5 Tips To Starting Social Media Marketing

Social media is trending among brand managers, retailers and business owners right now. At this point, with nearly one-third of all businesses saying that social media helps their business it is difficult to defend the “wait and see” attitude that’s been prevalent among those same groups.

Unfortunately the mystic of social media has many in charge of extending their brands’ message – flat-footed. Too anchored in old style and too fearful to pivot into the fray that we have seen social media become.

To help my clients I focus on consistency and measurability. Consistency because diffused marketing can be worse than no marketing and measurability because its essential to manage anything in marketing – you must know what is working so you can do more of it!

Here are 5 steps to get you going in social media -

Establish Your Brand Voice – This is fairly basic stuff, but before you go out on Twitter and Facebook to promote your brand, you have to decide what exactly your brand stands for. I’m continually surprised by how few brands have actually taken this step. Oddly enough, it is essential for any type of marketing to work – no only social media.

Invite Conversation - Social media is two-way communication. Use that to your advantage. What your fans say about your brand has far more credibility than what you say.

Stay Relevant – Stay on message unless the opportunity to divert brings value and interest to your audience. It also protects your social media communication to appear less “canned” and more conversational.

Seek Cohesiveness, Not Consistency - cohesion is a bit looser than consistency and involves rallying your messaging around a brand principle (see Brand Voice above).

Know Your Audience - Social media provides a wealth of information about what your target demographic is interested in, so use that information to develop a content strategy. In doing so, you may find that you have to tweak the strategy a bit because of new information.

Measurability is a whole different topic. And commonly follows the conversation about the basics I’ve covered here. So we’ll touch on social media measurability later.