Want to market your business on social media but don’t know how to manage multiple accounts? When should you upload promotional posts? Or should you make personal engagements too?
How will you advertise your brand? Find answers to all such queries in this comprehensive social media marketing article.
No matter what your business deals in either selling household products, mothering gears (for example nanny cams), kitchen tools, or how it is growing, social media profile marketing is a must if you want to boost your sales.
However, if employing an agency is too expensive or not worth the cost, you have to supervise social media marketing yourself. Here are some tips that will help you manage your social media profiles without using an agency.
1. Spreading Brand Awareness Is Your Goal
While you might have individual or company-specific goals of your own, the ultimate aim of social media profile marketing is to familiarize people with your brand.
The product or service you specialize in should automatically have your name tagged, for example, photocopying and Xerox brand. Through awareness, you will establish your brand’s value.
To do that on social media, you need to stand out among the plethora of similar companies and connect with your audience. Try different ways in which you can establish your unique feature in the minds of the viewers.
Which feature of your brand do they love the most? Which feature do they want to improve? Your goals will comprise all these, and present you in a new and exciting profile on social media.
2. Use Free Social Media Profile Management Tools
Are you quite busy managing the company? Don’t have time to check social media every now and then? Social media profile monitoring tools are here to rescue you.
You can choose from a variety of free and premium plans for these tools to manage multiple social media profiles for one company. The most popular among social media profile management tools are Buffer, SproutSocial, Hootsuite, and BuzzSumo.
The Buffer app is a centralized tool which allows you to manage all your social media profiles by logging in to a single Buffer account. You can add your Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to your Buffer profile and schedule posts there.
Hootsuite can be run a number of browsers, including Chrome and iOS while SproutSocial helps you track your entire social media marketing campaign.
3. Make Your Content Different For Each Platform
A significant part of social media marketing is content marketing. The content of your social media profile or page will attract traffic and retain it. Be it audio-visual or blog, the content is first based on a textual structure that is modified to the desired medium.
How should you define your content marketing strategy for different types of social media profiles? Simple, tell a story. Your brand content should appeal to the emotion of the customers and make them feel that you genuinely care for them.
Should you prepare the same content for all platforms? No. Your audience will vary from platform to platform and with it, your engagement rate.
For Instagram, focus on attractive but meaningful visuals with short, pithy one-liners. Facebook is mostly about sharing opinions and engaging with audiences on a more personal level. Hence, your content will vary accordingly.
Want to hear a pro tip? Partner up with influencers on each social media platform. They will promote your brand at a much lesser price than agencies and do a better job.
4. Engage With Your Audience
In continuation to the previous hack, we emphasize on the main strategy of marketing for all social media profiles: connecting with the clients.
Gone are the days when people thought that social media was hampering interpersonal ties. 2020 was the year of networking and personal interactions to form long-term bonds. 2021 will be no less. The number of clicks on your posts will determine the overall engagement of your brand.
Some simple ways to connect with your audience are replying to their comments on your posts, following them back, and commenting on their posts as well.
However, these are only basic strategies. If you want deeper and enriched connections, you have to curate posts to match the pulse of your customer. Take Starbucks, for example. They regularly respond to their customers’ feedback, mention them in their posts which are often relatable, and re-share good user reviews.
5. Auto-Schedule Your Posts
When you manage social media profiles and platforms for business, time is the key. How popular your posts are depending on how well you can do time management.
Just as they have prime-time for television shows, social media also has its prime time, meaning when your audience will be most active. However, not all time slots are optimal for everybody, and you have to choose a time for updates based on your product or service.
However, you might not be available to post content on prime time always. Hence, auto-scheduling helps. Using the social media profile management tools mentioned above, you can schedule your posts ahead of time and gain reach.
6. Make Use of Paid and Non-paid Targeted Social Media Marketing Ads
The targeted ads you see on Google and other web browsers, and social media are of two types: organic and paid.
Organic ads are made from SEO-optimized content, which makes them come up on top of the search results. These are non-paid and use relevant business keywords, and hyperlinks from associated websites. Paid ads, on the other hand, are the ones you sponsor directly and will be published on your behalf by Google or the search engine.
How to differentiate between paid and organic ads? Simple. When your ads are paid, the web browser will mention “sponsored” or “Ad” in the meta description.
How do you pay for paid ads? The system is pay-per-click which means you will have to pay only when your website gets traffic, that is when someone clicks on the ads.
Which one should you choose depending on your budget? We advise that you make a balance of both types of social media advertisements for marketing. While organic ads give you benefits in the long run, for instant traffic, paid ads are the solution. The publisher will carefully curate your ad within your customer’s feed to get clicks.
No, these are not just the monopoly of Instagram where it used to be- #like4like, #follow4follow. In fact, all social media platforms now have hashtag strategies.
Hashtags are like keywords. Using the popular and most-searched hashtags on social media in your posts will lead to more reach. However, you should use them effectively and in a way that fits your content.
The number of hashtags will differ for each platform. On Instagram, you should use no more than 10-12 hashtags for most reach. In Twitter, two hashtags are the limit due to minimal character limit. The same goes for LinkedIn where using more hashtags will automatically categorize your posts as “spam”.
The bottom line is that you should use at least one customized brand hashtag and other hashtags that are popular in your market and relevant too.
These simple tips are an overall guide to managing multiple social media profile accounts free for companies with a limited budget. Which ones will you include in your social media marketing strategy? Share with us in the comments!
Elizabeth Barlettah is a business analyst and blogger who reviews brands like Pocket-lint. She focuses on software development, marketing strategy planning, and helps companies grow their business and offers SEO-optimised copywriting services. When Elizabeth is not busy writing her blog, she strums the guitar. At present, she writes for top-mom.
