A successful social media marketing strategy can solidify your branding, create quality leads, improve ROI, and drive sales. But if you’re not careful, it can also be a giant waste of time. 

The key? Knowing how to strategically use social media. Social channels represent a massive opportunity for your business, provided that you use them effectively. Facebook has 1.59 billion users every day as of June 2019, and the numbers continue to rise. Instagram is the second biggest channel, and there are now more than 500 million people using LinkedIn. 
So how do you stand out amongst the noise? Here are some tips to help you get more out of your social media marketing:

Work on a Strategy

There’s no question that social media marketing can take up a large amount of your team’s time. But without a dedicated strategy, you’re likely to find that your social media efforts get little traction. 

That’s why it’s so important to create a social media marketing strategy. This will allow you to choose the best social media channels for your target audience, and create the types of content that will get you the engagement you’re looking for.

Be Consistent

You won’t see results from your social media marketing overnight. In fact, it can take a while to see results, but when you do, they’ll come from consistently posting to the social media channels you’re using, engaging with followers online, and speaking directly to your target audience. 

One way to ensure consistency is to write your social media posts in advance and then schedule them to post automatically throughout the month. Of course, you should still check in regularly to engage, retweet, and comment, but ‘batching’ your social media posts will help you save time while ensuring you’re constantly posting new content.

Remove Sales Talk

There’s a reason why traditional marketing is now failing. People don’t want to be sold to. This is especially true on social media. The best way to build relationships with potential customers and clients online is to establish real connections so you can earn their trust organically. Once they trust you, they’re much more likely to not just purchase your product once, but to also become a loyal customer.

Use Video Content

Did you know that by 2021, 82% of all internet consumer traffic will be from video content? That’s why now is a good time to jump on the video bandwagon and look at how you can implement video in your social media marketing strategy. 

These videos can range from product tutorials to testimonials, live Q&A sessions, to quick ads. Just make sure they’re engaging and ensure that the first few seconds will snag your audience’s attention.

Analyze Your Results

44% of businesses are unable to measure the return on investment of their social media marketing efforts. If you’re not accurately tracking and analyzing your efforts, you’ll have no way of knowing whether your overall social media strategy is working, and you’ll also find it difficult to know which tweaks, changes, and new ideas are having an impact.

The good news is that this tracking can be largely automated. First, you need to identify the metrics that are most important to your business. For example, if you’re looking for engagement and brand awareness, you may want to measure impressions, interactions, likes, and retweets. If you’re hoping for actual conversions, it makes more sense to measure your click-through-rates. 

Each week, note down your metrics. When making changes, make sure that you’re only changing one thing at a time, so you can see if it has an impact before trying something new.

Turn to the Professionals

Many business owners would prefer to focus on their customers, even though they know the importance of social media marketing. That’s why it can be a good idea to talk to a full-service marketing company who can take your social media (and many other marketing activities) off of your hands. 

If you’d like to learn more, get in touch with the friendly experts at VIP today.