In this post, you will learn the seven steps your business must take to create an effective social media marketing strategy.

Step 1: Audit Your Current Social Presence

Before you strategize about where you are headed, take a quick look at where you are. A few areas to consider when auditing your business’s social media presence are:

• Which networks are you currently active on
• Are your networks optimized (photo and cover images, bio, URL, etc.)
• Which networks are currently bringing you the most value
• How do your profiles compare to your competitors’ profiles

Step 2: Document Who Your Ideal Customer Is

You will want to get as specific as possible with this part. For example, if you identified your target market as parents it would be ok. However, if you identify your ideal customer as a parent that lives in the United States, is between 30 and 50 years of age, earns over $70,000, primarily uses Facebook and has an interest in outdoor activities you will have much more success.

Even the best marketers will fail if they are marketing to the wrong audience. Answer the following questions to help you come up with a highly focused buyer persona:

• Age
• Location
• Job Title
• Income
• Pain Points (that your business can solve)
• Most Used Social Network

Step 3: Create A Social Media Mission Statement

Your social media mission statement will drive your future actions, so make sure you put some thought into it. This statement will make it clear exactly what you plan to use your social media presence for and should reflect your brand identity. Keep in mind your ideal customer when trying to create this statement.

An example mission statement might be “to use social media to educate current and potential customers about digital marketing, with a focus on social media marketing.” Once you have this statement documented, it will make it simple for you to decide what to share and create.

If it doesn’t align with your mission statement, forget about it. Businesses that post randomly without a guiding mission will fail. People follow experts, not generalists.

Step 4: Identify Key Success Metrics

How will you determine if your social media marketing efforts are successful? I am not just talking about gaining more followers, I am talking about making money. Afterall, it is hard to rationalize spending time and money on something that isn’t improving the bottom line.

A few metrics to consider measuring are:

• Conversion Rate
• Time Spent on Website
• Reach
• Brand Mentions
• Sentiment
• Total Shares

Step 5: Create and Curate Engaging Content

Sadly, many businesses jump straight to this step. Hopefully, this post has made it clear that there are several vital steps that you must take before you start creating and curating engaging content to share on your social media channels.

Let’s now discuss the fun part, posting to social media. You know who your ideal customer is and you used that information to create your social media mission statement. Armed with this information it should be easy for you to begin creating and curating content. So, what exactly is considered content? Here are a few examples of content you could create:

• Images
• Videos
• Blog Posts
• Company News
• Infographics
• eBooks
• Interviews

The list of content ideas goes on and on, but make sure you focus only on forms of content that align with your mission statement, as well as your skill set. Content is what fuels social media, so it is crucial that you consider creating high quality, engaging content as a top priority.

Step 6: Invest In a Social Media Management Tool

Most marketers have a secret, they leverage tools to boost their productivity. Ok, maybe it isn’t a secret, but without tools, marketers would face constant burnout (many do even with tools). When it comes to social media, having a social media management tool allows you to scale your efforts with ease.

One of the main benefits of a social media management tool is the ability to schedule posts ahead of time. Remember that content calendar you created? Make sure your scheduled posts in your social media management tool align with your content calendar.

Step 7: Track, Analyze, Optimize

This may be the most important step when it comes to succeeding on social media. Even the best social media marketers rely on trial and error. It might seem basic, but tracking your results, analyzing the data and then making tweaks to optimize them is crucial.

Each previous step should be re-evaluated after you have had time to analyze the results of your marketing efforts. Let the data drive you. If it is telling you Facebook or Twitter is your most effective channel, consider doubling down.

A great social media strategy is never set in stone. It is a constant work in progress that changes when necessary. So get out there, create a strategy and start optimizing it as you continue to grow and learn more about your business and your audience.

What is social media marketing?

Social media marketing is the process of building awareness about you, your products or services through the various social media channels. The ultimate goal of any social media marketing campaign is to drive traffic to a website, increase the visibility of a product, gain more social media followers or find more customers. Today you have to follow social media guidelines to grow faster in this industry, so here we are providing these social media marketing tips which will help you to reboot your career.

The most popular social media networks today are: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, YouTube, Tumblr and Linkedin.

Why is social media marketing important?

