Do you have a social media presence to help market your business? If you do, are you using those platforms in an ad hoc manner, or are you pursuing a comprehensive strategy whose component parts work seamlessly together? Sure, you can find at least some success using a haphazard social media marketing approach, but wouldn’t you rather find even greater success by implementing a more cohesive strategy? Below, we’ll outline some of the more important elements of such an approach.
Regularity
The first, biggest thing you absolutely need to do when you’re putting together a comprehensive strategy is to make it a point to post content with regularity. Your social media platforms are of absolutely no use to you unless you use them. Think about the social media pages you visit. How many times would you return to that page if there was nothing new to see? Twice? Maybe three times, tops? After that, if the page isn’t updated, there’s just not much incentive for you to keep coming back.
Your customers are generally the same way. Simply building the pages and establishing the presence isn’t enough. Once you build it, you’ve got to stock it with fresh content, updated regularly. You should even go so far as to establish a schedule for posting new content so that your readers and fans never want for new things to see on your social media properties.
The Importance of Hashtags
If you’re not sure what a hashtag is, here’s a quick primer. Hashtags are a Twitter invention. They’re used to “group” Tweets by topic. Some hashtags, depending on their popularity, can have literally millions of eyes on them. You can capitalize on popular, trending hashtags by referencing them in or on your other social media properties, which is an incredibly easy method of getting lots of new eyeballs on your social media properties.
Moderation is important here. If you overuse hashtags you come across as being overly promotional. You don’t want your social media properties to be seen as a promotional dumping ground. Instead, you want to mix those hashtags with real, compelling content.
Too Much Of A Good Thing Turns Bad
Some people think that if they have multiple Facebook or other social media pages, they can expand their reach. This is manifestly NOT the case. Focus is important here. If you try to build and support multiple pages, all you’re going to do is dilute your efforts. Build one page on each of the social media outlets you plan to make use of and make it a truly outstanding page.
Don’t Follow Excessively
One common mistake that many people make is that they’ll use their business page to “follow” mass thousands of people, on the thinking that if they follow someone, that person will follow them in return. This is generally a poor strategy as the approach has been wildly overused. If you do it, it’s likely that you’ll wind up being seen as a spam-bot, rather than a legitimate business. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot.
