The ever-increasing social media usage of people has transformed almost every aspect of our lives. May it be daily cooking recipes or tutorials to remove a car dent, we watch out social media platforms to gain knowledge and learn hacks.
According to GlobalWebIndex’s 2018 research, a person on average spends almost 2 hours and 22 minutes while using social media per day. Moreover, 42% of the global audience actively uses social media daily. These mighty statistics clearly show our addiction and dependency on social media. Brands and businesses today are readily using social media to put forward their word and market themselves digitally. This has created the need and motivated us to compile all the Dos and Don’ts of Social Media Marketing.
Social media might sound like an informal channel to deliver your words to the masses, but it does still hold some essential practices and ethics. Here is what you need to know and understand:
The Dos and Don’ts of Social Media Marketing
Let’s first understand the don’ts of social media marketing to better analyse the dos.
Don’t Spam
We truly understand how eager you are to spread your word and target masses, but you cannot just spam right away. Social media users do not always want to hear from you, they can easily reach you out when they feel like. Therefore, you do not need to flood their inboxes with promotional messages unless they do subscribe for it.
Don’t Sound Salesy
Marketing, especially on social media, is not always about selling products and services but social media marketing is to make conversions possible. By conversion, we refer to a specific action that leads to business benefit; website traffic, video views etc.
Your social media interaction must not sound salesy, you do not always have to sell entities associated with your brand.
Don’t Use a Poor Copy
Social media marketing is about attracting potential customers at the right time, with the right message. Thus, the copy of the marketing message or advertisement needs to be on point!
Avoid spelling and grammatical errors as per to bring forward the best of your work in the most appropriate ways. Moreover, the message needs to be engaging and must consist of facts. Fake scripted content is a big no in social media marketing.
Don’t Ignore Any Social Media Platform
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn etc are among the commonly known and used social media platforms. You being a brand cannot just ignore the importance and reach of these social media platforms for marketing. Each one of these is important for a business in their respective ways.
If you tend to ignore these commonly used platforms, you might be losing a great proportion of your potential customers. Thus, you must use most of these to engage with your prospects and put forward your word in the right manner.
Don’t Ignore Comments or Queries
Social media users expect businesses and brands to answer their queries online. They also often ask around in social media communities to get their brand-related queries answered.
You as a business owner or brand, cannot ignore your prospect’s and customer’s comments and queries. If you leave your customers hanging in there with questions, this will soon give birth to ambiguities and you might suffer as a brand.
To overcome this, you need to actively answer comments and provide solutions to customers.
Don’t Forget to Link
Social media marketing is done to facilitate conversions and links makes this possible. You as a social media marketer need to add important links to your social media postings to make conversions possible.
A perfect way to add links is to use monetisation options and embed call to actions to redirect social media users and make conversions possible.
Don’t Just Post Text
Social media platforms are colourful that require you to utilise multiple types of content to spread your messages. One of the most important and prominent features of social media include infotainment. This means that the social media postings are good to go only if they provide information, entertain and enlighten users in a creative way. This is the reason why only text-based posts do not appeal to social media users in the best ways.
To make things work, you need to create social media posts by using images, videos, slideshows etc. the creative, the better!
Don’t Be Monotonous
Just as mentioned above, social media is colourful and full of life and you cannot stand right there to bore the audience. Remember not to be monotonous with your tone either while answering queries or designing content. You do not have to sound robotic either, learn to empathise, and sound like a human.
The Dos of Social Media Marketing:
Do Keep Every Information Updated
Social media is real-time, and so do users expect instant answers to their queries. Basics of a brand or business must be present and updated on every social media platform that it uses to acquire leads. NAP citations in this regard play a vital role, by adding a name, address and phone numbers to every post that you design and publish, you can put forward the updated information frequently so that users acknowledge it.
Moreover, if you are changing your location or contact details, you may create a separate post to highlight it and bring the changes into the knowledge of your followers.
Do Maintain an Active Presence
An active social media presence is all that brands and businesses need to create awareness and later run the sales funnel. Even if you as a label do not have content specially created to publish on social media, try sharing blogs and relevant content from other authentic sources to maintain your active presence.
Do Bring Variety
Your social media platforms must not have a monotonous posting history. Since social media is colourful, you need to create content by utilising multiple genres and types. Post videos, images, animations, blogs etc to break to monotony and bring in leads. A creative approach can make you stand out among your competition on social media but that certainly does not mean to overload users with the bulk of the content.
Do Engage Actively
Just as an active presence is important, active engagement matters as well. You cannot just keep your prospects hanging in there waiting for you to answer their comments and inbox messages. Great customer support is all that you need to engage actively and build a valuable relationship with the prospects.
Do Remember That No Reaction Is Also A Reaction
You do need to engage actively but this does not mean that you must answer rants and add fuel to the fire. In times of social media crisis, you deliberately need not to respond to any negative comments unless you know how to tactically handle them well.
Here the best thing to do is to not give a reaction and wait till the storm calms down.
Do Use Multiple Social Media Platforms
Social media platforms are diverse in features and each one of them has a different outreach and user interaction. Social media marketing requires you to utilise all possible social media platforms that actively support your niche. The aim is to engage with as many prospects as possible and spread the marketing messages in the right formats.
Use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn etc to get in touch with maximum leads out there in the market and try to maximise business benefits in the best ways.
Do Add Location Tags
Location tags play a vital role in ranking your business in local results and helps social media users to locate your business easily. Recent researches have declared that 94% of the millennials tend to view products and services online but despite businesses having e-stores, they still go out and purchase from the stores. Thus, location tags are a great way to answer location-based queries and redirect users to the right locations.
Do Consider Automation Software
Social media automation has helped social media marketers to actively publish and post online on social media platforms. These software make your task easy by enabling you to schedule social media posts for publishing later. In other words, by using these you do not have to login every time on various social media accounts to publish content.
All the dos and don’ts of social media marketing suggest you maintain a balanced image of your brand or business online. Just remember to keep your social media handles in a good shape to convert maximum leads successfully. Follow the dos and don’ts of social media marketing and there you go, you can efficiently make your social media game strong!
Need someone to help you with it? We know the art of social media marketing, comment below to start a conversation!
