Social Media Marketing: The Long Game
Category : Social Media
Social Media isn’t about spending money to make money in an ROI formula. It’s the ultimate long game!
It’s been about 10 years since Social Media content marketing was born. Social Media Marketing isn’t as simple as spending $500 to make $1500. It’s a bit more vague and a long term play. The goals of brand awareness building, customer loyalty, and audience engagement aren’t an overnight process or even a six month process. Social Media Marketing, like SEO, is a long game. It’s not going to be instant results. It’s a form of marketing that builds from year to year. Instant gratification is not the play on this one.
It’s important to set goals accordingly. The key to social media marketing is maintaining the presence daily. To do so requires a bit of time. Goals can include brand awareness, connecting with your current customers, community building, lead generation, and website traffic. Bolder goals can include establishing your company as a subject matter expert and changing the very perception of your brand.
Social media loyalty can be achieved by creating content on your website, monitoring your search terms, and making sure to integrate those on your social media.
You also should be monitoring the trends in your industry. If you are in the public health industry for instance you should be fairly agile to post on the latest public health issues such as a food recall, virus outbreak, or career trends in the medical field. Such monitoring and agility allows you to produce relevant content in a timely manner.
The long game, as it were, requires you to do some research on what social media platforms are relevant to you and your audience. Find if your audience is on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or even a niche platform like MeWe or Steemit. Spend time and energy where you audience is.
Timing is also critical – creating and scheduling content over time. Overposting can make you less relevant while not updating your core website can cause Google to lose interest in your website. Time of day is also a critical issue. You’ll want to determine the best time of engagement which can, forgive the pun, take time.
Content is King. You’ve heard it before. Does your audience like special offers, educational videos, or links to podcasts? Different social media platforms play to different formats, i.e,. Instagram plays to photo and videos while Steemit plays to blog posts.
Content first, build your followers, then engage. Wash, Spin, Rinse, Dry, repeat as desired.