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Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing

Here, We will try to understand Social Media Marketing by taking an example of the world’s most iconic brands, Starbucks. Grounded by its mission, Starbucks’ brand began to take form with a person, the consumer, in mind. From the coffee options available on the menu to the physical space of the café, Starbucks created an experience for its customers. Every Starbucks location uses particular plants, smells, sounds, colors, and lighting. With social media growing, Starbucks took their brand to the digital sphere.

Each of Starbucks’ social media platforms focuses on engagement. On Facebook, you can easily find your nearest location and scroll through selfies of consumers drinking Starbucks. Instagram is very similar with reposts of consumers’ photos onto their main page. Starbucks responds to hundreds of tweets a day and has used consumer-created snaps in advertising.

If you were to do a search on Instagram for photos tagged #Starbucks, more than 19 million photos would pop up – none paid for by Starbucks. Engagement is one of the fundamental key indicators of success in social media branding. Starbucks made the consumer their brand, which makes it easy to stay consistent with their brand on social media. If you’re still establishing your brand, then consider taking a similar approach to Starbucks and begin with the consumer in mind. On the other hand, if you already have an established brand, there are key elements to the Starbucks brand that you could borrow to communicate your brand better on social media. These elements will drive the content you post. Think critically about each item and consider how it relates to your business.

Since you probably don’t have a team around you that takes care of marketing, especially a team for every appropriate social network for your business, try not to go all over the place and pick several networks that you will try hard to manage and to update, and then fail – either in advertising or production. And you don’t need advertising if you have no product. So step by step, learn which outlets suit you and your business, choose a couple, and arrange your schedule so that it allows you to keep on top of them. But don’t let it take too much of your time. try to link them and follow the steps below:

Consistency
Eliminate confusion by using consistent messaging across all social media platforms that reiterate your brand. You want to use the same message over and over in order for it to be understood. Consumers receive a lot of messages, and they may only tune in sometimes. By staying consistent, you make sure that no matter when potential or existing customers are paying attention, they are receiving the same message.

Simplicity
Social media is making it easy for companies to overload consumers with content and messaging. Attention spans are shrinking and getting a consumer to pay attention to you is becoming increasingly difficult. Make it easier by keeping it simple. Narrow down your focus and keep your messaging succinct. Use plain language and short words. Get to the point and make a statement.

Visual appeal
Every social networking site is changing its display to become more visually appealing. Since the success of Pinterest, social networking sites have caught on to the actions of consumers. As consumers scroll through timelines, they are receiving hundreds of messages. Consumers will tune in and pay attention to strong, bold images. Determine what images are most in line with your brand and consistently promote those images to your audience.

Differentiation
Brand loyalty is the tendency of consumers to patronize the same brands. For consumers, although there are likely similar products and services, they continue to use the same brand, with no regard for convenience or price. This is because, in the mind of the consumer, there is something different about the brand they use in comparison to another. Make yourself stand out. With the example of Starbucks, their product is coffee but in the mind of the consumer, they aren’t just buying coffee. They are buying experience also.

Now that we understand that your brand must be consistent, simple, visually appealing, and different, we can help you define your brand. Consider the following questions:

  • What is your business?
  • What are your business’ core values?
  • What is the delivery method of your product or service?
  • Why would a customer care about your business?

As you answer these questions, keep your responses in line with the elements Starbucks showed us. Then lastly, ask yourself what emotion do you want your customers to feel when they think of your brand. Emotions can range from empowered to joy to hopeful.

Top 9 Social Media Marketing Mistakes You Need to Avoid.

Essentials to Build Your Brand on Social Media

social media

Whatever your aim is, the people on social media first want to know who you are. You may take the help of social media for selling products, persuading people to donate to a cause or gaining subscribers for the promotion of your brand, but the first question to be answered still remains the same- who are you in the first place? In fact, the answer to this question is always a major attraction to grab the attention of more and more people on social media and make them your followers.

