Social Media Marketing Strategy
Social media is now the number one internet activity in America, even besting e-mail. It seems as if most peoples’ lives revolve around social media these days, so having a strong social presence is vital to new businesses. You don’t need to have 1,000,000 people liking your Facebook page in the first few months, but you do want to have some people actively engaging with your social media accounts.
Engagement
First of all, having a strong social media presence is all about engagement, not the sheer number of likes or followers you have. What good do 200,000 likes do when there are only 10 people who engage with what you post? Your posts need to invoke an emotional response, something that’s going to pull them in and force them to engage because they want desperately to share their own side of things or feel like they are part of something.
So how do we get this kind of engagement? Easy. Cater to the first followers. The first people that start following your company on social media accounts are the ones you want to really make love to—sweet, sweet, internet love. Think about it…
When someone is dancing like a nut by his or herself at a concert, they are alone for a period of time. However, eventually, one more nut comes in, the first follower. Now there’s 2 nuts dancing, and the creator of the dance readily accepts this first follower, treating him or her equally as part of the group. Now, a couple more nuts jump into the dance circle, then more, and some more, and now you’ve got a following. Nobody is considered a “nut” anymore because everyone is doing the dance. Everyone is joining in because there’s no chance of ridicule—they won’t stand out when everyone is doing it.
This is exactly how your business works! When you first start out, you are the nut dancing by yourself at a concert, and those first couple following nuts are the ones you need to embrace! You need to spend extra effort interacting with them and treat them as equals to you, not as if you are superior. These are the action-takers, the ones you want to have on your side because they will tell all of their friends about you. After that, it keeps spreading and spreading and now you have a following.
Social Media PPC
PPC stands for pay-per-click, and it is a form of advertising in which you pay the advertising platform a fee for every click that your ad gets. You probably see these on Facebook all of the time, and they can be very effective. We are going to talk only about Facebook because if you can figure out Facebook PPC, you’ll have no problem figuring it out on the other social media platforms.
First, you need to decide what you want people to do when they see your ads. You have 3 options:
- Have people come to your Facebook Page or Event Page and engage with it.
- Have people visit or engage with your website.
- Have people download your app.
This will obviously depend on your type of business. If you trying to sell a product that you absolutely know the public needs or wants to buy, then you would likely just create an ad campaign to direct them right at your website to buy said product. If your business depends on a lot of interaction to be successful, you would want to drive people to your Facebook Page.
A writer would need to drive people to his or her Facebook Page so they can interact with people and build relationships because that is where most book sales come from. Hardly anybody is going to buy your book if they don’t know who you are.
Lastly, you may want to drive people to download your app because the app is the focal point of your business. It could lead to downloads of your other apps, or it may lead them to your website. Either way, that person has a better idea of what your company does, and most importantly, they now know who you are.
So the first step before doing anything else is to figure out what option would be the best for your business. Then, it’s off to the races as you make your creatives and get them out in front of peoples’ eyes. Here’s how you run a PPC campaign:
- Build your creatives. Facebook will offer you 6 different slots to upload images, and after a bit of time passes, 1 of those 6 creatives will be deemed the most effective. From that point on, only that most effective one will be shown to people.
- Monitor the results. Once your ad campaign is live, all you can do is sit back and analyze the effectiveness of the campaign, which can sometimes require a lot of patience.
If you are only trying to get people to take one stop and buy your product, you would monitor it by seeing how many people click through compared to how many buy your product, known as the “conversion rate.”
Let’s look at an example:
You have a product you are trying to sell for $10.
It costs you $0.50 per click.
Therefore, in order for you to break even, 1 in 20 people who click on your ad have to buy your product. If more than 1 out of 20 buy it, you’re making money and the campaign is worth it. If it takes 30 people to click your ad to make a sale, you are obviously losing money. If you are losing money, it doesn’t mean your product isn’t valuable, it could just mean your website needs to be changed to induce more sales.
Another example:
You are paying $0.50 per click to your Facebook page where you want to build a fan base and interact with people. This is going to be much harder to monitor and determine if your campaign is worth its cost because you aren’t directly selling something. Therefore, you are essentially paying to brand your business, and the results of that won’t be visible until later.
Summing it Up!
You really need to define your business before you pick a social media marketing strategy. However you drive people to your social media pages, whether by PPC or organic traffic through your website, you need to cater to those first followers, and then let the rest of it take care of itself. It goes without saying that you need to be providing valuable content to the people who you interact with on your social media accounts. If you have a bunch of likes with little engagement, it’s a good indicator that you have poor content that nobody wants to read about, interact with, or buy.
In short, be a nut, embrace the first following nuts, and before you know it, you will have your loyal followers waiting for you to come up with something else.