6 Best Practices for Excellent Social Media Marketing Results

Because of the overwhelming popularity of Social Media Marketing (SMM) in the current business environment, you can find a huge number of companies looking to make use of this effective tool.  However, there are those who feel that setting up an advertising/marketing tool is all that it takes in order to benefit from its ability to assist your website hits and sales.  With SMM, nothing could be further from the truth!

Social media marketing, by its very nature, requires the same diligence each day if you’re going to be able to reap its benefits. Here are some of the things that you’ll need to carefully consider:

Focusing on your audience is the most important thing in SMM

1.   Don’t ignore any reasonable comment, either positive or negative.  Think of SMM as a place in which you are in the same physical room as your readers.  If someone over in the next chair (say, in a dining room) tells you that they don’t like your shoes, are you just going to ignore them as if they weren’t sitting there? This makes everyone feel as if they are a part of your company’s maintenance and evolution.

2.   Pay close attention to everything that is said.  Don’t overlook input from others in lieu of  directing everyone towards your own agenda. Rather, you need to let your audience tell you what they want!

3.   Make people, who follow you, feel that they’re someone special.  You can do this by offering incentives to join and occasional ‘rewards’ for participation.  This gives you the opportunity to praise your readers and to show others that you value your social media contributors highly.

4.   Strive for unique content that is viewed as informative as well as engaging.  Trying to teach people without being engaging is like serving tofu at Christmas.  Folks would get good nutrition if they bothered to stay around in the first place (which they won’t).

5.   Get readers to ‘preach’ your message to others.  In order to do this, you must have a complete understanding of your readership.  If you can appeal to them on a deep level, they will tell others about your company.  You can even reward referrals on a periodic basis (in order to keep costs down).

6.   Above all – measure your results! One of the most common mistakes that business owners make is treating social media marketing as if you’re throwing wet objects against a wall and waiting to see “what sticks”.  The only way to drive an SMM campaign towards maximum effectiveness is to monitor your results on a daily basis. You’ll save a lot of time by observing what is working and what is not, in real time – not months later.

Which best practice will you be adopting to ensure you’re getting excellent social media results?