The Social Media Marketer

Are You A Social Media Newbie? 7 Tips For Getting Started

Social media has grown to such intimidating proportions that it's understandably challenging for businesses and marketers that are new to the game. If you're a social media newbie, here are 7 tips to help get you off the ground:

Strategize

Social media marketing is a crucial and significant part of your company's entire marketing and branding effort and a business process of its own. If you intend to succeed in social media, you need a strategy.

Craft your social media strategy around a specific, realistic objective - something concrete, measurable, and obtainable, such as increasing conversion rate through social channels by X%. You then have to choose in which social networks to interact with your target market and apply a specific consumer-level strategy.

For instance, HubSpot research indicates that Google+ is ideal for a strategy that revolves around organic search and markets to a technologically-savvy male demographic that does not spend much time in the site. Pinterest, on the other hand, attracts more female users who spend an average 100 minutes browsing boards, and is perfect for referral traffic.

Optimize

Methods of social media optimization may not be as refined as the technical aspects of search engine optimization, but there are ways to optimize your social endeavors. Each social networking platform offers its own advertising program and business page or profile options. When it comes to optimizing social ads, the task is similar to tweaking paid search campaigns. In optimizing business profiles and pages, there are varied tips and tricks for different social networking sites.

Facebook Fan pages, for instance, can easily reach three levels of consumers: the fans themselves, their friends, and whoever can access their Facebook Timeline and view their activities. From here, it is only a matter of optimizing social content to draw in as much of this three-tiered audience as possible.

Listen

As social media marketing continues to evolve, so too does the information and the analytics companies can glean from it. Today, data that comprises what is typically called "social intelligence" is what businesses should be after, as it can serve as an effective road map to understanding social consumer behavior and ecommerce patterns for your target market.

If you're not listening in on social interactions regarding your brand - conversations, comments, shares, and blogs - you're missing out on actionable data.

Engage

Research by Reevoo shows that in the new sales process, social engagement can account for as much as 177% increases in conversion rates. Your conversion rates almost triple when you have effective social content that consumers interact with and engage.

This is why social engagement is a powerful medium of marketing and ecommerce. Engage your audience, especially when you're just getting started with social media.

Measure

Measuring social data gathered through listening and engagement completes the cycle, and also restarts it anew. Social media is a constantly shifting industry, and the consumers within it are also a crowd that can be loyal one moment and fickle the next. To be consistently successful in your social campaigns, you need to listen, engage, measure, and from analysis of measured data, tweak your efforts and then repeat the cycle.

Listen, engage, measure, repeat. Measuring campaign performance tells you your strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities.

Research

Social media is an ever-changing landscape of networking, shares, and trends dictated by two major power players: the brands and the consumers. This means that tactics you employ in your social efforts today might not be so effective a few months from now. You need to consistently research the industry, your market, and your consumers to figure out the right time to perform the right move.

According to the Wall Street Journal online, Procter & Gamble wants to shave $10 billion off of its expenses by 2016, and $1 billion of that will come from their marketing budget - cost cuts achieved through researching where they can spend more efficiently, such as low-cost digital marketing like social media. How much can you save or gain through proper social media research?

Outsource

It is plain to see that social media is not limited to setting up social profiles, but is indeed an entire business process that demands significant investments in time, effort, and human resources. Small to mid-level businesses typically don't have the capability to keep abreast of the developments of social media while employing a cost-effective strategy. Outsource what you do not have the time, resources, or expertise to manage soundly.

Social media marketing can be a lucrative venture for those who know how. Now, you have enough wisdom to get started!