Top Social Media Marketing Tips and Tricks

Set Up Your Goals

Having a marketing goal like increased engagement, more clicks, conversions, etc. is one of the most important driving forces behind your brand decisions. That's why setting up goals is essential. It's also important that your marketing goals align with that of the organization. Here are some things that you need to focus on. 

• Make sure that the goals are quantitative and measurable.
• Make sure you follow a consistent timeline and adhere to a strict deadline.
• Make sure that your marketing decisions are SMART. They need to be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based. These will help you support your long-term goals.

Alongside this, you'll also have to set a north star metric. It helps focus on a particular goal or acts as a point of reference to ensure that your team follows the right path. It also helps show your marketing campaign's progress and holds the team and you accountable for providing a satisfactory result. Some popular north star metrics are--increased conversion rates, lead generation, app downloads, etc.

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Understand Your Audience

With social media, you can interact, engage, and develop your relationship with your audience. It will help you understand your audience, their needs, wants, likes, and dislikes. This way, you can create products/ services that can fulfill your audiences' needs. Some of the ways you can do this are: 

• Exploring surveys that help determine the issues faced by your audience
• Understanding the age demographics of your audience
• Communicate with them in forums, comments
• Taking their feedback and suggestions

Some of the most popular platforms and the audience that uses them are: 

Simplilearn - Working professionals and graduates

Unacademy - High school graduates

Byju's - High school students

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Choosing the Right Social Media Platform

While choosing a social media platform for your brand, you need to ask yourself questions like why you're using/choosing that platform, what kind of audience will see your content, is there content unique to the platform you're choosing? 

If you have the answers to these questions, you'll find yourself with a social media platform for your marketing needs. Let's talk about some of the popular social media platforms. 

• LinkedIn: A professional network best suited for B2B audiences
• Facebook: A network for content related to news and entertainment
• Instagram: A platform for visual content 
• Pinterest: A platform for static images that can help drive traffic to your blog

Setting Up a Social Media Calendar

A social media calendar will help you decide the message you want to convey to your audience. The calendar will also help determine the type of content you'll be posting on your brand's social media platform. It enables collaboration between team members, understanding what works and what doesn't, and distributing resources effectively. 

 Some of the most popular types of content you can post are: 

• Competitions: Competitions can be used to drive engagement from your audience. It can also encourage your followers to share your content and help grow your presence on the platform
• Polls: These enable data collection from users, and encourages users to perform a particular action. It can also help understand your audience, what they like and dislike, receive their feedback, and more
• Videos and live streams: Visual storytelling methods like videos and live streams will help you improve your relationship with your audience, to increase the response rate, to humanize your brand, and more

Using Social Media Marketing Tools

Tools like Buffer, HootSuite, BuzzSumo, and IFTTT, will help you create high-quality content, attract new users, drive engagement, and much more. It'll also help plan, create, and schedule content on your social media content calendar. 

These tools can also help with: 

• Generating leads
• Creating email lists
• Finding a relevant audience for your brand
• Creating a buyer persona
• Providing insights on what works and what doesn't

Visual Storytelling

With the help of images and videos, you can quickly share your message with your audience, engage with them, grab the attention of potential customers, and much more. And thanks to the simplicity of the medium and no language barriers, your content can be interesting and entertaining to anyone watching. More importantly, visual content is more likely to go viral. 

Here's an example of visual content from Simplilearn. 

Paying For Advertising

By paying for ads, you can find, target, and reach your audience. It can help you reach your audience with ease, improve your brand's visibility, provide excellent results, and much more. 

The pay-per-click model makes sure you're able to improve targeting by controlling who sees your ad, high return on investment, etc. You can also choose from several different factors based on which the audience can be targeted: age, location, gender, etc. 

Just make sure you don't overdo it. 

Your audience could get overexposed to your posts; advertising could get too expensive, you could also have more competition than you may be able to deal with. 

Newsjacking

Newsjacking enables you to use current events to promote your brand's content while helping improve brand awareness. It also helps shine a spotlight on your products/ services. With this, you also propagate the message that your brand keeps up with current events and that your product is relevant. And this can lead to improved engagement and web traffic. 

