How Do Beginners Start Social Media Marketing?

Hi,

As a social media account manager (in an agency) for local businesses, it might wonder you to hear me say what I’m about to say. However, here it goes:

The truth is that for most small businesses, hiring an agency to handle your social media activities is not your best move.

Here’s why:

In most cases, without advertising (a.k.a. investing money) to support your campaigns, social media marketing generally has the lowest and slowest ROI of all digital marketing efforts. Therefore, it costs a lot to do social media marketing through an agency.

Unless you’re a reputed brand, or already have a dedicated customer base, chances are that there are much better ways for you to be allocating your marketing/advertising budget.

Unlike with SEO and digital PR - where it usually makes more sense cost-wise to hire an agency rather than set up an in-house team - it’s totally possible to manage your social media on a DIY level.

This is especially true if you’re able to train internal resources. Plus, the tools that are required to manage and monitor your social media marketing efforts are much less expensive than in the PR or SEO sphere.

The bottom line is, you might not need an agency to manage your social media marketing. Chances are, you just need the right strategy. That’s why I always try to educate and/or train my social media clients especially those who are reasonable.

If you search the internet, you surely find hundreds of free training manual on the social media marketing from the professionals which explain all of the processes and tools that are useful to manage social media accounts, so that you can get the most out of your social media - all while keeping it in-house and on-budget.

But the reality is, you will never come to know -

• How to use social media to expand your reach and grow your audience
• Best practices for each social channel from the nitty-gritty of what to post and when to use advanced techniques for engaging with influencers
• How to use Twitter as a PR tool to get major media coverage
• How to create, manage, and promote hashtags (and when not to use them)
• How to beat the dreaded Facebook algorithm changes with Facebook Groups
• How to manage and harness communities from LinkedIn to Instagram
• The best tools for measuring ROI
• And MANY more!

And unfortunately, the actuality is no one will share their secret sauce with you for free when you are likely to become their competitor on social media. Do a Google search and formulate/follow a strategy for social media is really valueless and can cost you a lot of money.

So the best way to deal with this crisis is by taking the help of a consultant - a professional social media consultant. That’ll help you achieve your business goals by staying within your budget and stipulated time frame. That way you can channelize the good things towards your goal.

Summary for your memory:

• Selfish prejudice feeds the ego. Don’t point fingers at others and fail to learn from failures. If you don’t know anything, take the help of others where it is required. Too much confidence leads to bad decisions.
• Pessimism makes things seem less fruitful than they are. Do positive thinking exercises and start by taking small steps towards the goal. Don’t let opportunities go for unreasonable fear of loss.
• Fundamental outsourcing work-related error causes us to blame others (read as social media account managers) for their mistakes and external factors for our own. Don’t judge, rather find out the reasons behind slipups used by your niche.
• Gambler’s fallacy is when we draw false assumptions from historical data. Beat this by continually updating your expectations and communicating with your social media manager. Keep a sensible standard that holds to reality. Think forward, not backward.

Good luck!

Partha

How Do I Start Social Media Marketing?

One of the most challenging experiences as a marketer I faced ever is running social media accounts smoothly.

I’d like to come up with viral content ideas every day, but the reality is that I failed miserably many times. And realized, we're all human. At times, with planning content, while aligning with the campaign’s goal, we hit a wall.

How can I be a good social media marketer?

If you're a beginner in the social media marketing or a professional - who is looking for a few guidelines to get going, I've compiled a list of useful tips to reinforce your accounts, no matter your expertise level and type of your campaign - organic or paid.

What?	Why?	How?
Sync posts across all social media accounts	To measure metrics across all accounts	Use tools that will let you sync posts across various accounts but remember -“sync” means here same topic, not the same format for all the platforms
Reuse older posts	For re-engagement	Update your backdated content with fresh ideas and republish
Don’t post at odd times but do on weekends	Establish your best time and day to post on social media through experiments for optimum outcome	Ensure that your target audiences can get fresh content during their preferred time and day
Include Hashtags	To increase the relevancy and life-span of your posts, and engagement	Try mixing up existing and popular hashtags with your own custom hashtags - be a trendsetter is equally important sometimes like be a trend follower
Use visuals	Visual content has more appeal at any point in time to anyone	Include pictures, videos, gifs, infographics in your posts whenever possible
Posts often	The usual life-span of any content on social platforms is very little - so posting multiple times a day initially (when the account is like a newborn baby) is important, later when the account will have enough reputation, you can enjoy some irregularity but that again depends on the situation	I am not saying to post every hour – probably doing so may make you feel stress about coming up with new ideas every time and also limit the breathing space of the viewers; rather create a posting calendar and keep optimizing it
Do not forget about branding	Every piece of content should portray the brand you are promoting in an intelligent way	Set a color pattern, tone, and language, topic ideas, etc. for posts - make sure to blend your brand into your social media marketing effort strategically to   establish your brand
Engage through interaction	To make real connections with audiences which essentially help you reduce your social media management costs and set your audience your referrer in the long run	Answer all their queries with the committed mind, reply to the reviews with an open mind, establish a proactive follow-up routine with all the comments you receive, express your gratitude to their feedback, take the criticisms (if any) courageously - but do not stop interaction through your content with audiences to engage better
Invest a few bucks	To get services from real professionals as and when required	Try to understand the thin line that lies between ordinary and extra-ordinary - since your audiences are targeted by your competitors too, it is wise to take the help of, for example, a professional designer to post some visual contents on social media or run a few paid ads for a limited period of the time or proof-read the content through a pro editor - a lot of freelancers are around to provide you such services against nominal fees if in case you have doubt about your own creativity or time constraint - after all behind each social media post, a lot of effort has to invest
Find/invent/explore new ways	To expand your social media strategy	Aim to diversify your social media operation to keep things fresh, innovative, and exciting - do not miss out on opportunities waiting for you to broaden your horizons, if not work, at least you come to know about a new thing which itself is gainful
Tie the knot with influencers	To promote your product and/or service rapidly	Discover and then reach out to the influencers in your industry for partnerships (of course keeping the marketing budget in mind) so they become the advocate of your brand - do not forget to measure how they are actually influencing to grow your brand
Focus on USP	Authenticity matters	Play to your strengths - unless complete monopoly, you have to face stiff competition but that’s fine until you know your unique selling points (USPs) and build your social media campaigns on and around that - and there is always scope for improvement
Dream big but stand on your feet	To sparks lead generation (or goal conversions whatever you set as KPI)	Unless it’s a complete giveaway, never forget to add/include a CTA (call-to-action) in your content to direct your audience for taking your desired path
Confidence, courage, and idea	The focus should be on helping out both users and search engines so that they can understand properly and digest quickly the content they need	Reach out to the right audience at the right time with the right piece of content so they can feel an urge for connecting with me to get even more

Producing meaningful content often can be difficult, even if you're a social media pro. The reality nowadays is, social media trends are changing every now and then based on changing tastes and behaviors of both internet users and search engines, and experiencing it as a social media manager seems like a real challenge.

These tips are neither exclusive nor exhaustive but will help us in many ways like, how to organize and optimize a social media campaign, upgrade your content, and grow your target audience, and many more. But don't stop here. Keep checking my blog on social media marketing for more information.