You Don’t Have to Light Stacks of Money on Fire, but it Helps: 5 Practical Social Media Marketing Tips for Working Folks
Say it – social media marketing sucks.
2018 clogged our feeds with spirit-crushing toxic sludge like Cambridge Analyticia and the Zuckerberg hearings, fake Twitter followers, Instagram bullying, Facebook pivoting away from video, everybody switching to Vero for 6.2 seconds, Facebook trying to sell advertising subscriptions to end users, Facebook allegedly defrauding its advertisers, leaked Facebook memos, Facebook, Facebook, Facebook, GDPR, Facebook…
When your news feed is stuffed with bad news about the very platform you’re browsing, you know it’s been a rough year. Nobody likes spending money on this stuff, especially when the benefits are unclear. Here’s the rub, though: your competition is already doing it.
Let’s start 2019 with a clean slate. Here are a few practical big-picture points to clear your head and get you thinking about growing your business on social media on your own terms without lighting stacks of money on fire.
Know What You Want
Decide what specific outcomes you want to achieve IRL and develop strategies to make them happen. Set KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) in advance and use those data points to track your performance.
Let’s say you want higher engagement rates (video views, comments, likes, shares, etc.) and the elevated news feed placement that comes with it.
First, make sure you’re consistently posting quality content. Then boost your top-performing organic posts to maximize their impact. Next, compare KPIs between boosted and non-boosted content on a weekly basis to see your marketing dollars at work.
Now that your posts are gaining traction, you decide it’s time to increase website sales.
Review your recent posts – does each post make it clear what the viewer should do next? If not, include a URL with a call-to-action to direct traffic to your retail location, webstore, app install page, newsletter opt-in, etc.
Once people are visiting your website, you can use a technique called retargeting to show your ads on other parts of the web, bringing those customers back to your website to learn more about your product or make a purchase.
Regardless of what you’re trying to achieve, you’ll find social media to be much more beneficial if you look before you leap and establish clearly defined, realistic outcomes based on your business goals.
Make Your Own Rules
I’m repeating myself, but repetition is a useful pedagogical tool, so it’s worth saying again: set KPIs and use those data points to track your performance.
Choosing your own adventure is what makes social media fun and exciting – you and your business are free to express yourselves in any way you choose – but without data points to serve as milestones along the way, you’ll find that viral fun and games quickly turn to self-doubt, creative paralysis, and burnout as you scramble to decode why your next post didn’t perform as well as your ex-post.
To keep the big picture in view, I recommend tracking your progress in a spreadsheet updated weekly. Also, don’t forget to check your year-to-date stats when you view your metrics – you’re probably doing better than you think.
Weekly stats are wonderful for up-to-date information, and you should absolutely use weekly reports to check your work, but it’s important to remember that a bad week is not a sign of the endtimes, but rather an opportunity to analyze and refine your strategy to reach your year-end goals.
Know Your Audience
Your audience should be fans first, followers next, and customers last. Social media depends on users to curate and engage with content, so give ‘em something they can use. Create practical content.
If you upload a flashy video with celebrity testimonials and motion graphics and you sell a boatload of whatever you’re hawking, that’s great. But what incentive do those video viewers have to return? Not much.
“How can I find out what my audience actually wants to see?”
Ask them. Post a question. Create a poll. Monitor and reply to comments. Check your DMs. People on the internet have opinions and they want you to hear them.
Wading through trolls will take years off your life, but if you identify and listen to engaged members of your audience, you’ll be rewarded with suggestions for future topics to explore in your content. Once audiences recognize your page as a source of helpful information, they’ll smash that subscribe button so hard people will finally stop saying “smash that subscribe button.”
No Cheating!
You will never beat the algorithm. The only way to win this game is to post quality content consistently. Social media is pay-to-play, and your best bet is to put money on content with solid organic performance. But all of your content is good, so that’s easy, right?
Don’t Panic!
Mind your own business. Don’t worry that the competition’s latest viral hit is going to sink your company. It won’t. Use your competitors’ success to your advantage – watch their pages and observe the marketing techniques being used. Pay extra attention to what the competition is not doing – these are opportunities to fill a niche and pull ahead of the pack.
Do they leave comments unanswered? – Reply to every comment on your page right now.
Is their pinned post outdated? – Update your pinned post(s), profile and header photos.
Do they create killer original content but leave fans hanging? – Consider reposting high-quality user-generated content from your most engaged subscribers.