A/B Testing

A/B testing involves comparing copies, creatives, CTAs, and other components of the posts you put up on social media. Considering how audiences can react to different content forms, A/B testing enables you to determine what worked best for your brand. 

You can perform A/B testing by varying location, age, gender, education, audience interest, etc.

Communities and Influencers

Joining communities helps you interact with an audience of similar interests and other organizations belonging to your industry. You can also grow to become an authority within the industry. Active participation helps create an audience that can become potential brand advocates. 

Partnering up with influencers helps bring your brand in front of an all-new audience. Seeing the influencer collaborate with your brand would also help improve the authenticity and audience's trust in your brand. 

Measuring and Analyzing Results

Tracking and measuring your marketing campaigns are very important. This can be made possible with the help of tools like Sprout Social, Buffer, HootSuite, Google Analytics, etc. 

These tools help you track metrics on a weekly, monthly, or daily basis. 

Some of the metrics you can track are: 

• Facebook: Reach and engagement
• Twitter: Impressions, retweets, and mentions
• LinkedIn: Clicks impressions and interactions
• Instagram: Likes, comments and mention 
• Pinterest: Engagement and impressions

Using Social Media to Your Advantage

A strong social media presence can actually be helpful during your job search. First, decide what accounts you want to keep private and which ones will be public. With that in mind, remember that anything posted on social media can always become public. Although your personal accounts may be more relaxed and focused on other aspects of your life, always be prepared that a potential employer can see your content and refrain from posting anything questionable.

Public accounts can still let your personality shine through and don’t have to be strictly work-related. After all, it is social media. But you’ll also want to use these platforms as an opportunity to build your own personal brand and advance your career. Post and share content related to the industry you’re pursuing to show that you’re passionate and knowledgeable in that particular field.

Aside from what you share and post, consider the photos you share, too. Anything inappropriate should be avoided completely, and when it comes to your main profile photos, consider using your LinkedIn photo across all of your social media channels. Using a professional, clear, and high-resolution photo is a much better choice than using a low-quality vacation photo or questionable photo from an old holiday party, for instance.

Social Media Tips: Things to Avoid

One of the worst things you can do on social media when you're job hunting is post content that is blatantly offensive, or even has the potential to be. Many people use social media as a platform to voice their opinions, which is understandable. However, when you’re job hunting, it is important to keep things as neutral as possible. You may post something that you don’t see as problematic, but that someone else may take offense to. Other times, people may post commentary in an attempt at being humorous, but instead, can also offend others. Steering clear of hot button issues entirely, including things like religion and politics, can also help you to play it safe. You should also go through any past posts and edit (or completely delete) anything controversial. 

Avoid being pessimistic or consistently posting content that can be construed as negative. This also includes being rude, combative, using all caps (which can be interpreted as shouting), arguing with others, and so on. If you have doubts as to whether you should post something, or if you don’t think it’s something you’d want a potential employer to read, avoid posting it altogether. 

You should also avoid bad mouthing anyone on social media, and especially on your public accounts, which can result in poor first impressions. It is especially important not to badmouth people or companies you’ve worked with, regardless of the situation. Focus on upbeat, positive posts only.

Failing to proofread your content before posting it can be another big mistake. While your posts don’t necessarily have to be completely free of errors, posts that consistently have spelling and grammar errors can easily be a turn-off to employers.

That was all about Social media tips!

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Conclusion

Now that we've covered the top social media marketing tips and tricks for 2020, you can take the next step by taking up Simplilearn's Post Graduate Program in Digital Marketing and making a splash in Digital Marketing. 

With this course, you can learn about popular tools such as Crazy Egg, Feng-GUI, SEMrush, Buffer, and MailChimp. You can also prepare yourself for OCMA, Google Ads, Facebook, HootSuite, and HubSpot exams. 

Do you have any questions for us? Please mention it in the comment section of the "Top Social Media Marketing Tips and Tricks" article, and we'll have our experts answer it for you right away.