Customers need someone to identify with the brand so let them know something about yourself. It could feel like a scam or fake if you were to leave out that part – don’t be a ghost in your brand – you are the mastermind behind it. You are allowed to have some room for yourself.

However, any of the above-mentioned actions need to first focus on the authority of your brand. So, how to ensure the authority of your brand which plays a pivotal role in ensuring your success on social media? And the best way to build your brand authority is possible through the optimum use of social media. As per the recent research done in the field of social media, more than 70% of brands have developed their immense trust in social media and plan to make huge investments in this field in the upcoming year. This move will certainly help such brands to build their good reputation in the market and reach new heights by making new followers.

So, are you ready to make a strong place in your industry and get good ranks on search engine giants like Google? Let’s take a quick peek into the steps which you can follow to improve the strength as well as the popularity of your brand on social media:

1. Check if the Networks Chosen Support Your Brand Image
As per the information provided by Convince and Convert, more than 22 percent of Americans make use of social media services multiple times a day, which specifies how a strong role is played by social media to build their brand. Yes, hundreds of networks are available nowadays, but you need to select the best as not every network can support your brand with similar efficiency. So, invest your time and energy only with on such networks which can really be fruitful for raising the popularity of your brand in the long run.

How to choose the best platforms for boosting your brand image? It is certainly one of the most essential steps as it plays a crucial role in supporting your brand image. Here are a few factors which must be taken into consideration before selecting a platform for supporting your brand image:

  • Facebook – Until now, this platform has certainly proved itself to be the best platform for creating as well as promoting brand awareness. Undoubtedly, its wide usage all over the world gives one an easy way to make one’s brand popular and reach millions in a go. Not only this, but Facebook also finds an upper hand over other networks for its heterogeneous user base. It gives you a wonderful opportunity to raise your brand’s awareness among people of all the groups rather than being restricted to any particular segment. It automatically increases your brand’s awareness and that too at a much faster rate.
  • Instagram – It is a wonderful social networking site for such brands which basically rely on images for grabbing the attention of the customers. It is a great option for mainly retailers and clothing companies who depend on images for promoting their brands. It’s great popularity among the youth who love to try a variety of clothes and mainly like watching images help a great deal in establishing one’s retailing or clothing brands with the help of this social networking site.
  • Pinterest – Is your brand related to jewelry or clothing? Then, Pinterest can definitely prove to be a good option for you. It is one of the favorites among women, and your clothing or jewelry brand can gain instant popularity on it.
  • Linkedin – If you are a business-oriented person and want to promote your company, no other platform can be better than Linkedin for you. It is also the first choice of people whose jobs demand the promotion of business-related content. It also provides a good platform for connecting with influential business groups which can help in strengthening the effectiveness of your brand.
  • GitHub – If you have an interest in programming and computers, then you need to know that this is one of the greatest sites you will visit. The development of the GitHub platform began in October 2007. It is a social network for software engineers and enthusiasts. You can learn everything you need to know, present your work, share ideas with GitHub users who think alike, and you can do all that without unnecessary distractions.
  • Flickr – This is a vast gallery for managing, organizing and presenting photos. You can either show your talents and skills in photography and hope you’ll be noticed by some agency, or present your design on this high-quality photo-sharing website. It is always worth a try.
  • Foursquare – Foursquare is somewhat different, and works as an application rather than a website. It is a location service, a sort of check-in status, which allows you to have your customers notify their friends on social networks that they are at your business place – coffee shop, store, spa center, or hairdressers salon. It has more than 25 million users http:// www.foursquare.com/. This means that you have to have a physical, real-life store location. Free marketing is fun.
  • AngelList – This is a social network that helps startups find investors. It is a great way of presenting an idea for the job and to raise money for it. This page also allows browsing startup jobs. The only bad side is that it is only available in the United Kingdom, but hopefully, the expansion is coming.
  • Quibb – This is a social network that connects job professionals by introducing them to various business topics, business news, and up to date explanations. You can sign in with Twitter or a Google account. It includes members from almost 30,000 startups as well as companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Amazon and Skype.
  • SnapChat – This is an app that allows you to send photos or 10-second videos that disappear after some time. Brands are also using Snapchat to offer their customers an exclusive insider peeks at events or productions. Content is cheap to produce and is reaching a lot of viewers. Therefore, Snapchat offers brands a new opportunity to advertise and be in touch with their customers.
  • Tumblr – This social network might not be your first choice for marketing purposes, but you might just be wrong, as it has been proven that Tumblr is a great blogging platform and social media tool all-in-one. Tumblr accounts are effortless in terms of personalization – it fits any brand’s style and attitude, and it is easier to acquire followers than it is on other blogging sites.

