Avoid Mistakes & Build A Web Presence: My Top 10 Essential Social Media Marketing Tips

Branding your company through social media marketing has become necessary. I’m Mollie Paige, head of social media marketing for New Media Compass and an expert at building brand awareness, consumer loyalty and increasing sales through social media marketing.

These are my essential tips to get you started: 

1. Interact - The key word in social media is social. Interact with your market base by answering questions, asking questions and sharing the advice and content of others. You have to share the love to earn it back.
2. Quality over Quantity - It doesn’t matter that you have 1,000 twitter followers or Facebook fans if none of them are potential consumers of your product or brand. Utilize tools like twitter’s Advanced Search to target users within your market. 
3. Campaign Creatively - A great way to promote brand awareness is through a creative social media campaign. Learn from veterans Kraft and Old Spice, two brands who have effectively used social media campaigns to boost their brand.
4. Keyword Kindly - Yes, SEO and keyword usage is important for ranking high in search engine results. But please be kind with your usage, because nobody wants to check out your product if your blog reads, Sausage cooked broiled sausage boiled food eat feed sausage sausage sausage. Leave the overloads to the tags and only insert keywords where they will be useful in your post. Take this post for example, how many search terms could get someone just beginning in social media marketing to see this page? Catch my drift?
5. Learn from Others - If you’re a complete newbie to the world of social media marketing, there is no reason why you should have to blindly create a campaign. Do your research and find successful campaigns that are already working and learn from them.
6. Change your Perspective - Think about your posts, your layout, your campaigns etc. from the perspective of a potential consumer. If you were reading that post or interacting with that page, how would it make you feel? Would you be enticed  to make a purchase? If you think what you’re posting sounds bad, then it probably does, so cut it out!
7. Create Content - The best thing to post about on your social media networks? Your own business! But if you have only one blog post or article to link to, people are going to get bored really fast. You are the expert in your field, so prove it by writing blog posts about new product updates, helpful tips, behind the scenes action and anything else you can to spread the word about your company and keep people interested.
8. Adapt your Posts- When making a post, consider the social media site on which you’re posting. While it is simple to link your Facebook to your twitter so that you only need to post on one, it’s not recommended. Twitter is for short, frequent posting and has a completely different style than Facebook. If you want to post the same content to both sites, remember to adapt your post to each one individually.
9. Use your Site- Your website should be active with at least constant blog postings. Showing a potential consumer that your site is current and utilized will make them feel more comfortable about approaching your company. Web pages can get lost and sit dormant on the internet for years and people want to know that they’re looking at a product that is currently available.
10. Spread yourself as Needed- You should spread your business across as many social media channels as you have the time and energy for, and only if they are suitable for your company. Don’t create a ton of social media sites if you’re never going to check back on them. Be practical and active with the sites you select. I suggest at least getting yourself a: Facebook, Twitter and blog via WordPress.