Has Your Business Employed the Basics of Social Media Marketing?
If you want your business to succeed in the modern economy, then you simply can not ignore the Internet. However, it is no longer enough to just have a website and make search engine optimization a regular part of your internal and daily activities. You have to ask yourself if your business has also employed the very fundamental basics of social media marketing. Search engine optimization is still essential, but social media marketing backs it up with the following six critical elements.
Does your business have social media accounts established and activated? At the very least your company needs to have a presence on Facebook and Twitter. Consider how many times you hear about a business in the news, and instead of quoting a company official they interviewed, they quote a statement the business released through Twitter. Social media marketing is not even possible without being there. Do you post content regularly? It does not matter if you have a thousand followers or ten million. If you are not posting regularly, you are simply not showing up in their feeds. Regularly does not have to mean every day, though. Some businesses find every few days to be fine, and others do it only once a week to just stay in the minds of people without overdoing it. Are all your posts ads or coupons? This might seem like the obvious route to take, but it can backfire fast. People don't want commercials in their social media feeds, so aim for at least three-quarters of your content to be either entertaining or outright useful to your followers without them having to spend money or you asking for it. Build your brand this way. Do you engage your followers and fans? Social media should not be the only place or way for consumers to contact your business, and in most situations, it is not even a great way to resolve issues or concerns they have. However, people should know that you do respond to comments and questions on social media and feel free to communicate with you that way.
Are you putting out content or posts that might go even slightly viral? You do not need something to get shared five million times to benefit. Anything that gets to dozens of new faces expands the awareness of your brand and possibly creates new backlinks to your website, which doubles back to your search engine optimization efforts. Do you have social media buttons and widgets on your website? These let readers share the content they find useful through their own social media. Such pages are sometimes more likely to get shared than what you push through your account. These six basics of social media marketing are all things your business should do weekly or monthly in order harness the power of this marketing medium.