Social Media marketing is important because:

• It’s the fastest way to spread the word about a new product, service or news item – A tweet can go rival in minutes and spread a message around the Word faster than TV or other traditional media
• It’s a trend – Millions of people spend a good amount of their time on social media networks so if you ‘need them’ you know where to find them
• It’s the new marketing – Back in the old days marketers found out that many people spend time in their cars driving so they thought of the billboards on the roads. Today people are spending time on social media so as a marketer you have to start thinking this way too.
• It’s the new influencer – more and more studies indicate that social media is turning into business as well with more companies stating that they have found customers from Facebook or Twitter.

Social Media Marketing tips for beginners

How can you take advantage of social media? How can beginners build a proper social media presence fast? Read and follow our 10 social media marketing tips below and don’t forget to follow us on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest!

1. Decide which social media platform(s) to use

As a beginner to social media you have to choose one or two social media platforms and concentrate on those rather than trying to work on all platforms at the same time. This is a mistake that many beginners do and at the end they quit without having any benefit.

A nice way to find out which platform is best suited to your niche is to find the influencers and analyse where they have success. For example find out the leaders in your niche and check out the number of Facebook fans, twitter followers, Google+ followers, Pinterest followers etc.

If they have 100,000 Facebook fans but only 10,000 twitter followers then this is a good indication that FB is more suitable 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

Once you decide which social media tools you will use (at least for the beginning), the next step is to optimise your profiles on those sites. By optimizing your profiles you increase your chances of getting more followers and it is also a good way to boost your SEO efforts.

Some general rules that apply to all sites are:

• Use a real photo, showing your face – avoid using animals, places or anything that is not real. Social media is about connecting people and if you want to have a trusted profile you need to get out of your cage and put your face on the web!
• Write a good description about yourself or your company – What is your background or expertise? What are you proud off? Mention this is your profile.
• Give an indication to users what type of info you will share – Although this is not necessary, I like to read in profiles what kind of info to expect from the particular person.  For example in my twitter profile I wrote: “..tweeting SEO, social media, internet marketing tips and advice”.
• Include a link to your website (where applicable) – On Facebook include a link in the ‘About section’, on Twitter and Pinterest in the ‘Web site Section’, on Google+ in the ‘Contributor to’ section. In other words, do use your social media profiles for SEO purposes as well.

I suggest you read SEO boost your social media profiles article which includes more examples and instructions on what you have to do to each social media site for more exposure.

3. Connect your website or blog with your social media pages

After you have your social media profiles ready the next step is to connect your website with your social media pages. There is a certain procedure to follow for each platform and it is very important that you do it correctly.

A correct binding between the two means that search engines and social media websites know which website corresponds to which social media page. For example when I created the Google+ page for reliablesoft.net, Google+ did not know that this was the official page of the site until I have added the publisher verification code on my site.

• For Facebook you can follow these instructions
• For Google+ you can read this
• For Pinterest you can verify your website using this procedure
• For twitter you follow this

4. Add social media buttons on your website

Besides connecting your website with the respective business pages on social media, you also need to add social media buttons on your website so that readers can easily share your content.

Depending on the platform there are many ways and plugins to do that, I suggest you search Google using “how to add social media buttons to xxxxxx” – replace xxxxx with the platform your website is based. For example if you are using wordpress search google for “how to add social media buttons to wordpress”.

As a general rule of thumb, keep the buttons above the fold to increase exposure and have in mind that larger buttons get more clicks than smaller buttons.

5. Find and follow the influencers in your niche

So far we have selected the most appropriate social media tools for our niche, optimized our social media profiles, connected our website with the social media pages and added the buttons on our pages for more interaction. The next obvious step is to find people to follow but most importantly to gradually build our tribe of followers.

I would say that there are 5 basic steps to follow to get more followers and these are described in points 6-10 below. Before getting into that, you should first find and follow the influencers in your niche.

It is almost certain that they will not follow you back because you have a new account with no followers but doing so is important for 3 reasons:

1. Social media platforms will use this information to make suggestions on who to follow so by following popular people in your niche is like telling them that you are also in that niche.
2.  When you follow popular people who are likely to get followed by others as well. A trick many people use is to follow the followers of a popular person because they know that some will follow them back as well.
3. They will most probably share important and useful information about the niche so you have a chance to learn something new and re-share that with your followers.

