If you’re an entrepreneur, author, artist, actor, singer, model, nutritionist, trainer – or own a business – you will need to know these various marketing rules for each of your social media platforms.
Social media plays an indispensable part in business marketing in this day and age – the primary reason for this being that when you are building a marketing strategy, you go where people are.
These days, people are increasingly to be found on social media – more reliably than in most other media platforms.
So if social media isn’t part of your marketing campaigns, you’re clearly going to be missing out on a large share of your potential audience.
If you’re new to my site, hi there! I started my career as a writer and creative director in NY’s biggest advertising and marketing agencies – rising up to become a Senior VP in my late twenties. I then quit to build a career as a bestselling wellness author with 2 million books sold and 1.5 million followers in social media. Plus I work as a 1-on-1 business consultant – helping people with their marketing and branding.
In this article I will be sharing the main marketing rules to help you with your various social media platforms.
Marketing via social media is, of course, not always as simple as it might appear on the surface. People who are active on the primary social platforms tend to be on average more media-aware than most, which does present some challenges.
Advertising was easier when it first started appearing on TV, when the natural authority of a person appearing on a screen could be all the incentive anyone needed to buy a product.
Today, you need to use social media intelligently to sidle past people’s natural skepticism. (And if you have kids you need to make sure your kids use social media safely. )
If you use Twitter in a personal capacity, you will occasionally get promoted tweets in your timeline, and some of them will make perfect sense. And if you tweet a lot about baking, then there’s a good chance you’ll get tweets from businesses that have a focus on baking.
On the other hand, some promoted tweets will show up in your timeline that make little sense on the face of it.
Remember that someone has paid for these tweets, and if you’re scrolling past them asking “Why am I seeing this?”, you’re probably not alone.
If people feel that a promoted tweet is simply wasting their time, they’ll not only scroll past it, they may well block you as well. You may sign up to use promoted tweets, and aim to promote what you think are your best posts, but think a little more. Look up and down your timeline for content that is likely to make people want to know more.
The best tweets to highlight to people who don’t yet follow you:
Remember: Growing your engagements is a key reason for promoting tweets.
From one day to the next, Instagram’s algorithm can be your friend or your enemy. Based on very little that anyone can explain, a post that is getting a lot of engagement one day can disappear from view the next.
There is one sure way to ensure that your followers see what you’re posting! It’s by posting it as a Story.
When you post in Stories, your post will appear at the top of your followers’ screens when they sign in. As a result, you’ll be asking it much more likely that your post will be seen.
But…it’s not just about how often you use Stories, either. The better you make these posts, the more incentive people have to stay and watch. So put the effort in to make them look and feel professional.
If you don’t already know, learn how to add music to Instagram Story posts, because the more senses are engaged in following something, the more likely it is to stick in people’s minds. And consider making some of your Stories sponsored, too. This increases the chance that they will be seen by people who don’t follow you, but are interested in the field your business occupies.
As we noted earlier, social media ads are being seen by an audience that has grown increasingly cynical about advertising. Many of the people you want to reach have expressed an aversion to being “sold” to. Telling them how good your product is, or expecting them to sit through a video where you circuitously talk around how good it is, will get a frosty reaction – and this is where Facebook Groups come in.
The advantage of Groups: They are quite freeform.
And you can have them as a community in addition to your business page.
You can make a group for product queries or for users to post testimonials.
Plus you can start a group which is simply about a topic.
Explore a topic that your business has a connection to – and offer the space for people to post queries, with an open forum for answers.
You can make mention of this group in your company literature. Be sure to draw attention to the fact that you have specific, group-only bonus codes giving customers money off. People may not like being sold to, but everyone enjoys discount prices.
Smart use of social media will set companies out above the competition. So if you know how to harness these free services, then you’ll surely see the benefits they can bring.
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