SOCIAL MEDIA — BASICS
Everyone these days only wants the big numbers which in their eyes represent the huge success with social media marketing. But they most definitely do not want the sweat, the effort and often the multiple frustrations that come for free on your path to social media marketing success.
We only talk about going “Viral” long before we even know what kind of value we are going to offer our followers in social media. We always complain about not getting any traffic from social media without You will not have real success, if you do not get your basics of social media marketing right in the first place. So much depends on your goals like your target audience, the brand perception you want to communicate, the content that you should use etc. The big success does never come for free! And it certainly does not come over night.
You cannot expect people to follow you if you do not provide anything of value. The simple existence of any social account will not make followers and fans flock to it. Make your accounts worth to be followed first — otherwise you are going to fail.
Most often it is the information, which you share and the content you provide which makes people interested in following you. It is not necessary that every piece of information or content is your own content. In this case content curation is a legitimate way of providing more value to your followers without having to create the content all by yourself. Never forget that social media is about what your audience wants and not about what you want to sell them.
When you are starting out you have one big problem: No one knows you exist. You have no audience to speak of. So even the best value on your accounts will pass by totally unnoticed. You need to hustle like hell to change that and get yourself in front of an audience. There are multiple ways of doing it and all take effort, time and persistence to really make an impact. Take part in conversations, follow some people you want to connect to, guest post on established blogs to borrow their audience (make sure to include your social accounts into the bio).
Most of us do not simply do social media for having fun on the social networks. We want to get people to our own site and have them consume what we provide there. But why should people visit your site, if your site is not interesting to anybody. You need to build trust and brand recognition. And one way to get there is to provide an endless stream of good informative content directly on your site. (Think about a blog, if you do not have one yet).
Social Media marketing success is not only based on the number of followers and fans you can reach by yourself. To a large part, it depends on other people spreading the word for you. But while you yourself will hopefully be. You can have the best content on your site if it is barely readable people will turn around and never bother again. And they will definitely not share it.
Whatever you want people to do: Make it clear! It is up to you to tell people what they should do. Do not expect them to be interested enough to use their own brains. It is a science in itself to perfect the call to action. Sometimes the colour of the button or the placement of the button on your site can make a huge difference. The story you tell and how you present it is crucial.
