5 Social Media Marketing Tips For Beginners

What is social media marketing?

Social media marketing is the process of building awareness about you, your products or services through the various social media channels.

The ultimate goal of any social media marketing campaign is to drive traffic to a website, increase the visibility of a product, gain more social media followers or find more customers.

The most popular social media networks today are: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram and Linkedin.

Why is social media marketing important?

Social Media marketing is important because:

It’s the fastest way to spread the word about a new product, service or news item – A tweet can go rival in minutes and spread a message around the Word faster than TV or other traditional media

It’s a trend – Millions of people spend a good amount of their time on social media networks so if you ‘need them’ you know where to find them

It’s the new marketing – Back in the old days, marketers found out that many people spend time in their cars driving so they thought of the billboards on the roads. Today people are spending time on social media so as a marketer you have to start thinking this way too.

It’s the new influencer – Recent studies show that social media is becoming a great sales channel and more and more companies are stating that they get customers from Facebook or Twitter.

Social Media Marketing tips for beginners

How can you take advantage of social media? How can beginners build a proper social media presence fast?

1. Decide which social media platform(s) to use

As a beginner to social media you have to choose one or two social media platforms and concentrate on those rather than trying to work on all platforms at the same time. This is a mistake that many beginners do and at the end they quit without having any benefit.

A nice way to find out which platform is best suited to your niche is to find the influencers and analyse where they have success.

For example, find out the leaders in your niche and check out the number of Facebook fans, twitter followers, Google+ followers, Pinterest followers etc.

If they have 100,000 Facebook fans but only 1000 twitter followers then this is a good indication that FB is more suitable for your niche than twitter.

It is also a sign that you are more likely to have success with FB than twitter, so you can use your time more efficiently and engage more on FB rather than any other platform.

2. Optimize your social media profiles

Once you decide which social media tools you will use (at least for the beginning), the next step is to optimise your profiles on those sites. By optimizing your profiles you increase your chances of getting more followers and it is also a good way to boost your SEO efforts.

Some general rules that apply to all sites are:

Use a real photo, showing your face – avoid using animals, places or anything that is not real. Social media is about connecting people and if you want to have a trusted profile you need to get out of your cage and put your face on the web!

Write a good description about yourself or your company – What is your background or expertise? What are you proud off? Mention this is your profile.

Give an indication to users what type of info you will share – Although this is not necessary, I like to read in profiles what kind of info to expect from the particular person.  For example in my twitter profile I wrote: “..tweeting SEO, social media, internet marketing tips and advice”.

Include a link to your website (where applicable) – On Facebook include a link in the ‘About section’, on Twitter and Pinterest in the ‘Web site Section’, on Google+ in the ‘Contributor to’ section. In other words, do use your social media profiles for SEO purposes as well.

I suggest you read SEO boost your social media profiles article which includes more examples and instructions on what you have to do to each social media site for more exposure.

3. Connect your website or blog with your social media pages

After you have your social media profiles ready the next step is to connect your website with your social media pages. There is a certain procedure to follow for each platform and it is very important that you do it correctly.

A correct binding between the two means that search engines and social media websites know which website corresponds to which social media page.

For example, when I created the Google+ page for reliablesoft.net, Google+ did not know that this was the official page of the site until I have added the publisher verification code on my site.

4. Add social media buttons on your website

Besides connecting your website with the respective business pages on social media, you also need to add social media buttons on your website so that readers can easily share your content.

Depending on the platform there are many ways and plugins to do that, I suggest you search Google using “how to add social media buttons to xxxxxx” – replace xxxxx with the platform your website is based.

For example, if you are using wordpress search google for “how to add social media buttons to wordpress”.

As a general rule of thumb, keep the buttons above the fold to increase exposure and have in mind that larger buttons get more clicks than smaller buttons.

5. Find and follow the influencers in your niche

So far we have selected the most appropriate social media tools for our niche, optimized our social media profiles, connected our website with the social media pages and added the buttons on our pages for more interaction.

The next obvious step is to find people to follow but most importantly to gradually build our tribe of followers.

I would say that there are 5 basic steps to follow to get more followers and these are described in points 6-10 below.

Before getting into that, you should first find and follow the influencers in your niche.

It is almost certain that they will not follow you back because you have a new account with no followers but doing so is important for 3 reasons:

Social media platforms will use this information to make suggestions on who to follow so by following popular people in your niche is like telling them that you are also in that niche.

 When you follow popular people who are likely to get followed by others as well. A trick many people use is to follow the followers of a popular person because they know that some will follow them back as well.

They will most probably share important and useful information about the niche so you have a chance to learn something new and re-share that with your followers.