All these are part of digital marketing.

2. Offer Interesting and Legible Content
Instead of giving boring details which very few may read, it is always recommended to give catchy details which are interesting to read and also easy to understand for others. Not everyone can understand your business terms so, keep it short and simple. In fact, the legibility factor will arouse the interest of the people, and they will feel curious to know more about your brand. Not only this, but such contents are also shared more giving wide popularity to one’s brand. So, always remember to craft the content for social media in a highly precise and interesting manner which can quickly grab anyone’s attention.

Now, let’s discuss the points which should be taken care of while posting any kind of content on social media for the popularity of one’s brand:

  • Keep it precise and ensure that every single word of your content adds to the meaning of your brand giving it a powerful impression. In fact, each word should be talking in favor of your brand image. Yes, humor always plays an effective role in catching one’s immediate attention so, it would play a magic wand in your brand popularity if you can use such content effectively in your brand promotion. However, if you are not sure about the overall effect of the humorous content or feel even a bit unsure about people’s reactions, the idea must be pulled off immediately. It is better to avoid such humor-filled content or images which can earn criticism of even one category of people as it may reflect your company in poor light. So, you need to be extra careful while choosing the content for the promotion of your brand as it is directly connected to the promotion of your business and reaching the masses.
  • It’s also important to the task to find out the type of content which can give you instant visibility on social networking sites. So, you need to spend some time doing research to find out such content. It’s been noticed that images click the minds of the visitors faster than blog posts, however; you need to check this by collecting relevant information on such areas before abiding by any particular promotion strategy for your brand.
  • Always be ready to use visual content as it’s a proven way to catch immediate attention. The latest researches in this field have also shown that articles and blog posts with attractive as well as informative images get almost 90% more views in comparison to those write-ups which have only written content. The best example of this is one of the fastest-growing social networking sites, Twitter which gets just double views on images as compared to texts posted on the site. The factor to be kept in mind is that it happens even when Twitter has seven times more text content than images posted on it. So, if you are thinking to promote your brand on social networking sites, the easiest and the most effective way will be to take an idea about the posts which have proved highly successful for certain brands. On the basis of that, you can site methods and modify those according to your requirements to ensure your success in the field. Such strategies not only help you in getting acquainted with tested and tried methods but also raise your confidence in the field.

For example, one of your competitors got a wonderful response on social networking sites by posting a blog titled  “ 7 Quick Tips to Increase Website Traffic”. So, instead of trying your hands on unproven titles, you can get a more effective blog post on the same subject and enrich it with better data to attract the attention of the customers towards your brand. Obviously, an intelligent customer will get attracted towards the better information which is enriched with data as well.

Now the question arises, how to find well-performing content pieces related to your business? No need to worry as there are a number of tools to help you in resolving this issue. One of the most popular ones is BuzzSumo which helps in finding out the related successful content for your business on social media. In case you find difficulty in applying this technique, you can take the help of the Backlinko blog’s guide to getting a detailed idea about the subject.

3. Take Hold of Influencers
Posting highly catchy and attention-grabbing content on your profile of the social networking site certainly plays a significant role, but it’s just a part of the success strategy. In case your brand is not quite popular, all your efforts for its publicity may get lost somewhere. It’s not that you won’t be able to gather your own audience gradually with the help of good content posting, but it would certainly take a good deal of time.