6. Keep a balance between following and followers

Once you start following people you should always have in mind that it’s better to keep a balance between the number of people you follow and the number of people they follow you back. This is important especially in Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest and the reasons are a lot:

• Software applications are using this ratio (followers/following) to make suggestions on ‘who to follow’ so if you have a very high ratio you minimize your chances of getting new quality followers.
• It is a matter of trust – Who do you think has a trusted profile: someone with 1000 followers but following 2500 or someone with 550 followers that follows 510?
• A balanced profile is better for SEO – SEO’s have been talking the last couple of months about the importance of social media for SEO and how things are changing and although it is not yet confirmed, it is more likely that people with strong social media profiles are in better position that those with weak profiles.

A strong profile in this case is someone that has more followers than following and someone that is followed by people who are considered influencers in the niche.

7.  Share interesting content (text, images, videos)

This is the foundation for having a successful social media marketing campaign. When we talk about publishing content we always say that ‘content is king’ and this true in social media as well. If you share interesting and useful content you can get more re-shares, more visitors to your website and under some conditions more customers as well.

What is interesting content? From my experience (and certain studies) this is a combination off:

• Articles/Stories/Pages related to your niche but not only from your own website.
• Interesting statistics about your niche
• Motivational Quotes related to your niche or otherwise
• Research studies
• Images and Videos
• Funny stuff- whatever your niche, you can share once in a while a joke, a funny image or video to make your followers smile.
• Don’t forget about hashtags – hashtags (#) can make your content more searchable so don’t forget to use hashtags in the networks that support it (Twitter, Google+).

8. Post many times per day but don’t overdo it

A common question by people who are just beginning on social media is “how many times should I post per day?” The answer depends on the network. There are many studies analysing the effect of posting frequency and some best practices are:

• Facebook personal page – As many times as you want
• Facebook business page – No more than 1-2 times per day and no more than 7 times per week. There are studies that support this guideline.
• Twitter – The more you tweet the more exposure you get.
• Google+ Business page and Google+ profile page – as many times as you want but don’t overdo it because this may create the opposite results.
• Pinterest – a few times per day is enough

9. Don’t forget to follow back

Most people concentrate on how to get new followers but they forget to follow back those who have already followed them. Every day you should create the habit of viewing the people who are already following you and decide who to follow back. If you don’t do this on a regular basis then most likely some will un-follow you and this is why you may sometimes notice a decrease in the number of followers.

10. Follow the rules and be patient

Social media networks have rules to keep spammers away. For example there is a limit on twitter on the number of people you can follow per day; there is also a limit on Google+ on the number of people you can add/delete from your circles, Facebook has its own rules etc.

This means that it may take some time to build thousands of followers so you need to be patient and not try to rush into results either by breaking the rules (your account will be suspended) or by spending your money in ‘buying followers or tweets’ or anything similar. Try to spend your time in creating a great social media profile that will stand over time and why not become one of the authoritative profiles in your niche. These social media marketing tips is a guide for beginners to success.

A large percentage of my website traffic comes from Twitter. We know that many of you enjoyed the twitter tips that we shared in our FREE 7 Day eCourse about making money from blogging and making your own website, so today we wanted to look more in detail at how Twitter can help your business.

I am a big fan of Twitter marketing! It is such a great tool that you can use to find targeted traffic for your website, whilst allowing you to network with people from all over the world.

Most people that use Twitter tend to tweet meaningless nonsense, such as what they ate for lunch! That is great for people that use it purely for social reasons, however if you are planning to use Twitter to help you market your business, then you need to be using it in a more productive way.

The best thing about Twitter is that the people using it are so diverse! It doesn’t matter what your business is about, you will be able to find people almost instantly who are interested in your niche. This allows you to quickly find people who are part of your targeted audience.

The following are some tips that you can use to improve your Twitter account and increase traffic to your website.

Driving Traffic From Twitter To Your Blog

Lets get to the point! You want to use Twitter to drive traffic to your blog/website. Twitter is one of the best social media tools for driving traffic to your blog. I use it to update all of my followers about what’s new on my websites and what I’m doing (@matt_oit). It is such an amazing feeling when you tweet about a new post on your site and people start to re-tweet it, spreading the word.

