Social Media Overview
What is Social Media Marketing all about?
Social Media Marketing is the use of platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube (to name but a few) for the purposes of promoting your business online to a growing and diverse audience.
Social Media is the term that refers to the engagement and interactions among people in virtual communities and networks. This online space allows us to create, share, and exchange information and ideas. This means that Social Media is essentially online word of mouth. The Social Sphere is the online public spot light, and is exactly where we want our business to be.
We want to have people talking about and sharing our content with others in the relevant online communities with the aim of driving them to our business, products and services.
Social Media Marketing is now an integral part of raising brand awareness and connecting your business with an essential and diverse client base. Both we and the industry as a whole see Social Media as an intrinsic part of successful online marketing strategies and the use of Social Media is already a substantial influence on Search Engines such as Google and Bing. This makes the practice of social and content marketing a vital cog within any Digital Marketing Campaign.
How do I get started with Social Media?
Used correctly the social sphere can greatly boost your online presence, enhance lead generation and add a whole new level of communication to your demographic.
Used incorrectly the viral and transparent nature of the social landscape can lead to less desirable results. Remember, this is your business in the spot light.
Let's get it right.
There are a number of things you will need to consider when getting started with your social media marketing. This includes;
Before we start shouting to the world about who we are, we need to have a clear understanding of our business ourselves. That not only includes the our branding and website design, marketing materials and so on, it means the way in which we interact online, deal with comments, reviews and complaints. Our sales voice, our authoratative voice and our the nature of our customer relations. It's all very important. So make sure you have this all figured out with your team first.
Not all social media platforms will be relevant for your business and as we all know time is valuable, so it's important to focus our attention in the areas that will benefit us the most.
It's important to make sure that your social media profiles are dressed for the occassion and full of useful information before presenting to the online community. After all, you wouldn't go to a business meeting in bin bag, or host an event in your onsie. Well you might... but you'd get some extremely funny looks. Correctly optimising your profiles on social media is as important as having a beautiful web design or factastic marketing materials.
No one wants to see reams of spammy sales posts. They will simply unfollow you and your content will not be seen. It is crucial to work out the types of content you will share on each platform. This is part of deciding your content marketing strategy. Understanding the type of content that works well on social media as well as having a benefit to your business and brand awareness. There are lots of different ways to engage your audience, with the ultimate goal being to drive traffic to your website or gain enquiries direct through social media.
We all know that time is valuable and social media often reaches the bottom of our list. Planning a social media schedule can help organise and become part of your daily rountine, dedicating as little as half an hour to posting your content, managing notifications, enquiries and comments and keeping an eye on social activity. Once you have your content pre-planned, the management of your social media becomes much easier.
Social Media is always changing so it's important to keep on top of relevant updates, new tools and features and trends online. Be sure to always keep an eye on what's new on various platforms to get the most out of social media. We will always keep you up to date with relevant news and information that might be useful for you in our digital marketing blog.
How can we help?
In our training department we host a range of useful resources to assist with each stage of your social media marketing and management. We aim to guide you through the process to help you make this work for you in the promotion of your website and business. Please feel free to check out some of the resources below or visit our blog resource area to have a browse around some of the materials. As well as creating resources designed to help you, we also harness the expertise of industry specialists as guest authors to assist in your promotional activities.
Launch your Web Rocket
Take advantage of our FREE Digital Marketing guide.Web Rocket covers every aspect of your Digital Marketing, from preparing your business and branding, to building your website, implementing SEO, and planning your content and social media strategy. We also look at Search Engine Marketing, website analytics, email marketing and much more. Track your progress with your very own Web Rocket Action List, download free templates and resources.