The good news for you is that a much quicker approach to lure the influencers in your industry has already come into force. Some of the most popular ways used nowadays are:

  • Specify the names of the influencers in your content pieces or cite their websites. It has proved to be a highly effective strategy to win the attention of the influencers with Google Alerts or other notifications. It notifies them about your content immediately after it’s published.
  • Tagging influencers referred by you in your content while posting on your social media profiles is also a wonderful way to catch attention and grow one’s popularity.
  • Emailing influencers after the publishing of your content to make them aware of their references used in your work is also proving itself as a great way for the promotion of one’s brand as well as content.

So, what’s the primary goal of all these actions? It’s definitely to make your content piece popular among the users of various social networking sites. Yes, it will take a little time to build such relationships which can directly lead to influencer sharing, but if you keep on producing and publishing quality content, your efforts will soon start getting fruitful results.

4. Promote Content with Social Campaigns
Last but not the least, one can’t deny the immense use of paid campaigns nowadays to gain instant popularity for one’s brand. For this, you can take the help of native advertising platforms easily available nowadays for growing awareness about your brand on social networking sites.

A large number of brands in their growing phase also use various other interesting strategies like contests to promote the brand’s visibility as well as generate leads.

For availing the complete advantage of this strategy, you can also offer valuable incentives to your audience. It will not only help in encouraging user participation but also ensuring that the campaign launched by you gives due credit to all the participants.

Social media is undoubtedly one of the most effective ways of generating new leads. However, if you don’t use it appropriately, there is a big chance of wasting your time and energy on it. It is the primary reason why following a strong social media strategy holds prime importance.

So, if you really wish to get fast and positive results in return for all your efforts made for brand building, you need to be consistent in sharing great quality content as well as leveraging the power of existing social media influencers. This will certainly give you great results in the long run.

Habitat for Humanity, a 501( c) 3 nonprofit, has been awarded for their outstanding branding in the social services industry. Habitat’s brand is positioned around their mission of bringing people together to build strength, stability, and self-reliance through shelter. Although Habitat is a nonprofit, they are selling a product or service, in that they are in need of volunteers and financial donations. With each social media post, Habitat reinforces strength, stability, and self-reliance. Though those are feelings that their clients feel, they are pulling on the strength and stability that potential donors and volunteers may already have to move them to act.

One message Habitat uses is that “Every donation and a helping hand is helping families create a place to call home.” With the use of the word ‘every’, Habitat is staying consistent with their brand messaging and reinforcing people together. Habitat uses images of faces with houses in the background. Even when focusing on construction, which is reinforcing the “build” component of the brand, there is still a face because, in addition to the building, Habitat brings people together. Due to its consistency, simplicity, visual appeal, and differentiation, Habitat is successfully reaching its audience and converting.

In a business exchange, there are only three parties – the seller, the buyer, and the product. The act of completing a transaction – whether monetary or not – falls solely on the person who will buy. As humans, we make many decisions based on emotion. Therefore, your social media approach should focus on the buyer. Many businesses make the mistake of focusing on the seller or focusing on the product. Do not blast out information about yourself or what you’re selling. Your role as a social media manager is to craft your message so that a potential buyer can see themselves at home using your product or service. Once you craft these great messages, you have to reach your target audience. Social media offers two options – organic and paid.

Organic posts are shared directly from a business page or profile. Followers see your post based on the algorithms of the site’s newsfeed or timeline, which will vary from site to site. On the other hand, paid posts to reach a specific audience with targeting criteria that you set. Each social network has its own paid post options with varying fee structures. The highest-performing organic social media posts are short, visually appealing, and relevant. We will discuss paid advertising on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat later in the guide.

Keeping the customer in mind, go to where they are online. The 80-20 rule encourages marketers to spend no more than 20 percent of your time on self-promotional activity and conversation and at least 80 percent on engagement that is not self-promotional. Look at relevant blogs and online forums. Make your active participants in these outside platforms part of your social media strategy. Write guest blog posts, make comments, and answer questions. As you interact, make sure you have a way for people seeing you connect. Although you are following the rule of thumb and spending at least 80 percent on conversations that aren’t promoting your business, by simply being visible, you have an opportunity.