Using Twitter and Blogging Together

To get the most out of Twitter, you need to promote Twitter on your website and there are a few ways to do this. The most obvious way to do this is to display a Twitter button on your homepage, or better yet within your sidebar so that it displays on all of your website pages. This button links directly to your Twitter account, allowing people to sign-up and follow you.

Another great way to promote Twitter on your site is to display sharing links on your posts. As you can see, at the top of all of my blog posts I display ‘AddThis‘ share buttons. This allows anyone to share my posts on any of the social media sites online, including Twitter. Counters can help show how popular your posts are to new visitors.

Also, consider placing a ‘Recent Tweets’ box on your site. This will display your newest tweets that your visitors may be interested in. Ultimately, this is just another way to encourage people to ‘follow‘ you.

Promote Yourself

You need to make sure that you promote yourself and your blog on Twitter. If you can do this well, then you will be able to build a strong brand identity that will be beneficial in the long run.

One of the key parts of your Twitter profile is your bio. Write a bio that clearly states what your blog is about and add a link to your site. This sounds really easy, but take some time to think about this. You only have a limited amount of characters, so make them count. If after reading your bio, people don’t get what you are about, they won’t stick around.

The best way to promote your site is to tweet about it! Tweet about all of your new posts a couple of times a day and keep everyone up to date about everything that is happening with your site. Surprisingly, a lot of people think that if they promote themselves on Twitter, then that makes them a spammer. That is just not true! It is fine to promote yourself, as long as you do it the right way. Tweeting every 5 minutes about your new post or an affiliate link would be classed as spam. Mix it up a bit and you will be fine. Tweet about your new post, but then tweet about other things that might be related.

If you can get the right balance and learn to promote your site in the best way, then you will begin to see results.

Make Friends

Twitter is a social site, so be social! There is a whole community related to your niche out there, so get involved. Chat to people, make friends, share ideas, ask question, re-tweet, etc.

I am always amazed when I get followed by someone that doesn’t tweet. When I check their profile, they are following x thousand people, but have never tweeted a single thing. You can’t expect to make friends and build your brand without tweeting.

Blogging is a community, so find similar people that blog within your field and interact with them. The more blogging friends that you can connect with, the better your blog will be as you will be able to share ideas with each other.

Listen To Your Twitter Followers

One of the best things about Twitter is that you can get almost instant reaction to your tweets from your followers. It is important that you listen to your followers as they can tell you what is working and what isn’t. A particular post that you tweet may be particularly popular, so you might want to do a follow up post on the same subject. Similarly, if you don’t get much reaction from one of your tweets, it may be because there isn’t much interest for it.

You can just ask your followers what they like and what they don’t and why. This way you are almost treating Twitter as a tool for market research that can help you with your business.

Have Conversations

Twitter is full of people having great conversations with one another. The best ones are full of useful information that can be very helpful to you. Don’t be shy, jump into conversations, ask questions and contribute to the discussion, or better yet start your own. People are very helpful when you are nice to them, you can learn a lot from many different people and build a useful network of people.

Honesty Is The Best Policy

I think that this is important for every aspect of your business and life in general. It is very easy to tell when someone is clearly talking a load of rubbish about something. Doing that only results in loosing business. Just be honest about who you are and what you are talking about. Trust is such an important part in any relationship, whether that be a romantic relationship or simply a business relationship. People are much more likely to listen to you and do business with you if they trust you.

Be honest on Twitter. If you come across something that you really like, or that you think your followers will like, then tell them about it. If you find something that you don’t like, then also tell them about it and why you don’t like it. You may find that not all of your followers agree with everything that you say, but ultimately they will value your honest opinion, which is far more important!

Straight To The Point

I am a big fan of writing informative posts that people can read. On Twitter, this is not possible because you have a limited 140 characters to use. This means that you need to get to the point with your Tweets!

This can be a bit of an art form, but the more you Tweet, the better you will get at doing it. You need to provide maximum information with minimum characters. Keep your titles, questions, comments, etc. short and concise, whilst still being easy to read.

