Social Media

Social Media Marketing for Businesses: Do it in Five Easy Steps

social-media-marketing

social-media-marketing

With several Social Networking Sites (SNS) and a huge number of potential clientele available just at a simple click, every business today wants to make their presence on the Internet. Right from the small coffee shop on the corner of your street to the biggest casino in the town, you will find almost all the businesses making themselves active on several SNS like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and more.

Today, creating a social media presence doesn’t only mean to create your business account on various SNS. But, you must also ensure that people get to know about your business. You must be active enough on the social media arena so that people get to know about your brand and further think of utilizing it.

However, starting up with your social media presence is quiet complicated and one must smartly plan their approaches. Following are five simple steps that would guide you in starting your active social media journey.

social-media-marketing-plan

#1 Social Media Marketing Plan: Planning anything before implementing it is very important. It is very rightly said that, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail”. Same goes with your social media presence. Ensure you map-out your plan of action so that you can meet the desired objective without much difficulty. Some of the obvious question you can think of while making this social media marketing plan include – What are you planning to get from your social media marketing? Who is your target audience? How will reach them?

Organizing this stuff gives you a clear roadmap thus avoiding any further issues. Since, anything you do online or on social media spreads like a wildfire and any negative thing can severely affect your potential clientele. Hence ensure to make a reliable social media marketing plan before you actually start promoting your business on social media.

#2 Decide Who’s Going To Do It? You need to decide this in the first place whether you or someone from your business is going to do it or you are going to outsource it to some agency. If you are quiet uncomfortable or do not know much about social media, it is recommended to outsource it to some reputed agency. On the other hand, if it’s someone from your business who is going to take care of your social media presence, make sure it is one single person who can effectively communicate with the consumers.

Also, if you have a much bigger business and are thinking of employing more than one person for social media marketing, ensure each one of them knows their responsibilities properly and does not create confusions online.

#3 Get Committed To It: Social media marketing works only if you are committed to it. You must be highly active on social media and get in touch with your potential clientele every now and then. Many businesses start with their social media journey with much of enthusiasm in the beginning but eventually fade out for several reasons. Creating your fan base on social media is slow and steady process. You must have patience since it’s not possible to get 1000 likes on your Facebook page or 1000 followers to your twitter profile within a day or even a month. For that you must be committed and consistent in managing your profiles.

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#4 Community Building: Creating active communities for your businesses is the next big thing for efficient social media marketing. A challenging area for your business, community building works super good if you are able to handle it properly. But if not, it can take down your business at any point of time. When you create communities, your consumers might just complain openly about the bad service they received or a bad product they were delivered with.

In such cases, it totally depends on how you react with them and how quickly you solve their problems. This not just increases the faith of your customers but also helps in increases your business since people get to know you care for customer satisfaction.

#5 Derive A Content Strategy: One of the biggest problems faced by the businesses while performing their social media marketing is deriving an effective content strategy. Businesses often complain that they do not get time or know what to post on their social media profiles. Well, it’s simple. All you need to post is about your business, the services you offer, the products as well as smart tips related to your business or products, etc.

A simple strategy which almost all successful businesses on social media follow is 3 posts per day. When I say 3 posts, it doesn’t mean to post all the three posts at one single time. Assign 30 minutes for your social media marketing in the morning, afternoon and evening respectively. Nowadays, you even get applications like Hootsuit, Vocus, FutureTweet, etc. that help you with posting your content at any desired time.

The use social media marketing for business is one of the best ways to reach a wide range of potential customers in no time. All you need to do is make a strategy and stay committed to it until you get good results.

Do you think there are any other ways for effective social media marketing? If yes, please share them in the comments below.

About the author

Manas Shinde

Manas Shinde is a full-time blogger and loves to write on new technologies, gadgets, search engine trends, web designing & development, social media and entrepreneurship. Be friends with Manas on , Facebook and Twitter.