With over a dozen popular social media websites existent it is easy to be caught up in the idea that you must be actively promoting your business on all of them. This is simply not the case and will result in a weak unfocused social media campaign if you don’t have enough staff to tend to each website; because a successful social media campaign takes more than 30 minutes a week. It requires much more time and energy in order to break through and get the results that you want. It has to be done right if it is to be done at all. Otherwise you wind up with a business Facebook page, which has 10 likes and no value. Let’s look at how you can effectively employ social media.
Pick ONLY Two Social Media Websites
The old adage “Think big, but start small”, applies very well to this situation. You definitely want to think big, with the goal of having a popular and business-producing social media campaign, but you DON’T want to fly off in all directions in an explosion of activity. The approach needs to be gradual and well planned.
Therefore to start with you need only choose two social media websites. This doesn’t mean you can’t expand into other useful websites (you may very well want to once you get rolling) but it means you have to start with two. The following are recommended to choose from:
- Google Plus
- Youtube
- Vine
- Instragram
- Yelp
Of course the two largest sites are Facebook and Twitter but that doesn’t mean you have to start with them. Using sites like Google Plus and Yelp will help you leverage your online reputation and instill confidence in your potential customers.
Sites like Vine, Instagram and Youtube really ONLY work well for you if you invest in creativity and break free of banal robotic posting.
Your Campaign
Once you have chosen your social media site you then need to fully educate yourself as to how people are using this site, how much energy/posting is required to succeed, what the successful actions are, what things shouldn’t and should be done and how the analytics work (so you can consistently monitor and test your posting to find patterns, strong points and weak points). You can do this by reading articles online or actual books on the subject. While this may seem daunting and ‘too much’, one must recognize that social media marketing is not something that everyone natively knows and can just sit down and do. When people have that attitude they end up with a business Facebook page with 10 likes and no momentum. Marketing is a precise technology and when it is used with Social Media websites it becomes a whole new animal.
In light of this, one must recognize that they don’t know all there is to know about social media and with that accomplished one can then fill their mind with information and certainties, which they can use.
What’s Next?
Now that you have chosen your sites and fully educated yourself you can with your new-found understanding & certainty craft a campaign and monitor its success with the site’s built-in analytics. Analytics are the ONLY way you can measure the success of your campaign, so you must use them consistently, and by this you will be able to greatly improve your social media campaign.
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