Any links that you want to include should be shortened. This is easy to achieve with the many online URL shortener websites that are available online. I myself use bitly.com to shorten all of my links. This is such a great tool that dramatically reduces the amount of space that your links take up in your tweets.

Twitter Backgrounds

Twitter allows you to customise your Twitter account, so you can change all of the colours and you can upload your own background image. Why is this important? Well, by customising your own account, you make yourself stand out from the rest of the crowd. You can make all of your account colours match your website colours. Check out our Twitter account to see how we did this to match our website.

The background image is the most important part of this process. You can include a lot of important information on your background image that your followers might find useful. The most obvious would be to display your website address, but you could also show social network addresses, any products that you are promoting, company logo, etc.

Marketing yourself on Twitter can take up quite a bit of time, which you could be using to add to your website. Thankfully, there are some useful tools that you can use to help you. You can now follow people, unfollow, schedule tweets and so much more with some really easy to use applications that do everything for you.

Scheduling Tweets can be very useful. Think of all the people that you are missing out on connecting with whilst you are asleep! That is a huge market that you could be connecting with on the other side of the globe. This can help to increase traffic to your website by making your presence known. Of course, tweeting yourself is much better because you can interact and have conversations with people, but automating some tweets can increase your online presence.

Social media is transforming the way brands market themselves online. Actually, it’s safe to say that social media has already changed things in a big way.

Related: Top 20 Social-Media Tools to Add to Your Arsenal in 2016

New platforms have emerged that continue to transform the way we communicate. These changes affect both how brands promote their message, and how their fans respond.

With these new platforms comes a handful of new tools to help social media marketers engage with audiences in creative ways, and to keep track of their efforts. To keep pace with the latest social media trends, it’s time to review and update that tool set, recognizing which tools we should keep, which we should discard and which new tools we can add to supercharge our social media efforts.

Here’s my shortlist of the top social media tools that every marketer should be using in 2016.

1. Buffer

With its clean interface and simple analytics features, Buffer just barely edges out Hootsuite as my favorite social media scheduling tool. You can share content across multiple accounts and networks, all from one central dashboard.

A Chrome extension makes it even easier to share on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ and even LinkedIn simultaneously. Buffer has some epic social media guides and case studies on its blog, which is a great place to start if you’re new to social media marketing.

2. Social Clout

It’s all well and good to share content and get likes. In fact, it can be quite addicting. But to really understand which posts get the most engagement, we need to look past vanity metrics and focus on the metrics that matter.

Enter Social Clout, a social media analytics tool designed specifically to track engagement and calculate social media ROI. Social Clout shows you which demographics have the best engagement and which platforms convert the best, and at what times.

Related: 5 Up-and-Coming Social Media Tools You Should Know About

3. Feedly

Put your content ideation on autopilot, with Feedly. To set it up, just add the RSS feeds of your favorite blogs and writers and Feedly will create a daily “magazine” with all its content, organized by topic.

Moreover, Feedly is a great way to know what niche influencers are talking about, to join the conversation and to stay up to date with the latest industry trends. Staying up to date with the latest current events helps guide your own content strategy and social media posting schedule.

What’s great about the app is that it integrates with scheduling tools like Buffer and Hootsuite, so you can share and schedule posts from directly within the dashboard. In my own work, Feedly saves me hours of time and energy combing through social media posts to find good content.

4. Canva

Here’s a thing most people don’t know about me: I’m terrible at graphic design. (Blog design is another story.)

This is especially true when it comes to choosing and editing photos for my blogs. Luckily, there’s a tool that’s built specifically for non-designers: Canva.

Canva is my favorite tool for creating stunning images for social media posts. Creating images is so easy even a bean-counting marketer could do it. Using Canva’s multiple templates, fonts and colors, all you need to do is drag image elements around and drop them into place.

Canva is free to use, but don’t let that fool you. Despite its affordability, major sites like Buzzfeed use Canva to create images for their posts (which, last I checked, drive nearly half a billion visits each month).

5. Socedo

Social media campaigns have countless moving pieces, all of which need to work together if the campaigns are to be successful. Whether you’re an entrepreneur or an established social media manager, there’s never enough time in the day to manage it all while still you’re looking for customers.

