The Top 10 Social Media Marketing Tips for 2017

The advent of social media platforms has created a cost-effective and highly efficient marketing venue for internet marketers and online entrepreneurs on a global scale.  These platforms have witnessed exponential growth in the past 10 years and increasing numbers of online marketing experts worldwide are jumping on this speeding promotional bandwagon every day.  Suffice it to say, social media’s connection potential and its global reach today make it a very appealing marketing venue for businesses of all industries.

Let’s face it.  There is so much to like about Social media marketing or SMM as it is oftentimes referred to.  It is easy to access, more cost-effective than traditional advertising and marketing venues, and most importantly, it caters to a massive global audience.  If you’re willing to put forth the effort and invest your time, SMM can be a very lucrative experience.  Unfortunately, there’s too much of it and even the most experienced social media marketers have difficulties with its competitiveness and trying to stay current with ever-changing SMM trends.

Statistics You MUST know about

From a statistical perspective, getting the most bang for your buck (value for your investment) is essential.  In a comparison of 5 of the most popular social media sites – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn – there are two statistical categories to be aware of:

• The number of active followers or users:

• Facebook – 1.7 billion
• Instagram – 500 million
• Twitter – 313 million
• LinkedIn – 106 million
• Pinterest – 100 million

• Percentage of adult users:

• Facebook – 79%
• Instagram – 32%
• Pinterest – 31%
• LinkedIn – 29%
• Twitter – 24%

While Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn remained in the identical position, the exact position reversal of Pinterest and Twitter does tend to make a person wonder about the implication of and reasoning behind this particular statistic.

Components for developing a successful SMM Strategies

No matter what your industry niche is, your business goals and objectives are the basis for your social media marketing strategy.  If you want to successfully connect with your website visitors and engage a larger target audience, you’ll need to include the following 8 components in your social media marketing strategy:

• Allocate your resources by establishing a budget for your SMM endeavors and making a list of the specific tools you will need (e.g. CRM, e-mail marketing, etc.).
• Assign responsibilities to your management or supervisory personnel (if applicable).
• Choose social media platforms that will generate the most return for your efforts.
• Determine who your ideal clients or customers with criteria such as age, habits, hobbies and interests, income, likes and dislikes, motivations and objections, and occupation.
• Develop a content marketing strategy that is based on context and form.
• Identify your specific primary and secondary business goals.
• Keep an eye on what your competitors are doing and pay attention to the type of content they post and integrate their successful tactics in your strategy.
• Make your SMM objectives achievable, measurable, relevant, specific, and time-sensitive.

Remember to analyze your past content on a regular basis in order to gauge the effectiveness of it once it’s been published.  The more successful online businesses do this on a regular basis and make adjustments whenever necessary in order to keep their content fresh.

What the Experts have to say

In order to help with your social media marketing strategy, we have compiled a list of the 10 most important tips that you should consider following:

Facebook is still one of the most powerful advertising tools you can use – don’t let negative press taint your opinion about Facebook advertising.  It is still a powerful tool and doing quite well for companies and entrepreneurs.  When you consider Facebook’s popularity and size, (after all it has 1.7 billion followers and is growing constantly) advertising with them has proven to be successful, especially if you manage it correctly and target your audience properly.

Focus your SMM efforts on your target audience – in order to do this properly, you have to know who your target audience is.  Instead of trying the “throw enough stuff against the wall and eventually something will stick” marketing strategy, focusing your SMM efforts on a specific target audience.  By doing this, you’re almost ensured of realizing a return on your investment dollars and adding to your bottom line.

Infographics can attract a huge audience – it’s not surprising to understand why the “digital” audience is in love with infographics.  You can highlight a tremendous amount of information in a format that has a great deal of visual appeal and doesn’t bore the audience to sleep.  But without a doubt, the primary advantage of using infographics is its shareability.  In other words, you can share your infographics with nearly every social media platform, especially Instagram and Pinterest.  However, they share well on Facebook, Google Plus, and Twitter.

Make the required changes and learn how to benefit from them – if there is one thing that holds true about Google, it’s the fact that they wrote the book on ongoing changes where search algorithms are concerned.  For instance, Google wanted higher-quality content to be a priority in the SERP’s.  So, in order to accomplish this, they changed the way in which they were indexing content.  Not surprisingly, Twitter has decided to employ the algorithmic approach.

Monitor your content’s successes –   but it’s much more important to know which content is performing at the highest level than simply writing high-quality content.  Identifying the more successful posts is relatively easy.  Fortunately, analytic software applications are available and have made tracking your content a simpler task.  The key is to write appealing content for a wide array of followers and either answer a very common consumer question in that content or solve a problem for them.

Remember, you don’t have to try every social media platform out there – although it can be very tempting to cast a broad net and utilize every social media platform out there, you want to start small using one or two initially.  Naturally, the goal is to reach as many followers as you can, but you don’t want to get overwhelmed either.  Keep in mind that some platforms will bring you the followers you are looking for while others won’t.

Take your SMM to the mobile user – with the ever-increasing popularity of smartphones and tablets, you have to ensure that your website and its pages have a mobile-friendly, responsive design.  Let’s not forget that mobile use exceeded desktop use within this past year meaning that you can reach a huge audience whether they are sitting at home or are out and about.  Make the most of these different platforms when developing your SMM strategy.

The fastest growing SMM trend is “influencer marketing” – and for a very valid reason.  Your audience (and just about everyone else’s) wants genuine opinions and truthful reviews.  These are known as “influencers.”  Influencers are an essential component of a consumer’s decision-making process.  While this involves more effort than other marketing modalities, the proven results are much better.

Utilize more video content – recent advances in network connectivity and technology made video content more important than ever this past year.  With Netflix and YouTube at the head of the pack, video content demand reached an all-time high.  Whenever you get the chance, you should produce exciting video content that holds the viewer’s interest and continues using it to your advantage.

Most importantly, content has always been and will always be the king – your top priority should always be the production of the highest quality content possible because it will play a very significant role in communicating with your audience and delivering your marketing message.  You can attract consumers with organic SEO and they will become very loyal to your brand provided you give them what they want.  When it comes to the branding process, SMM will help you build a strong online presence and increase the consumer’s awareness.

Remember, social media marketing is still virgin territory.  However, when it comes down to attracting the right target audience, building brand awareness, and promoting your products or services, the best strategy will be the difference between a failed and a successful social media marketing campaign.

Drop in your comments and let us know if anything is missed.