10 Social Media Marketing Rules to Follow
Using the power of social media marketing can help you connect with a broader audience and increase your customer base in a very powerful way. However, going into any marketing campaign without any previous experience can prove to be challenging to say the least. That is why we have put together a list of 10 social media marketing rules to follow to help you start off on the right foot. Following these social media marketing rules will help build a strong foundation that will not only serve your customer and brand but your bottom line as well.
1. Listen to your Audience
To be successful with social media marketing, it is important not only to put information out there for them to read but listen to what they want. Read what your target audience is posting online and join in on discussions to find out what is important to them. With the information you collect in mind, you will be able to create content that sparks conversations and brings value to your audience.
2. Focus on a Specialty
It is much better to specialize in one thing than to dabble in a bit of everything. A Highly focused social media campaign with the intention of building a strong brand will have more success than a broad strategy that attempts to reach everyone and everything.
3. Quality over Quantity
Quality should beat out quantity. It’s better to have a following of 1,000 people, who actually read, share, and talk about your content with their own followers than to have 15,000 people who will disappear after finding you the first time.
4. Be Patient
Success from Social Media Marketing does not happen overnight. It is possible that you can become a success overnight, but it is highly improbable. It is a far better idea to commit to the long haul and get real results.
5. The Power of Compounding
If you’re posting amazing and high-quality content to build the quality of your online audience, then it is highly likely that they will share it with their own audiences on Twitter, Facebook, their own blogs, and many more social media platforms.
The discussing and sharing of your content opens new entry points for search engines to find it in keyword searches. All of these entry points can grow to hundreds and even thousands of potential ways for people to find you online.
6. Online Influencers
Take time to find online influencers in your area of specialty who have quality audiences and are more likely to be interested in your products, services, and businesses. Try to connect with those people and build strong relationships with them.
If you get onto their radar as an authority and interesting source for useful information, they might consider sharing your content with their users and thus putting you and your business in front of an entirely new audience.
7. Add Value
If you only spend your time on social media directly promoting your products and services, people will look away. You need to add value to your conversation. Focus a bit less on conversions and move towards creating fantastic content and developing relationships with influencers. Over time, those influencers can be an amazing word-of-mouth marketing for your business.
8. Acknowledge your followers
Would you ignore someone who reaches out to you in person? The answer should be no. The same applies online. Building relationships is one of the most important components of social media marketing success; Therefore, always acknowledge every person who reaches out to you.
9. Be Accessible
Don’t just publish your content and then disappear. Be available to your followers. This means you need to consistently publish content and participate in conversations. Online followers can be fickle and will not hesitate to replace you if you disappear for weeks or longer.
10. Reciprocate
You shouldn’t expect others to talk about you and share your content if you don’t plan on doing the same for them. For that reason, a portion of your time spent on social media should be dedicated to sharing and talking about content by others.
Following these 10 simple social media marketing rules will help you reach out to a larger audience and improve your authority as a business.