This means that it’s critical to save time wherever possible.

With a unified social inbox, you know exactly who you’ve replied to and who you need to reply to. But there’s one button within a social inbox that saves the most time – the ‘archive all’ button. This means you can go through the most recent messages/updates, hit the ‘select all’ button once at the bottom, then hit ‘archive all’.

Authenticity is Key

BE Authentic, don’t just ACT it. This might seem obvious… but authenticity is on the verge of becoming just another buzz word in the social/content marketing world. TRUE authenticity (not just using that word often in your tweets and posts) will set your brand (product or personal) apart in today’s highly competitive market. Followers/Advocates are attracted to REAL, and can sniff out fake in a heartbeat.

Focus on Relationships

The life of social media is people. People who laugh, cry, get mad, go crazy, get married, divorced, have kids, lose family members, win jobs, lose jobs, get promotions, win new clients, get new opportunities, have fun, play hard and work hard.

Offer value to the people in your community with a goal of building real relationships. Offer value and knowledge. Inspire your communities to connect with you with a foundational goal of achieving their objectives. It is all about them and not you.

Start with Strategy

All great things online start with strategizing offline. To start, ask yourself 3 questions in this order:

  1. Why am I in this business? It is important to start with this because we often forget the real answer. And hint, hint – money is never the real answer.
  2. Who is my product/service for? The answer to this should be as specific as possible. If you serve a variety of audiences, you need to make a profile for each. This profile should not only include demographical data like sex, age, and location, but also interests, hobbies, clothing brands, etc. This will allow you to clearly envision your ideal client(s), establish which social platforms to reach them on and curate content that they will respond best to.
  3. How does my product/service solve my ideal client’s problem? This is a two-part question as you must first establish the pain points your clients are experiencing. Then, you describe how your product or service resolves those pain points.

These 3 questions are the start to building a strategy, which will allow you to move onto goals, branding and lead generation via social media. Companies that don’t do this crucial offline work risk wasting time and money online.