5 Social Media Marketing Tips for Beginners

If you are new to social media marketing, you might be feeling a bit overwhelmed with so many tools and platforms to choose from. If you could use some assistance, here are five social media marketing tips that can help you succeed.

Here are the social media marketing tips for beginners

1. Set SMART Social Media Goals

Everyone knows that setting goals is very important for business success. However, you may have given little thought to creating goals for your social media marketing campaign. First, you need to answer the following question: 

What are you hoping to achieve with social media?

Without goals to work toward, it will be hard to know exactly how well your social media marketing strategy is doing. Your social media goals should be aligned with your overall business objectives and used as defined metrics to measure your progress.

SMART stands for:-

• Specific – Set specific goals and you know how to start
• Measurable – Way to track and evaluate the progress
• Attainable – Make sure you can achieve the goal within your scope   
• Relevant – Ensure the goals align with the long-term objectives
• Time-based – Set a realistic and reasonable timeline to achieve your goals

It is important to set your SMART goals before any other plan because you will have the clear direction to make things happen. 

2. Don’t Spread Yourself Too Thin

This is very important especially if your budget is limited. You should focus on the social media strategy first so it will generate the best return for your efforts. It is pointless spending your time on a particular social network if your audience is not there. Nor should you attempt to be everywhere at once.

What questions you should ask before choosing a platform?

Keep in mind that every platform you engage with means additional effort and time necessary to create content tailored for each platform. Answer the following questions will help you choose a suitable platform.

• Will this platform help me achieve my social media marketing goals?
• Is my target audience active on this platform?
• Will this platform match the content I create?

Note: Analyze what is working for your competitor. Your competitors and industry peers are extremely valuable sources of insight. Look at where your competition is posting and what kind of content they are creating. Assess which content is performing well by looking at the number of likes, social shares, comments, etc. Brainstorm on how you can take a piece of successful content a competitor has created and put your own unique twist on it.

3. Get to Know Your Audience 

You need to have an in-depth understanding of your target audience, including the following:

• Where does your audience like to hang out online? 
• What kind of content is most relevant to them? 
• What sort of information are they looking for? 
• How do they like to consume that information? 

Once you really know your audience, you can begin to create content that is relevant to them in order to build meaningful relationships with them over time. 

Note: Having an audience persona is crucial to constructing your social media strategy and truly understanding who exactly you’re aiming to reach. There are few techniques to get the information of your audience like conducting interviews, using business data (like an eCommerce platform), research your competitor websites and etc. You should gather the data and analyze it to understand your audience.

4. Create a Social Media Style Guide 

It is important to present a consistent communication style across all social media platforms that you use. Whether you are working solo or have a team of assistants posting to your social media accounts, you need a style guide that lays out exactly how your posts should read and look. Your style guide should define the following:

• The desired tone and voice of your brand’s social media presence.
• The preferred writing style for your posts — consistent formatting, spelling, etc.
• The fonts, colors, logos that will be used. 
• How emojis and hashtags should be utilized.

Note: Add at least an image to every post. As a marketing professional, you have undoubtedly been told this before, but it is worth repeating: images matter and matter a lot! If you want to be successful on social media today, you absolutely have to be sharing visual content. To create a strong visual identity and aid brand recognition, maintain consistency across all of your images by sticking to the same fonts, colors and layouts.

5. Adhere to a Regular Posting Schedule 

Social media marketing represents an ongoing commitment. You need to post consistently to stay in front of your audience’s eyes and to keep your audience growing. The more your audience hears from you, the more trust you willl be building. 

Create a content calendar for your social media postings. Also, set aside one day per month to map out upcoming events, holidays, etc. that you would like to post about.

If you search for the best posting times, you will discover many guides online. These recommendations make a good starting point, but you should also run your own tests to see which days and times work best for your own particular audience. Of course, you can know the most active time of your audience through the business studio of the social media platform after some time.

Final Thought: Don’t Just Do Social, Be Social

Finally, you are probably aware of people who only send you tweets when they want something – their sole purpose is to have you read, comment on, and/or re-tweet their content. It’s not a good idea to be like that – you will gain a reputation for being interested only when you want something. Your focus should be on building online relationships. After all, you can’t expect people to care about your community if you don’t care about theirs.

Before posting something, stop and ask yourself if it would pass the re-share test? Answer the following questions from a prospective visitor to your social media site:

• Why would I want to click on this information? 
• Why would I want to share it with my friends/family? 
• Before someone shares a piece of content, they evaluate its social currency. Therefore, you need to create content that your audience will want to share because they believe it will be of value or interest to others.

If you are just putting your toe into the social media waters, there can be a steep learning curve at the beginning. However, remember: Every expert was once a beginner.

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