Complete Guide to Social Media Marketing

Do you have what it takes for your business to make its presence felt online?

If not, perhaps its time you considered Social Media Optimization to nurture and develop your business towards consistent profit! 

Social Media Optimization is the process of developing customized content, distinctive to each individual social media platform that encourages user interaction and sharing. To your organisation, this means brand awareness, strong online presence, and increased ROI despite a minimal investment of time & efforts! 

Within a decade of being granted public access, the Internet managed to gather 1 billion users.
Ever since Facebook started in 2006, it has earned a record user base of 2.41 billion in the second quarter of 2019. And this is just one social media account. 

 

Image Source: Unsplash @morningbrew

We have the tendency to repeatedly check our mobiles. Isn’t it? We’re always looking for something fresh, something that excites us, something worth sharing. In fact, this has lead to a collective social obsession by the name of ‘nomophobia’ or the fear of being away from mobile phones! Many brands like you, have in fact tied-up with a  360° media company or professional SMO service provider to take care of their marketing campaigns online. With their high-quality knowledge and experience by your side, you can leverage your online presence and grow your business 10X than normal.  If these facts don’t convince you, what will?!

This blog acts as a guide to optimize your content in the most popular social media platforms.
SMO is really simple to understand. 

One needs to implement changes in order to optimize their online content so that it gains more relevance & familiarity, influential sites find it easier to access, thereby increasing visibility and ranking on search engines’ pages.

The ‘Marketing guru’ Rohit Bhargava has given 5 golden rules for an efficient SMO:

Be a Treasure trove of Resources

If you’re creating content for your website, blogs, articles, PR, vlogs, or anything that is descriptive in nature, make sure that it is informative and easy to understand. 

Simple language, point-wise elaboration with well structured interactive material is key to great content. The motive here is to educate and provide value to the customer. 

Do not lose your heart if your web traffic is low at the moment. Remember, good things take time. If you have invested time and effort to come up with a genuine, educational content - the audience is sure to appreciate it! It's just a matter of time before your backlinks and internal links work their magic. Your social site and tag will be deemed useful and you will gain more relevance & high ranking in the SERPs!

Content is King; Context is God

This is the golden guidance given by Gary Vaynerchuk, a renowned TED speaker and entrepreneur. It is imperative to stick to the ground details of your content. The content needs to be engaging and interactive. Always keep in mind the target audience, the content marketing funnel and what are the unique features and values that you can offer through your written piece.
 For instance, if you are working on an article for the TOFU (top of the funnel) customers, ensure that you provide maximum information and spread awareness regarding your topic.  Your target audience is visitors who are novices to the field or concept. Your content cannot sound like a professional-level conversation or force them into decision-making. It should equally be noted that you cannot stray from the topic. E.g. If you started writing a blog about ‘Introduction to SEO’, then it should cover all the important basics. You cannot divert the blog midway to talk about 10 best SEO tools. It is detrimental both to your organisation and audience.

Encourage Content Shareability

Your content looks great, interacts effortlessly and is sure to be a hit with the audience. Hey, wait… Where to find them? 

Easy. Let them find you! 

Facilitate ‘Share’ buttons of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Get Social, Shareaholic, Buffer, etc.
Include links from influential bloggers, marketers and entrepreneurs that sync with your content topic for reference.

Don’t forget to Internal links to relevant sections of your related content and website sections.
These are helpful tips to increase your visibility and shareability.

Let there be Innovation!

Original content is always a huge success and goes a long way. This is a proven case. But one has to invest a lot of time - do so some out-of-the-box thinking, research extensively across every form of content, align the concepts with the target audience. Whether it be about helpful tips, comparison, infographics or a whole new concept, it is wise to keep it original and plagiarism-free. This also helps you widen your consumer-base, increase your search rankings and establish your authenticity.  

Analytics to the Rescue!

Tools like Google Analytics, AgoraPulse, Hootsuite, Social bakers allow a marketer to channelize website traffic from social platforms through their campaigns. Analytics help you assess:

Content Applause & Amplification: How many times are your posts being shared and retweeted? How many likes have you got for each post?

Session Time: For how long do your viewers and customers stay and explore your website?

Navigation: Did viewers simply browse through your blog, social media post, landing page or did they go through other sections of your website?

Conversion Rate and Economy: The amount of queries and replies that you get for your social media content is directly proportional to your conversion rate. This, in turn, generates maximum Online Return of Investment (ROI).

So you see, analytics shows you the big picture of the impact your SMO strategy is having online and on your business. A robust and systematic social media analysis tool provides vital information, that ensures you are right on track and can help you improvise further on your SMO processes.

 

Bridge of Communication

It is when two hands come together, a clap is heard!

Be participative! Social media is a two-way street according to Cameron Olthuis. Join discussion forums, actively debate, post comments, congratulate on launches and achievements, share content, anything that keeps your social buzz going. Try to be as relevant and correlative as possible. 

Hashtags are a great way to track what’s hot in your field of business and the market. Not only are they entertaining but they also help you categorize your social media posts.
Create awareness. Get noticed. Gather your target audience effortlessly!  

A Good profile is your Trust Bank

Optimizing your profile is as much important as the above-mentioned steps. It is better to use your Company Name as the Username and your Company Logo as the Profile picture in order to avoid confusion. In the case of a Cover photo, it is wise to showcase images that depict the activities and features of your organisation. A brief Bio of not more than 75-150 words which describes who are you as an organisation,  why do you exist in the market, what unique features do you have to offer your customers and so on.