10 Ways To Leverage Your Social Media Marketing Efforts
Thousands of companies have jumped aboard the social media movement by creating profiles, such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, with the objective of achieving particular goals including ongoing customer engagement, brand awareness, driving more traffic to their website and/or as a way of learning more about what consumers want and need from their products and services. Social media profiles, when integrated into a social media marketing (SMM) strategy, require time, commitment and dedication to work effectively and achieve your SMM goals.
An often overlooked area when setting up and managing social media profiles are the many ways in which you can leverage your efforts across your other SMM channels and traditional promotional materials. The options are endless, but hopefully the following tips will assist you in getting started with leveraging your SMM efforts.
- Include your Social Media icons/addresses in all your promotional materials from business cards, billboards, calendars, email signatures and online press releases, to traditional newspaper/magazine and radio advertising.
- Spend the money getting your website/brand design and aesthetic integrated into your social media profiles (e.g. your Twitter background or a custom landing page on your Facebook page). Your website designer/developer can assist you with this.
- Be consistent with your branding across all of your SMM channels and promotional materials. Retaining a consistent brand theme/message will allow for instant consumer recognition with those already familiar with your brand and help build awareness for those new to your brand.
- Add social sharing icons to your website and blog – www.addthis.com has a huge selection of sharing icons to choose from. Social sharing allows for your content to reach an even wider audience.
- There are many cross platform promotion tools such as Hootsuite and TweetDeck which you can use to manage and publish updates across all of your social media profiles at once. When it comes to using pre-scheduled and automated updates however it is important to use these cautiously. Having a constant stream of automated updates from your Facebook page to your Twitter profile can make it seem like there isn’t a ‘real’ person behind the scenes. We recommend using these sparingly, and instead use mostly personalised updates if you want to foster reciprocal communication/engagement with your social media audience.
- Ask you developer to add your Facebook and/or Twitter news feeds to your website. This can encourage visitors to your website to follow conversions, events and competitions for example that are happening on your profiles.
- Update your frequently asked questions (FAQ) section on your website to include commonly asked questions made via your social media channels - i.e. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Then when someone visits this page on your website, you can be sure that you have covered many of the popular questions asked regarding your product/service. Likewise, these questions may make excellent blog posts, articles and news items for your website.
- Join already established SMM groups with a steady following to build relationships and participate in conversions with others in your industry.
- Remember, ‘word of mouth’ isn’t just an offline form of communication. It exists online too and has the ability to reach a lot of people with one simply update/tweet. Keep on top of questions posted to your profiles – always answering in a timely manner. Likewise, look for referral opportunities, even if not directly related to your business – help people on Twitter with their questions, suggest helpful websites on Facebook and so on.
- Measure you SMM efforts with a free tool such as Google Analytics and find out how many visitors each of your respective SMM channels are generating to your website, amongst a wealth of other useful information.
Unfortunately, many business social media profiles are set up quickly and without much, if any, consideration of objectives and goals from the outset. What is worse, is when profiles are setup and left with no or limited activity – not a good look for when interested consumers do find your profile!
If you are just starting out, I recommend you focus on doing well with one or two social media channels first, and then include more (if necessary) once you get the first one up and running, while leveraging your SMM efforts at the same time.
If, on the other hand, you are completely new to the social media marketplace, but know (or have been told) that your business should be involved (especially if your competitors already are) then contact us today to discuss a social media strategy that can be catered specifically to your company’s objectives and online marketing goals. If you are uncertain about social media and its benefits, then read this post – it addresses common social media fears that many businesses have and how you can overcome them.
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Posted on:
28th Nov 11 by Jessica Murray
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