Description
Before You Begin: Key Considerations For All Social Media Marketing
Peer pressure, success stories in the media and general hype tell today’s business
owners that having a presence on social media is essential. That’s not to say a
business couldn’t do well without utilizing social networking, but they’d
certainly be missing out on a myriad of opportunities to build and grow.
However, one of the biggest mistakes that a brand can make is to leap into social
media marketing with no real clue of what they are going to do with it; only the
vague hope it will somehow make their fortune. While there is a possibility that
you get really lucky, in most cases this kind of unplanned approach will lead to
unrealistic goal-setting, poor results, a huge waste of time, and ultimately a
defeatist attitude that puts you off the idea of social media marketing completely.
To ensure that this doesn’t happen to you – and to give you the best chance of
success – I urge you to digest the key considerations for social media marketing
detailed below. By the end of this chapter, you will have a firm understanding of
what kind of approach works for business on social media, and how to take your
efforts in a well-planned, logical direction.
Decide which social networks will work best for you
Unless you’re a big company with the resources to plow full speed ahead into
every potentially viable social platform, chances are you’re better to focus on one
or two “core” social networks first. It’s better to excel on a couple of social
networks than be mediocre on five or six, and while social media is (mostly)
free, your time is valuable. Indeed, depending on the type of business you run,
not every social media site is going to suit your marketing, your audience, or
what you are trying to achieve. To help you decide where to begin, identify
which social networks your target audience already “hangs out” or use customer
personas and research of social network demographics to judge where you will
best be received. Joining Facebook and Twitter is often a given for brands
simply due to their sheer size and influence, but more “niche” communities with
their own unique attributes – still with hundreds of millions of users, mind you –
like Pinterest, Instagram, or LinkedIn, might be where you find can make animpact more successfully. You’ll learn all about what each particular social
network brings to the table as they are introduced in the chapters to come, but to
start off, experiment with a couple of social networks where you can invest some
significant time, track your progress, and then either build on your achievements
with them, or steadily begin to experiment with other platforms on which you
might have additional (or better) success.
