Social media is a vitally important part of any brands marketing efforts but it isn’t always easy to optimise and run your social media marketing campaigns alongside your business operations. This is particularly the case for smaller to medium-sized businesses that may not be capable of employing a full-time member of staff to manage their social media accounts and execute an effective digital marketing strategy.

In this article, we’re going to discuss the practical implementation of Social Media. First, we will begin by discussing the importance of, and how to create an social media strategy along with how key social media management services could help you save costs and optimise your marketing efforts. Second, we will look at 5 of our top tips on how you can grow your social media profile and really make the most of everything that social media has to offer for your business, this will cover topics such as content, strategy and much more.

1) Creating a Social Media Strategy

Creating a social media strategy is the most important part of growing your social media profile so this will be the biggest point we cover on this list. So, without further ado, no matter the current size of your business or website, you should most definitely have a Social Media Marketing strategy. And no, that doesn’t just mean making a post on Facebook and being done with it. If you’re looking to achieve real results, which let’s face it we all are, then developing a strategy is essential. Not only does this keep you on track to achieve results, but provides structure to what can only be described as “madness” – as we’re sure you’ll learn.

So, where do you begin? First, you should outline what social media marketing methods to incorporate into your newly found strategy, for creating engaging content, social media optimisation, paid social advertising, graphic creation, organic social media and social media strategy to name just a few. Once you’ve created a list of components, it’s time to set goals, later creating a realistic schedule to achieve these goals. Notice the use of the word “realistic,” if these goals aren’t realistic then you’re setting yourself and your team up for disappointment.

A sustainable social media strategy beats a chaotic mess every time. This is especially true if you’re the only person devoted to working on the social media aspect of the business, saving you stress and the risk of burnout. A very basic social media strategy would be to post at least three times a week on specified platforms and monitoring the results. Next, you should aim to share engaging content several times a week based on the data you receive from your initial posts – you should use analytics to develop your marketing in real time. Throughout this process, share old and current posts on your social media accounts and interact with others on these platforms. Finally, ensure that you keep tabs on how well your content is being received and adapt accordingly, make sure that your strategy is guided by clear KPIs such as sales, reviews or engagement.

For businesses with too much on their plate, or are perhaps not confident in their social media marketing knowledge and ability, outsourcing this content can be a great idea. In particular, outsourcing content creation and content posting is a good idea. This means you only need to help establish what you want your social media marketing to achieve and then you can hand it over to the experts to help you with. In addition to this, if you’re looking to fast track your social media results, you can hire a team to manage the entire process from strategy right through to execution. This is not cheap, however, there are some Affordable Social Media Management Services and they can work wonders for your social media marketing and the growth of your business. You can do all of this work yourself, but it takes a lot of time, effort, and energy – it’s often best to leave it to the pros for this one.

2)  Creating Engaging Content

Creating engaging content is often the bread and butter of any good social media campaign and is one of the most important factors in the success of your campaign. That being said, it is amazing how many people this becomes an after thought for as they create an extensive set of goals and a strategy then end up just haphazardly posting generic information based social media posts.

You should always look to add value to the people that see your content on social media and this comes from understanding your audience. Create genuine engaging content that you would want to see as a visitor and then use that content to drive engagement and build a relationship with your audience. Content doesn’t even have to be limited to text and images, recent findings have shown that methods such as video content creation services can drive exponentially higher levels of engagement than any other content on social media.

3)  Social Media Optimisation

Your social media marketing efforts don’t need to limit their success simply to KPIs set out for your social campaign. Social media marketing can have a big impact on all other areas of your digital marketing campaign and have additional benefits beyond the platforms you are marketing on themselves. Social Media Optimisation allows companies to drive positive reviews to their brand helping improve their public image and help to outweigh any negative reviews you may have received. There are also big SEO benefits that can be seen from social media marketing, sharing the content of your website on social media helps to drive interest in it and may even lead to new backlinks for your website.

There are a bunch of experienced and dedicated social media optimisation services out there that can help your business really make the most out of their digital marketing efforts and align social media marketing with your other marketing efforts such as SEO, PPC and Email marketing.

4)  Paid Social Advertising

Social media is a great low cost way to reach your audience and certain platforms like Linkedin, TikTok and Facebook Groups have really great organic (unpaid) reach where you and rely purely on engaging, high-quality content to reach your audience. This is fantastic for marketers on a low budget but you won’t always see the best results from this. Sometimes to gain traction with your social media marketing you might need to spend a little. Most social media platforms have an easy to use paid marketing function that works in a similar way to PPC/Google advertising for example. The good thing about paid social media marketing is that you can create hyper-focused ads that allow you to target only the people interested in your services or products.

Because paid social advertising can be so narrowly focused on just a handful of people it tends to be cheaper than traditional paid forms of advertising and there is even several cheap social media advertising services out there that you can take advantage of to help you along the way.

5)  Social Media Graphic Design

It’s no secret that social media marketing is all about visuals, you could create the most engaging wall of text ever written but the chances are it won’t capture the attention of anyone just scrolling through their social media feeds. People respond, react and engage with strong visuals on social media so this should absolutely be a key part of your content creation strategy for social media marketing. There are lots of fantastic ways you can create engaging content that visually stands out from your competition, services such as Canva have made it really easy for even someone with no design experience to create captivating and engaging graphics and videos for their audience on social media.

Services such as Canva are great and you can really get back what time you invest into them with results for your social campaigns. That being said, sometimes you don’t have the time for even a platform such as Canva or you may want to add a little more uniqueness and polish to your designs, this is where a social media posts graphic design service can come in handy.

Final Words On Picking The Best Social Media Strategies and Tips For Your Business

This article has just been a very abridged version of some of the things you can do to optimise and grow your social media presence and marketing efforts. These were our top 5 suggestions on some of the things we think would have the biggest impact on your business, brand and marketing efforts. If there is anything else you’d like to know more about then do not hesitate to get in touch or if there is anything you’d like to see added to the list then give us a shout. Social media marketing is something that is incredibly flexible and reactive, as always, look at your data, understand your audience and plat what you want to achieve with your campaign, happy marketing everyone!