Learn How to Become Social Media Marketing Guru
You need to have a thorough knowledge of social media marketing and how the marketing channel of your choice (your chosen social media platform) operates. However, you can gradually learn this as you start using social media. Tiktok has 1 billion users. When TikTok started a lot of people did not know how to make videos, they started using the platform and gradually learned how to use social media. Those people are influencers now. You can learn about social media gradually.
Becoming Social Media Guru
I went to an MBA class where I studied subjects like Finance, Accounting, Marketing, Investment, etc. I do a lot of works and one of them is digital marketing and social media marketing. In my marketing class, we were taught about digital marketing, however, we were never told how can we actually do digital marketing. I mean we were not taught how to advertise on Google search of Facebook, how to run ads on Tiktok, etc. Thus, I did not learn digital marketing by going to college, the marketing I learned in college was too much theoretical, without any use case. I learned marketing through the courses like these. I would like to add few more free resources. Search Engine Round Table is a platform that provides data on SEO and Digital Marketing. You can utilize the data on your own marketing campaign. Mailchimp Marketing Library is another useful free resource. THs is important especially if you do email marketing.
For a lot of people, social media marketing is all about creating a social page and start posting your content on social media. Those who have some understanding of social media go a little further and also include audience building with social media marketing. While these activities are certainly social media marketing, these are just the basics. These methods do not even scratch the meaning of social media marketing. Social marketing can be done through two methods, one organically, by building followers organically, and generating sales; and two, by spending money to run ads and reaching out to the target audience to generate sales. While the first method is a sustainable method, the second method will stop working the day you stop spending money on ads. However, the first method takes time to generate sales, the second method will start generating sales immediately. The right approach is to build the audience first.
Unless you are a big business and you have a separate team to handle your social media activities, it is not possible to use each and every social media platform. You will have to choose a few social platforms based on the demography and use that platform to maximize your promotion. I have a small business, I cannot use all of these 11 social platforms, I can not even use half of these social media channels, I could hire a virtual assistant to help me but I don't have the budget. Therefore, I have chosen a few social platforms. It is impossible to skip facebook because it has almost 3 billion active users. It is also impossible to skip Whatsapp because with over 1 billion users Whatsapp is evolving as the best communication tool for businesses. I also use Pinterest because it is one of the best content curation platforms.
How to Create Effective Social Media Campaign
If you want your social media marketing campaign to be effective, here are a couple of things you need to follow
Content creation and content sharing: You need to plan your content in advance. Creating a content calendar can help. If you plan content in advance, you can have a consistency in content sharing.
Analyzing performance: You will have to check insights and metrics to see what kind of content is performing better and what kind of content is not doing well. This will help you in future content planning.
Competitor analysis: Check what your competitors are doing. This will help you understand their strength and also weakness. You can copy their best strategy.
Content to evolve: Use various tools for content creation, content scheduling, etc. Continue to learn various platforms.
In order to become successful on social media, you need to be a good content creator as you can build followers only through interesting and useful content. IN order to build email list, you need to be a good marketer.
Hashtags for social media are like keywords for search engines. Search engines show the search results based on the keywords, whereas social media platforms organize content and make them discoverable based on the hashtags used. Hashtags are also used by social media platforms to rank content, push the content up and down in the algorithm, and recommend the content to users on their platform. Do you know how to find the best hashtags for your niche? Well, you need to use the hashtags suggested by the platform where you are sharing your content (Instagram in this case). Before you start using hashtags, you should know the proper use of hashtags and the hashtags you should use. Doing a competitor analysis and checking what hashtags they are using can be a great help. No matter where you are posting your content, hashtags should be always related to your content niche, do not use too many hashtags.
How to Attract Customers Through Social Media Marketing
Even though social media marketing is one of the most popular digital marketing methods, it is really difficult to attract customers through social media. When you are promoting on social media, you have to options to get the word out about your products to attract more customers, one, paid social, and two, organic post. Paid social means you promote your products through social media advertising, and organic post means you promote to your followers. The first option required advertising budget, and the second option is free. The first option works when you run ad campaign where as the second option works if you have a lot of followers.
Community Management in Social Media
Social media marketing works only when you have a lot of followers, therefore, small businesses need to build followers on social platforms. Success of your social media marketing will be largely determined by how you manage your social media community. In another words, how you interact with your followers will affect your social media success.
In order to manage your social media community, you will have to focus on 4 areas:
Build authority in your niche.
Connect with the customers in a human level, connect with the people who are interested in your industry. Use advertisements and content marketing to build audience on your pages.
Promote your content (product, services) and reach new audience. You should not only promote to your existing followers but also try to reach new followers. You can do that by using appropriate has tags, boosting and promoting your posts, etc.
Identify risk related to brand reputation in the early stage. If negative news related to your business is circulating around, try to address that correctly. If there negative reviews, respond to these reviews and always be polite.
How to Combine Free and Paid Methods For Social Media Marketing
You can market and promote on social media through free and paid methods. If you're thinking about promoting your business, products, or services on social media for free, you need to build followers on your social pages and then promote through your pages. If you are promoting through paid methods, you need to create ads and run ad campaigns, or partner with a social media influencer. No matter, what method you are using for promotion, there are some important steps to follow. Firstly, you need people to see your posts, so focus on building up your audience. This means sharing good content and running ads to attract attention.
