One of the main goals of Social Media Marketing (SMM) is to increase brand awareness and reach more customers, but it's not as simple as putting an ad on Facebook and waiting for the sales to come in. This post is about what small trade business coach owners need to know about SMM before they start.
In a way that's similar to SEO, the best social media marketing tactics use a mix of both “organic” and “paid” posts. Organic social media marketing is the process of making high-quality, useful, and interesting posts to get more people to interact with the content without paying to promote it. Since organic marketing is free, you have to work hard to get on people's newsfeeds. This means you should be careful about how much your posts are about selling, because content that is mostly about selling is rarely liked, and engagement won't happen if people don't enjoy it. Organic promotion isn't always easy and can take a lot of time, but it's important.
Paid or sponsored social media marketing is when you pay a social networking site to target a certain demographic and put your post where it will be seen by that group the most. Notice how it says “Boosted Post” at the top of this post? That's how we know we paid to get this information to the right people who will care about it.
You can also use paid ads, which work the same way and are made to show up in the feeds of people who are most likely to be interested in what you're offering. For example, you could choose to target 25-year-old guys in Wyoming who like fishing and make more than $40,000 a year with a paid ad on Facebook. You can be as specific as looking for women in the US who follow @KrispyKreme and have talked about donuts on Twitter.
Capitalize on speed!
Making an Organic post timely and useful is a great way to get a lot of people to read it. The tweet that Oreo sent out during Super Bowl XLVII is a great example of a timely Organic post that went viral. When the power went out in the stadium for 34 minutes, the cookie company took advantage of the situation by posting a picture of an Oreo with the words “You can still dunk in the dark.” The digital marketing company behind the Oreo magic, 360i, says that the tweet was shared more than 20,000 times on Facebook and retweeted more than 20,000 times. It also got more than 525 million television impressions, which is five times as many people as watched the Super Bowl.
Use pictures, movies and GIFs
Using pictures, videos, and animated GIFs in your posts and ads can give your brand more energy online. GIF means “graphics interchange format.” It is a compressed image file format that plays a looping animation that looks like a movie. Photos, videos, and GIFs are more likely to be shared and bring more attention to your site than text-only posts. Buzzfeed, a popular social news and entertainment site, does well by using pictures, videos, and GIFs to get people to visit their site, which is full of even more pictures, videos, and GIFs.