Socedo is a B2B demand generation tool that does most of the grunt work, so you don’t have to. It works by automating lead generation, and finding and acquiring targeted leads through different social media channels. That way, you can focus on increasing ROI (sales and revenue) without getting bogged down in minutiae and repetitive tasks.

Using a combination of keywords and demographic criteria, Socedo finds and engages prospects across major social networks. Whereas most demand-gen platforms focus on email, Socedo is one of the few that handles outbound prospecting via social.

6. Edgar

Ever notice how influencers like Tim Ferriss, Gary Vaynerchuk and Richard Branson repeatedly share their old content?

While that practice may appear redundant or irksome, the fact is that old posts have high engagement when shared. It’s just plain smart.

First, social media accounts gain and lose followers with time. Re-sharing content is an excellent way to showcase your top stuff to new followers. Second, even the most loyal fans won’t be online all the time. Regular sharing is a way to engage with audiences at different times throughout the day

That said, it’s not always easy to know the best social media schedule for new and old content. Edgar knows, and shares your content at the times when it’s most likely to engage your audience. The tool categorizes all of your content by topic and target demographic, determining which posts get the highest engagement with which followers.

Edgar doesn’t stop there. After posting an update, the tool recycles the post back to the bottom of your queue, so it will post again later once the rest of your content has been shared. The result is an endless supply of social media posts that shares and reshares itself continuously, without you having to lift a finger.

Conclusion

In 2016, social media marketers can choose from thousands of tools to help streamline their social media campaigns. However, it’s important not to get bogged down with decision anxiety, giving in to the feeling that you need to learn everything all at once.

Leveraging the power of content and social media marketing can help elevate your audience and customer base in a dramatic way. But getting started without any previous experience or insight could be challenging.

It’s vital that you understand social media marketing fundamentals. From maximizing quality to increasing your online entry points, abiding by these 10 laws will help build a foundation that will serve your customers, your brand and — perhaps most importantly — your bottom line.

1. The Law of Listening
Success with social media and content marketing requires more listening and less talking. Read your target audience’s online content and join discussions to learn what’s important to them. Only then can you create content and spark conversations that add value rather than clutter to their lives.

2. The Law of Focus
It’s better to specialize than to be a jack-of-all-trades. A highly-focused social media and content marketing strategy intended to build a strong brand has a better chance for success than a broad strategy that attempts to be all things to all people.

3. The Law of Quality
Quality trumps quantity. It’s better to have 1,000 online connections who read, share and talk about your content with their own audiences than 10,000 connections who disappear after connecting with you the first time.

4. The Law of Patience
Social media and content marketing success doesn’t happen overnight. While it’s possible to catch lightning in a bottle, it’s far more likely that you’ll need to commit to the long haul to achieve results.

5. The Law of Compounding
If you publish amazing, quality content and work to build your online audience of quality followers, they’ll share it with their own audiences on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, their own blogs and more.

This sharing and discussing of your content opens new entry points for search engines like Google to find it in keyword searches. Those entry points could grow to hundreds or thousands of more potential ways for people to find you online.

6. The Law of Influence
Spend time finding the online influencers in your market who have quality audiences and are likely to be interested in your products, services and business. Connect with those people and work to build relationships with them.

If you get on their radar as an authoritative, interesting source of useful information, they might share your content with their own followers, which could put you and your business in front of a huge new audience.

7. The Law of Value
If you spend all your time on the social Web directly promoting your products and services, people will stop listening. You must add value to the conversation. Focus less on conversions and more on creating amazing content and developing relationships with online influencers. In time, those people will become a powerful catalyst for word-of-mouth marketing for your business.

8. The Law of Acknowledgment
You wouldn’t ignore someone who reaches out to you in person so don’t ignore them online. Building relationships is one of the most important parts of social media marketing success, so always acknowledge every person who reaches out to you.

9. The Law of Accessibility
Don’t publish your content and then disappear. Be available to your audience. That means you need to consistently publish content and participate in conversations. Followers online can be fickle and they won’t hesitate to replace you if you disappear for weeks or months.

10. The Law of Reciprocity
You can’t expect others to share your content and talk about you if you don’t do the same for them. So, a portion of the time you spend on social media should be focused on sharing and talking about content published by others. Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms and websites to promote a product or service.