If you are a small business owner, you might be overwhelmed by all the tasks you have to accomplish every day. You are most likely handling most of the business aspects such as accounting, everyday business tasks, and the marketing of your business. You probably heard this a thousand times, and many people are saying that you should get your business online and start tapping into the social web to start communicating with your target audience. How do you start, and how are you going to manage it?
Once you start, there is really no turning back, and it can quickly turn into a massive snowball without losing any momentum. But how can you effectively use the web to ensure you are getting the best ROI for all your efforts? With a simple social media marketing strategy you will be able to restore some of your time and also be active on the social web. Here’s a couple of tips that can help you achieve this.
Manage your time effectively
Most people that are using Facebook for marketing purposes combines pleasure with business. This can really be a problem because when you are updating your Facebook business page, nothing is stopping you to check out your personal news feed to get a glimpse of what others in your network are up to. You can get quickly sidetracked with all the updates containing videos, images, and links on your news feed. With this said, it is best if you designate separate times for your personal and business profile. The first step with doing it this way is by knowing exactly how you are going to spend every minute that you are going to use for your social media marketing campaign.
Your target audience
Time in today’s competitive marketing is extremely valuable. Make sure that you are spending your time on the social media channels that your target market can be found on. If you are only using your time to Tweet updates and pinning pictures on Pinterest when your target market spends most of their time on Facebook, you are basically wasting quite a lot of time chasing rainbows. Research and follow your customers on the social media channels that they are using.
Automation
There are many online tools available such as Hootsuite that you can use to automate some of your social media updates. Hootsuite allows you to schedule tweets and updates in advance and this can really be great time saver. Rather than visiting all of your social media channels a few times everyday, Hootsuite and other related applications can manage most of the popular social media channels within one dashboard.
Scheduling a couple of tweets and updates can save you time, but it shouldn’t be used all the time, and it must be monitored. You need to be available to respond to mentions, questions, and comments. It is really bad customer service if you are not answering the concerns that your customers are having. It is even worse when your customers are leaving comments online about their problems and you ignore those requests.
Measuring your campaign
In the end, you won’t know what is working and what isn’t if you are not measuring your efforts. Monitor and analyze the conversations on the social media channels that you are using. This can provide you with insight on where you need improvement, and on what you should focus more attention to.
With a simple social media marketing strategy like this tied together with your digital marketing campaign can help you get things under your control.
