As we all know, Social Media Marketing has grown exponentially in the past few years. These days you can reach your entire audience (or most of it) through your social media channels. So what does this mean for businesses and sole proprietors? It means your marketing efforts will now need to include social media, or you will be losing out on TONS of exposure.
A lot of you are already in the social media marketing game, and kudos because youre steps ahead of a good number of businesses already! Go ahead, give yourself a pat on the back, I’ll wait…..
Great, now that we’ve all complimented ourselves I’ve got a little bit of bad news, the majority of you are doing your Social Media Marketing WRONG! *Gasp* I can hear you asking now, “But I post to my social channels, what else is there?” Well, the answer is in the question – By Being Social.
Be Real Not a Robot
Have you ever called some sort of customer service line and gotten an automated response? It can get pretty annoying right, trying to push the right numbers or say the correct words just so you can get to the part of the pre-recorded message you ACTUALLY want/need to hear.
Well, that’s a very similar feeling you will give off to your audience if you are not present behind your social media channels.
People are getting a lot smarter with brands online these days. We have all become accustomed to dodging ads and expecting to be “sold to.” So when your audience starts seeing that comments and questions are going unanswered they will start noticing pretty quickly that there isn’t anyone actually there.
Once you give off the “Pre-recorded message” feeling, you will experience a drop in engagement all together. Most people will even go so far as to unlinke you and complain about you to other brands and people.
In the world of social media a couple unsatisfied customers can easily snowball into a couple hundred. Once people start telling their friends about a robot-like company, they tell their friends and their friends and so on and so on. You might even end up with some crappy vine circling the internet because of it!
That last part might be a bit of a stretch, but I have seen bad reputation snowball rapidly on social media.
Get Social on Your Social Media
When your audience gets their questions answered, pictures commented on, links shared etc. they will really feel like you are attentive and there for them. Nothing works better at building relationships than showing people you are there for them.
You’d be surprised how many social channels I’ve come across with questions that go unanswered, complaints that go un-assisted and it simply sickens me. I mean there is absolutely no reason any business should ignore their customers like that.
Perhaps they tried contacting them in a slightly more private way, but they should have mentioned something in the public area of the complaint or question. Not doing so makes your business look cheap and a bit on the sketchy side.
Would you want to do business with anyone you couldn’t talk to? Or at least have a question answered? Yea, me either. So what does all this mean for your business? It means if you stay active in your social channels you will out-play a lot of these companies that may be your direct competitors.
Your audience will love you when they see they can reach you easily, and you’ll become your niche’s superstar of social media.
But how do you get all these audience memeber?
Get on the Ad Train
Even if you are the most social person in your niche, you answer every question, participate in every discussion and have great content all across your platforms, that still doesn’t mean you will get the highest exposure possible.
Facebook especially has been quietly changing their algorithm for a couple years now. And this means that organic reach has dropped pretty drastically. The only way to pick your exposure backup is to utilize their ads. Now before you start freaking out thinking you’ve got to drop hundreds of dollars on an ad budget to accomplish anything, take a deep breath.
You do not have to spend an arm and a leg to get the kind of exposure you want from Facebook. We at Flying Man Productions have pretty easily managed just about 2,000 likes with a very minimum budget in a very short amount of time. How did we do that?
It’s all about targeting. You can set your target ads to your specific needs, all the way down to country and gender if you wanted. This can make your ads get tens of thousands of eyes on it for just a few dollars per ad. Set a budget in the Ads Manager that you feel comfortable with and tweak your settings until you’ve got it just right.
You’ve got your audience, you’ve got your ads, you’re starting to engage, but how do you not consume your entire day?
Become Smart Social Not an Insomniac
Just the thought of stay active across all the major social channels sounds like it’s a 24 hour a day job, and if not handled properly, it probably could be. But you don’t have hours upon hours each day to spend on social media while still growing your business do you, I didn’t think so.
What do you do? Well, a couple things….
First you need to figure out what are the most optimum times for you to be on your channels. By that I mean, figure out when your audience is online the most. This way you aren’t wasting time online when your target audience isn’t.
If you don’t already know, Facebook has what’s called ‘Insights’ and inside these insights you can see when your audience is most active. Aim to be around these times of the day so you can post and engage with everyone.
Typically the best times are late afternoon,around 2-5 and again in the evening usually around 6-8, but this can and will vary depending on your market. So do your due diligence and find out when YOUR market is online.
I personally use things like Tweriod and Facebook Insights to determine our best times to be on our social channels at Flying Man. Once you’ve found your perfect times, you can easily set aside an hour or 2 each day to get on and get personal. This will leave the rest of your day wide open to do whatever else you need to.
This all sounds great, but how are you going to deal with all your posts and content?
The Social Tools That Help You Save time
I know that the majority of this post was about being active in your social media campaigns, but there are certain occasions when automation is perfectly fine.
If you tried to keep up with all the Tweets and Facebook posts manually, you wouldn’t have time to do anything else! So how do you combat the need for posts AND being social? Well, it’s pretty simple, you use some really helpful tools.
The first one is Buffer,
this web app lets you connect up to 4 social accounts on their free version. From the dashboard you can schedule posts to go out at certain times, on certain days and even schedule certain posts to repeat, or be “buffered” those days and times.
If you have multiple accounts you need to manage you can upgrade and have even more accounts connected, but for most of you, the free version will be more than enough starting out. There is a Chrome extension you can download as well that makes sharing and scheduling a breeze.
This 2nd tool is one of my personal favorites, HootSuite
HootSuite is like Buffer on steroids. It’s dashboard allows you to not only schedule posts across multiple social channels, but it also allows you to monitor each channel in real-time.
Basically from the HootSuite dashboard, you can monitor, reply, post and schedule everything you need across all of your social media channels. Like Buffer, there is also an extension you can use to make your scheduling and sharing as easy as highlighting text, right clicking and selecting your HootSuite logo, then scheduling your content.
The last tool that I highly recommend is Swayy
Swayy is a content curation tool that helps you fill in those gaps between writing amazing content and still keeping your audience engaged and interested. You can connect your accounts and start browsing through what is trending, what is popular based on your feeds and what categories you choose.
Content curation is really important in social media marketing (as I said before) for saving you time. Swayy allows you to easily curate and share content all from the dashboard.
And one of the greatest aspects of Swayy, is it let’s you track your progress with every link you share. In all forms of online marketing one of our greatest tools as marketers is the analytics data.
And graphs to layout even more data
You should never overdo your automation, this will give your social presence a very robot-like feel to it. And as we’ve discussed, you really want to keep the SOCIAL in there, the REAL person behind it all.
The truth of the matter is it takes a lot to keep up on your channels if you don’t employ the help of at least a couple tools. It’ll be easy enough to schedule your posts to come out through the day, and then you can easily spend some time engaging with your audience worry-free.