You can easily and clearly direct customers to your social pages. Add links to your social channels on every page of your website. Do you blog on your business website? Add social sharing links to each post that are linked to your business username. Put your social media URLs in your email signature and on your business card. Any printed materials you use should have your social media links. Make it easy to be found. Social media reinforces your brand, so you want to have people connected with a portfolio that represents who your business is.

Read: 7 Key Points to Write a Winning Content for Social Media Marketing

Social media is solely a tool for your brand strategy. You will give away more content than you receive but your efforts are part of a long-term strategy to have ongoing participation and increased understanding of your business and its brand. Your business goals may range from generating leads to converting social media followers into customers. Goals must be specific and measurable. Therefore, you want to be sure that as you move consumers from your social media to another platform, whether it be to your website to fill out a form, signing up for a newsletter or purchasing a product, that your potential customers are receiving consistent messaging.

Before moving to the next chapter, take the time to reflect on what we discussed on branding. Craft a message that tells the story of your organization in 140 characters. Your ‘bio’ or about us statement on social media may be the one opportunity you have to share your brand with potential or existing customers. Show the consumer who you are and what value you bring to them.

Many take a keen interest in social media marketing to boost their business, but not all become successful. So, how to ensure success with social media? Here are a few tips to achieve success with social media marketing:

  • Focus on Planning – Planning plays a pivotal role in deciding your success on social media. For this, proper keyword research should also be done using effective tools to ensure forwarding such ideas which will help in gaining the attention of your target audience.
  • Give Importance to Content — Content is always the king when it comes to social media marketing. You must ensure that the information provided by you is liked by your customers and can arouse their curiosity in your products. Apart from using the text-based content, you should give a lot of importance to create catching contents with photos and videos embedded. However, all the graphics used should be connected to the content.
  • Keep Your Brand Image Consistent — With social media, you get a wonderful opportunity for marketing your brand image in a variety of social media platforms. Each platform has its unique way of dealing with marketing campaigns. However, you must not change the core identity of your brand image with every platform. The point here is to keep your brand image consistent to win the trust of the customers.
  • Use Blogging — Blogging is a highly effective social media marketing tool that helps in sharing a wide range of informative content with readers. The best part is that even images can be used in blogs to draw the maximum attention of the customers. It will be an amazing idea to convert your company blog into a social media marketing blog where you can share information related to the latest social media efforts, events and contests.
  • Use Links — The fact can’t be denied that social media for marketing mainly depends on sharing of unique content to grab the attention of the followers. However, to catch more attention, you must do linking with outside articles as well. If you think that you are able to get valuable information from other sources that your target audience will find interesting as well as related to your business, you must go for it. Linking to outside sources also helps in improving trust and reliability. Not only this, but you also have a good chance of getting some links in return for it.
  • Identify Your Competitors — Keeping an eye on the competitors helps in keeping you updated and following the latest tactics to attract customers. With this, you also get easy access to keyword research and industry-related links which prove to be of great benefit in attracting the target audience. It also gives you social media marketing insight and an understanding of the social media marketing tactics used by your competitors. In case the tricks used by them are giving good benefits, you can also make it a part of your social media marketing.
  • Use Analytics to Measure Your Success — It is not possible to measure your success in social media marketing campaigns without using any tracking data. For this, Google Analytics   is a wonderful social media marketing tool which can help you in understanding how far you have been successful in using social media marketing tactics. In fact, it will also tell you the strategies which proved to be the most effective for you. You can also attach tracking tags to your social media marketing campaigns in order to monitor your success in an appropriate manner.
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Era Innovator

Era Innovator is a growing Technical Information Provider and a Web and App development company in India that offers clients ceaseless experience. Here you can find all the latest Tech related content which will help you in your daily needs.

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