The plain truth of the matter today is that you can’t even have an effective marketing strategy that does not include social networking. Using social networking is key to the success of most business owners, online and off. Thankfully, the tools available today make it a no-brainer to integrate social networking into your marketing strategy.
Understand What Social Networking Is
Social networking is interacting with your market online or in-person via dedicated websites, applications, and groups. Most of the time it starts with creating a profile on a platform like Facebook, Twitter, or Meetup.com, then connecting with like-minded individuals through the platform. This can also develop into meeting in real life outside of the platform.
Set SMART Goals
Whether you want to increase brand awareness, generate leads, make sales, or something else entirely, it’s imperative that you know what your goals are and to set them in a way that leads to success. Understanding how to set SMART goals is an ongoing lesson you’ll need to perfect through time.
Research Your Audience
Using social platforms and other means, research your audience enough to be able to create an ideal audience or customer avatar or persona. That way you know who you’re targeting with the information you post.
Know Your KPIs
It really doesn’t matter what you are selling or where you are selling; knowing the metrics that you need to keep track of and measure will help you succeed. Some KPIs to pay attention to are reach, clicks, engagement, hashtag performance, organic likes, paid likes, sentiment and more.
Know What Your Competition Is Doing
Observing and following what your competitors are doing with social networking is essential to ensuring that you can compete with them. You will soon be able to point out what is going right and wrong for them so that you do better.
Create, Curate, and Post Relevant and Engaging Social Media Content
The content that you post is so important and should be relevant and engaging for your ideal audience. Don’t be tempted to go wide when it comes to sharing the best social media content for them. Keep it targeted and narrow.
Know When to Post and Engage
Each audience has a time of day that they’re most likely to be on a social networking platform. Knowing when they are there is a good way of knowing when you should post. Always seek to post while your audience is engaged and active.
Track and Measure Progress
Using the KPIs that you determined, it’s a good idea to keep tracking and measuring those metrics. The data is what will drive your actions. That way you don’t do more or less than you need to in order to reach success.
Integrating social networking into your marketing strategy is a no-brainer today. With all the platforms and tools available, there is no reason you cannot make social media networking work for you to boost your business connections as well as your bottom line.
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