Social media marketing is still a buzz word to many, but it is a medium that can be used to close the gap between businesses and their customers. Social media has also levelled the marketing field between small businesses and bigger companies. Anyone can use social media in their digital marketing campaign. With social media your marketing message can be shared easily on the social web, and long-lasting relationships can be built with your current and future prospects. Social media is also an excellent way to increase your online reputation.
Even though everyone is talking about what you can achieve with social media including all the benefits surrounding this medium, it is really not as easy as it sounds. If you want to engage with your targeted audience on a daily basis and keep it interesting and fresh, there is a chance that at some stage you will get stuck with your campaign. There’s nothing worse on the social web than spam or all your social media profiles posting the same boring message all the time.
How do you make sure you don’t get stuck with your social media campaign and help keep your content fresh and clean? Here’s a couple of tips that can help you with this.
Interesting content
There are millions of business blogs around the web that are updated on daily basis not including all the news and personal blogs. The web is full of content and readers have a wide choice on what they want to read. Always make sure that you can provide your readers and target audience with interesting and relevant content that is valuable so that they know a visit to your website or profile is really worth their time.
Keywords
Use your web analytics and check how your readers arrived to your website and blog. Look especially at which keywords and long tail keywords were used on the search engines to get to your blog. Most of the social media channels such as Facebook also provides analytics so that you can analyze which of your topics sparked up a conversation on your fan page.
By analyzing and understanding what people are discussing about your website, and which keywords were used to bring them to you, you can tailor your content around them.
Keep your profile and content relevant
Getting stuck with social media marketing can happen, so one of the best ways to overcome this is to keep your campaign relevant and stay ahead of all the news and trends related to your industry. This is easier than you think. You can set up a few alerts on Google alerts for keywords related to your industry and each day you can be notified of all the articles containing those keywords. This can be emailed directly to you without you having to search the web for new ideas.
Social media means being social
It is an absolute must that if you are running a social media marketing campaign that you must be active on the social media channels that you are using in your strategy. In plain English: be social and stay involved in the network you are creating. There is really no point of coming up with exciting slogans, offers, logos, videos or images to share via the social web if you are neglecting to being involved with the campaign personally.
People on social media channels are real people that can easily see through an automated response. When this usually happens you will find that you are losing followers, and your reputation can suffer from this.
Keep on learning
Social media is still very new and you will see that you campaign will change quite often. With Web 2.0, there’s always the next big thing and “buzz”. Google Buzz and MySpace are old news, Pinterest and Instagram are the new social media channels, but who knows which channels will take the lead next year?
With your campaign you should always keep on learning and see what other people are doing and how can integrate that into your own campaign. Also look at how your own campaign is doing and drop the stuff that isn’t bringing any value to your brand. With your social media campaign the most important part is getting results.
Hi Anton,
in my experience we usually get stuck in something when it used to work successfully but then stopped working, abpruptly or incrementally. We might be in love with a certain method or channel and don’t even notice the danger signs anymore. Then we might make a change or even try harder like increasing the posting frequency of a marketing message noboby wants to hear anymore – which increases the problem actually.
With that being said, I like how you point out the benefits of social media marketing, such as that marketing has become a levelled playing field now. I also apreciate that you made clear that it is not as easy as it sounds.
From the pieces of advice you give, the necessity of being social in an authentic way and interacting with people, getting involved in the discussion seems to be the most important one to me but probably also the most difficult one for companies that used to just broadcast their pitches but also for individuals who are trained the same way, as employees, former employees or consumers.
Thanks for sharing your insights.
Take care and have a terrific weekend ahead
Oliver
Thanks Oliver. You are 100% correct. Your SMM campaign and strategy should never be set in stone. If something arises or it doesn’t work, change course.