You can become viral on social media when your content is shared multiple times by many people. Your content will be shared by a lot of people only when it is useful, interesting, entertaining, educational, and original. Basically you need to create content that people like to share. As long as your content is shareable, your content has the potential to go viral. When you publish on the topic that a lot of people want to read or watch, your content can also go viral.
Consistency is the key. Make sure your name and profile picture are consistent across all platforms to make it easier for people to find you. Consistency also means you share your content in a regular intervals, without over doing it. Additionally, when posting content, use high-quality images that are relevant and avoid using pictures with watermarks, or the pictures that don't belong to you. Lastly, don't overdo the self-promotion. Instead, mix it up with quizzes, contests, memes, and other engaging content to keep your audience entertained and interested.
You do not have to create a facebook page to create ad campaign, you can post something on your timeline and use boost feature to promote your post. Boost feature is also available for page. This is the easiest ways to run ad campaign on facebook. You can boost your post with daily budget, while small budget will allow you to reach fewer people higher budget will allow you to more people. You can also design ads and then run ad campaigns, or run video ads as well
How to Build Social Media Followers Without Spending Money?
The earliest followers on your social media pages are always your friends and family. If you reach out to your friends and family you can already have some followers on your social pages. You can then start building useful and interesting content, and encourage your friends and family to share your content, when your content gets shared, you will also be able to build followers because people like to follow content creators who create useful and interesting content. Boosting your posts, or advertising your page can also help you build followers. However, when you are boosting or advertising, make sure to target your post to the proper audience. proper audience means the people who are genuinely interested in the kind of content you are creating. Do not start buying followers, this is not a good method to build a following. When you buy followers, you either have fake followers or both followers.
People are so desperate to build followers that they either start buying followers or start using social exchange sites. Even celebrities are buying followers (a lot of celebrities have frequently admitted to buying followers). This is not a good way to build followers. Ther primary motive behind building followers is to build and audience, the idea behind building an audience is to have genuine people who will be interested in your products and services, When your followers are interested in your products and services, you will have a conversion on your social media posts. When there are conversions, you have sales, when there are sales, you are making profits. If you are in a bit hurry to build followers, a better strategy is to advertise your page on the social media, by doing so, the platform will place your page among the feed of potential followers and you will be able to build genuine followers.
You need a lot of followers to make most form your social media activities and building a lot of followers require spending money. Is there a way to get lots of followers on social media without spending money? Here is how it works:
Share short videos. They grab attention fast.
Run contests and give out rewards to your followers.
Post quizzes and polls to get people interacting
Share infographics with cool facts and figures.
Share funny memes.
In other words, post stuff that people find useful and interesting, as well as enjoy sharing. That's how you get followers without spending money.
How to Manage Your Social Media Pages
Social media marketing is important aspect of digital marketing. The one who manages to build a huge following and gets a lot of engagements will do well on social media. Here are a few tips you might find useful:
Get more followers by sharing stuff they're interested in and using ads to reach people outside your followers.
Don't overdo it with too much postings, but don't be too quiet either. The sweet spot is sharing once or twice a day when your followers are most active.
Talk to your followers! Interact with them, mention them in posts, or send them direct messages if needed. It keeps them interested and connected.
Does Free Social Media Marketing Really Work?
Not just graphic designing anything you can think of is saturated. Someone without programing or coding knowledge might think programming and coding can be lucrative, however, if you ask someone who has these skills, you will know how hard it is to get jobs in these areas. Niches like Big Data Data Analysts look less competitive but if you go and try these for yourself, you will find how hard it is to get jobs. There is no job or skill that is not saturated.
You can use any platform you want for your marketing strategies, however, if you want your marketing strategies to work you need to understand your content niche and the demography of the platform. In other words the content yo want to promote should be appropriate for the platform where you want to promote. Pinterest is basically a platform where people visit to find ideas, get inspired, it is a platform for designs, art, crafts, and things like these. If you have related content, you can benefit.
If you want to run a paid marketing campaign, look no further than social media platforms. There are a couple of reasons why social media advertising is good. First and foremost, social media advertising is one of the cheapest kind of digital marketing. You can start running ads just for $5-$10. Second, important thing is you can easily start, your ad would be running in less than 30 minutes. Thirdly, social media platforms boost a huge audience and you can reach a lot of people in no time
How to Create Viral Content
There are formulas for creating viral content on social media, however, these formulas might not work a hundred percent as these are not mathematical formulas or science formulas. First of all, you need to start using social media analyzer tools so that you can check what content is going viral on which social media platform. These tools will tell you the number of times a certain content is shared, the engagements the content has received, etc. One such social media tool that I can recommend is called Buzz Sumo. When you use the tools like Buzz Sumo, you can see which content has gone viral in the past 24 hours, in one week, in one month, etc. You can then analyze the viral content and try to find why this content is going viral. You can then try to create similar content, use similar hashtags, etc. By copying the tactics from the viral content you can become viral.