It’s important to get started on the right foot when it comes to social media marketing. Even though the barriers to entry are low, it still takes a lot of time and effort to embark on a successful social media marketing campaign — if you expect it to work.
“How To Be A Social Media Rock Star”

It’s not rocket science, and you can be a rock star by using social media properly!

10 Tips for Successful Implementation of Social Media Marketing

1) One thing at a time

Don’t try to join all social media networks at once. Do one network at a time. Figure out through study which one will be most effective to get started with.  Most of the time it’s going to be Twitter or Facebook. But, if you have a super visual business consider starting with Pinterest. Once you have one social network running and are comfortable with how it looks, and how you’re running it, then and only then add another network.

2) Define your goals

It’s essential to decide what your goal is for each type of campaign you run on each social media networks. You may have several goals, increase traffic to your website, get more signups for your newsletter, etc… but each goal has its own path to success and are separate campaigns.

3) Develop your tactics

Once you’ve identified your goals, now you can decide what tactics you’ll use to reach those goals. You want more newsletter sign ups? Are you going to give away something free for each sign up? Have a contest? What are you going to do to reach the goal? Be very specific. “I’m going to post three times a day specific messages to encourage participation in my contest.”

4) Take the time

Social media marketing strategy is not something that you’ll see results from over night. It will take time and you will need to persevere and demonstrate great patience. However, if you have a plan and you implement the plan, “it” (whatever your goals were) will happen.

5) Test it out

Everything you try won’t work, it’s the nature of the ever-changing social media landscape. What worked yesterday may not work today. It’s important to experiment and test new ideas to see what works and what doesn’t work. You can always adjust as you learn more.

6) Provide value

Probably one of the most important tips of all, your content should be valuable to the readers. It should be interesting, targeted, and what your audience craves. Otherwise, they’ll not read and they will stop following you.

7) Keep up the Conversation

Without interactive conversations social media is no longer “social”. It’s important to respond to people who make comments, and truly interact with your audience. Engaging with your followers is an essential element of using social media for marketing.

8) Reward your followers

To keep people interested in following you and interacting with you, have contests and games with rewards for those who are active participants. If a special is only offered on xyz social media network to only those who follow you, they’ll feel special and exclusive.

9) Measure your results

It’s not only important to keep measuring results, so that you can toss what is not working and keep what is, it’s important to make sure that you are measuring the right things. If your goal was to get more newsletter sign ups, did you succeed in reaching that goal with the methods you used? You can have 1 million followers on any given social media network, but if they’re not actively engaged and acting in a manner that you’d hoped with your various campaigns, then you’ll need to figure out why.

10) Automate responsibly

We all like a good plugin or app to help make our lives a little easier. That is especially true when it comes to social media marketing automations. But, the problem is, you can use too much automation, and not get involved personally replying to comments and that is a mistake.
By following and considering these ten tips you’ll make a bigger impact in your social media marketing efforts regardless of which channels you choose to engage.
Tomorrow we’ll take a look at various social media networks and discuss the ins and outs of each.
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