What Is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing is the creation of content that promotes your brand, advertises products or services, connects with your audience, and encourages traffic to your website across different social media platforms. With each platform seeking its unique place in the social media ecosystem, they have their own best practices for marketing. You might, for example, craft a series of short videos for Instagram Stories and longer clips for Facebook.

A steady stream of updated features and new platforms means that social media marketing is an ever-evolving field. If you want the best results, you’ll need to stay up-to-date and be unafraid to try new things. After all, the best social media marketing examples exhibit outside-the-box thinking. It’s all about interacting with your audience on the platforms they spend time on and connecting with them on a social level.

Why Is Social Media Marketing Important?

Social media marketing has a plethora of potential benefits including (but not limited to) increased brand awareness, better audience engagement, and more website traffic. It’s widely believed that the key benefit is the number of new people who will see your brand, so you can gain a bigger following and a more dedicated customer base. Engaging with your audience can grant you insight into what they’re interested in, how they feel about your products or services, and more.

Another unexpected benefit could be a welcome boost to your brand’s SEO strategy. Google pulls from social media profiles and posts to determine its search results. You could consciously try to improve your search engine ranking by incorporating keywords, questions, or phrases searched by your audience into your social media content. From boosting sales to better customer service, many potential benefits make social media marketing an important endeavor for your business.

Master Social Media Marketing

When you first start marketing your business on social media, make sure you know who you’re trying to reach. In a world where anything can be accessed at the tap of a screen, there’s no point trying to reach everyone. Find your audience and which platforms they’re using, gather data, and keep an eye on what the competition is doing. You should also set out clear and achievable goals so you know what you’re working towards—like gaining more Instagram followers or getting more than 200 clicks to a page on your website.

Incorporate all the platforms your audience is using into your strategy. If none of your customers are young enough to be swiping through TikTok videos, focus your efforts on Facebook or LinkedIn instead. You should also ensure your content is optimized for each platform, so pay attention to ideal image sizes, the best times to post, word limits, etc.

Once you get started, you should maintain an organized and regular posting schedule, always prioritizing quality over quantity. Keeping track of your results is key because it can help you know what’s working and what needs optimizing. Don’t worry, you don’t need to be a math wizard to get useful numbers. There’s a whole host of social media analytics tools available.

As you go, you’ll develop a unique strategy based on your audience and the results you track. It is, however, easy to stumble along the way. Here are some important social media marketing do’s and don’ts from Liaison’s team of experienced content marketing professionals.

12 Do’s and Don’ts of Social Media Marketing

1. Don’t: Make Everything about You

When you kick off a social media marketing strategy, it can be easy to make yourself the center of everything and do everything you can to promote your brand. Only posting content that makes your brand look good can disinterest your audience because you’re focusing on what interests you, not them.

2. Do: Focus On Your Audience

Of course, your overall goal is to promote your brand and gain a bigger audience—but that’s not all you should be focused on. The very best brands think along the same lines as their audience. Only by having your followers’ best interests in mind can you ensure the right material is being marketed to them. Airbnb is a fantastic example of this. They post aesthetically pleasing photos of various houses and vacation spots on social media, inspiring and exciting their audience of enthusiastic travelers.

3. Don’t: Concentrate On Someone Else’s Success

It’s not exactly news that social media invites comparison, but it’s worth pointing out that this is also the case for businesses. Seeing the growth and success of your competitors can lead to excessive competition and jealousy. While these emotions are natural, it’s important not to get distracted from your own goals.

4. Do: Stay Focused On Your Goals

Remembering what you set out to achieve is crucial to an effective social media marketing strategy. It might be tempting to jump on trends and try out all of a platform’s features, but doing so just for the sake of it could do more harm than good. Always make sure that your posts align with your brand and its social media strategy.

5. Don’t: Ignore Your Audience

Comments will roll in each time you post on social media and while it can be hard to know how to respond, leaving these comments unanswered can slowly erode your brand’s reputation. When someone’s comment goes unanswered, they could be forgiven for thinking the brand doesn’t pay attention to its audience. Ultimately, this can lead to a loss of customer loyalty, trust, and satisfaction.

6. Do: Interact with Your Audience

It doesn’t matter if a comment is positive or negative—engaging is crucial to a successful social media marketing strategy. Responding to your audience not only shows that you care about them, but that their thoughts and opinions are important. It’s as simple as taking a few moments to start a conversation or answer a query. Doing this promptly is also key: 30 minutes should allow you enough time to think up a response without keeping your audience waiting.

7. Don’t: React in the Moment

Negative comments will appear on your posts from time to time. When this happens, you might feel like responding quickly with an equally scathing comment. This, however, can negatively impact your whole online presence. Don’t forget that these comments can be seen by a huge number of people and shared easily. By reacting rashly you could damage your brand on a wider scale than expected.

8. Do: Take Time to Craft a Measured Response

When you see a negative comment, give yourself a few minutes to step away, breathe, and put as much space as you need between yourself and social media so you can regain your composure. In the case of excessively hostile, threatening, or offensive comments, delete the comment and block the user if it seems prudent For comments that are merely irritating, resist the urge to respond unless there is an opportunity to deliver a clear brand message.

9. Don’t: Post Content That Isn’t Optimized for the Platform

You’ll likely be posting across multiple social media platforms, but you mustn’t assume your content will look good on all of them. Facebook and Twitter might seem reasonably similar, but there are subtle differences that can dramatically affect the look of your content. An image from Twitter, for example, could look awkwardly cropped on Instagram. Ensure your posts are optimized for their respective platforms.

10. Do: Check Your Posts Before Posting

Seeing how a post will look before you hit post is the only way to ensure that your content will appear in the way you want it to. It’ll take a little more time, but the benefits of professional-looking social media marketing will far outweigh that small investment.

11. Don’t: Become Complacent

It’s easy to get too comfortable when something starts going well. In the world of social media, this leads to monotonous content and a lack of diversity. These platforms are evolving at a rapid rate, so failing to try new things and keep up with changes can damage your online presence. Continuously posting the same content will bore your audience.

12. Do: Adapt Your Strategy

Staying up to date on changes in social media is essential. Regularly research the platforms you use and make any necessary adjustments to your content or overall strategy. Your audience will be excited to see new kinds of content from your brand, so always keep things fresh and interesting.

Ready for a tailor-made social media marketing strategy that’s unique to you? Get in touch with our team today to learn more about how we can help.