10 Tips Social Media Marketing For Beginners
For beginners, a moderate introduction to social media marketing. Discover how to develop a successful social media strategy.
What is social media marketing?
The process of increasing awareness of you, your products, or services through various social media channels is known as social media marketing.
Any social media marketing campaign’s ultimate purpose is to drive traffic to a website, boost product visibility, attract more social media followers, or discover new customers.
Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram, and Linkedin are the most prominent social media networks nowadays.
What is the significance of social media marketing?
The importance of social media marketing can be summed up as follows:
It’s the quickest way to get word out about a new product, service, or piece of news — A tweet can become viral in minutes, spreading a message faster than television or other traditional media.
It’s a trend – millions of individuals spend a significant amount of time on social media networks, so you’ll know where to locate them if you ‘need them.’
It’s a new era in marketing – Marketers discovered that many people spend time in their cars driving in the ancient days, therefore they conceived of billboards on the highways. People nowadays spend time on social media, so as a marketer, you must adopt this mindset as well.
It’s the influencer of the future – According to recent surveys, social media is becoming a wonderful sales channel, with an increasing number of businesses claiming to receive consumers from Facebook or Twitter.
Social Media Marketing tips for beginners
How can you use social media to your advantage? How can newcomers quickly establish a strong social media presence?
Read and follow the 10 tips below to get started:
1. Decide which social media platforms to use
2. Optimize your social media profiles
3. Link your social media pages to your website or blog.
4. Include social networking icons on your webpage.
5. Find and follow your niche’s influencers.
6. Maintain a healthy balance of followers and followers.
7. Make fascinating content available to others (text, images, videos)
8. Post several times every day, but don’t go overboard.
9. Remember to follow back.
10. Be patient and follow the rules.
1. Decide which social media platforms to use
As a newcomer to social media, you should focus on one or two platforms rather than trying to work on all of them at once.
Many beginners make this error, and as a result, they resign without gaining anything.
Finding influencers and analysing where they succeed is a good method to figure out which platform is ideal for your niche.
For example, look up the leaders in your niche and see how many Facebook fans, Twitter followers, Pinterest followers, and other social media followers they have.
If they have 200,000 Facebook friends but only 2000 Twitter followers, it’s a good sign that Facebook is a better fit for your niche than Twitter.
It is also a sign that you are more likely to have success with FB than Twitter, so you can use your time more efficiently and engage more on FB rather than any other platform.
2. Optimize your social media profiles
The next step is to optimise your profiles on those sites once you’ve decided which social media tools you’ll utilise (at least at first).
You can raise your chances of acquiring more followers and improve your SEO efforts by optimising your profiles.
The following are some broad guidelines that apply to all websites:
Use a real photo of yourself that shows your face – don’t use animals, places, or anything else that isn’t real. Social media is all about connecting people, so break out of your shell and show your face on the internet if you want to build a credible profile.
What is your background or expertise? Write a solid description of yourself or your organisation. What do you take pride in? Make a point of mentioning that this is your profile.
Make it clear to users what kind of information you’ll be sharing – Although it is not required, I enjoy reading profiles to see what kind of information I may expect from a certain person. “..tweeting SEO, social media, and internet marketing tips and advice,” I stated in my Twitter profile, for example.
Where applicable, include a link to your website — Include a link in the ‘About part’ on Facebook, and in the ‘Web site Section’ on Twitter and Pinterest. To put it another way, use your social media presence for SEO as well.
3. Link your social media pages to your website or blog
Following the completion of your social media profiles, the following step is to link your website to your social media pages.
For each platform, there is a certain protocol to follow, and it is critical that you follow it precisely.
Search engines and social media websites will know which website belongs to which social media page if the two are properly linked.
You can use these instructions for Facebook.
You can use this technique to authenticate your website on Pinterest.
You may follow this on Twitter.
4. Include social networking icons on your webpage
You should also include social media buttons on your website, in addition to connecting your website to the appropriate business sites on social media, so that users can simply share your material.
There are numerous ways and plugins to do this depending on the platform; I recommend searching Google for “how to add social media buttons to xxxxxx” – replace xxxxx with the platform your website is built on.
For instance, if you’re using WordPress, look for “how to add social networking buttons to WordPress” on Google.
Keep the buttons above the fold as a general rule to improve exposure, and keep in mind that larger buttons generate more clicks than smaller buttons.
5. Find and follow your niche's influencers
So far, we’ve chosen the best social media tools for our niche, optimised our social media profiles, linked our website to our social media sites, and added interaction buttons to our pages.
The next logical step is to discover others to follow, but more importantly, to progressively grow our tribe.
I believe there are five basic methods to gaining additional followers, which are mentioned in points 6-10 below.
Prior to doing so, you need first identify and follow the influencers in your field.
6. Maintain a healthy balance of followers and followers
Once you begin following individuals, bear in mind that it is preferable to maintain a balance between the number of people you follow and the number of people that follow you back.
This is critical, particularly on Twitter and Pinterest, for a variety of reasons:
This ratio (followers/following) is used by software applications to suggest ‘who to follow,’ therefore having a high ratio reduces your chances of gaining new quality followers.
A balanced profile is better for SEO – SEOs have been discussing the importance of social media for SEO and how things are changing over the last few months, and while it is not yet proven, it is more likely that people with strong social media profiles are in a better position than those with weak profiles.
In this situation, a strong profile is one that has more followers than followers and is followed by influencers in the niche.
7. Make fascinating content available to others (text, images, videos)
This is the cornerstone of a successful social media marketing strategy. We usually say that “content is king” when it comes to publishing material, and this is true in social media as well.
You can receive more re-shares, more visitors to your website, and in certain cases, more customers if you share entertaining and valuable material.
What is the definition of fascinating content? This is a combination of things, in my experience (and according to certain studies):
Articles/Stories/Pages from other websites that are connected to your niche.
Interesting facts about your industry
Motivational Quotes, whether they are linked to your niche or not
studies on research
8. Post several times every day, but don't go overboard
“How many times should I post every day?” is a popular question among newcomers to social networking.
The network determines the solution.
Many research have been conducted to determine the impact of posting frequency, and the following are some best practises:
As many times as you want on your Facebook personal page
No more than 1-2 times per day and no more than 7 times per week on your Facebook business page.
Twitter – The more you tweet, the more people will see your profile.
Pinterest – a few times a day is plenty
9. Remember to follow back
Most people are focused on how to gain new followers, but often overlook the importance of returning the favour to those who have previously followed them.
Every day, make it a practise to look at who is already following you and pick who you should follow back.
If you don’t do this on a regular basis, some of your followers will unfollow you, which is why you may notice a drop in the number of followers from time to time.
10. Be patient and follow the rules
Spammers are kept at bay by social media networks’ restrictions. For example, Twitter has a daily limit on the amount of people you may follow; Facebook has its own set of regulations, and so on.
This implies that building thousands of followers may take some time, so be patient and don’t try to accelerate things by breaching the rules (your account may be suspended) or spending money on ‘buying followers or tweets’ or anything like.
Spend some time building a superb social media profile that will last, and why not become one of the most authoritative accounts in your niche?