Our social media marketing course equips you with the skills you need to help you use popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, and many more, as powerful marketing tools.

Using social media to grow your business and build a brand may seem like a daunting task, and in some ways it is. But there are steps you can follow to improve your chances of success, which will help you take advantage of everything social media has to offer.

Whether you’re just getting started or have been active for a while, but haven’t had much success, follow these social media marketing tips:

Interaction

This tip can be a game changer. Don’t be the company that shares links all day. The purpose of social media is to be social and engage with others. That means interacting on a regular basis.

You’ve probably seen the advice of engaging with your audience a million times, but what exactly does that mean?

  • Replying to other peoples’ posts even if it doesn’t mention you.
  • Retweeting.
  • Liking posts.
  • @mentions.

Essentially you want to switch from one-way communication to two-way. Two-way posts encourage conversation and communication.

Watch Your Competitors

Is one of your competitors doing really well on social media? Are they getting more engagement on their posts and Tweets? When this happens, you should start to analyse what they’re doing that you aren’t.

Have a look at:

  • The content they post.
  • Who they follow.
  • Who’s following them.
  • How often they post.
  • What time of the day they post.
  • What kind of headlines they use in their posts.
  • Their most popular posts.

This will give you an idea of what’s working for your competitors and why they might be seeing more social media success. Once you start to get a feel for your competitor’s strategies, you’ll want to incorporate some of what they do in to your own plan.

At the same time, you don’t want to completely copy a competitor.

For instance, if you notice a competitor posts a lot of images, then start creating more images of your own. Try posting at similar times of the day, or more frequently based on their activity.

However, your customers will want you to be unique and you should show that by adopting some things from competitors and looking for other ways to improve those strategies.

Give People a Reason to Follow You

Why should people follow your business? This is what you need to ask yourself.

You have to stand out from the thousands of other companies on social media. Create content specifically for your social media channels. For example:

  • Share behind the scenes content on Instagram.
  • Share discount codes exclusively with your Twitter followers.
  • Curate the best content in your industry on LinkedIn.
  • Offer real-time customer service and support on Twitter.

The content has to be exclusive to the social media channel. If you regularly share the same discount codes through on your website that you post on Twitter, there’s no value there.

Make coupons exclusively for social media.

See our social media marketing course