Course Content
What is social media marketing?
Social media marketing is a form of digital marketing that leverages the power of popular social media networks to achieve your marketing and branding goals. But it’s not just about creating business accounts and posting when you feel like it. Social media marketing requires an evolving strategy with measurable goals and includes: Maintaining and optimizing your profiles. Posting pictures, videos, stories, and live videos that represent your brand and attract a relevant audience. Responding to comments, shares, and likes and monitoring your reputation. Following and engaging with followers, customers, and influencers to build a community around your brand. Social media marketing also includes paid social media advertising, where you can pay to have your business appear in front of large volumes of highly targeted users.
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Social Media Marketing for Businesses
About Lesson

Ready to get started with marketing on social media? Here are a few social media marketing tips to kick off your social media campaigns.

Create diverse content

Consistent with other areas of online marketing, content reigns supreme when it comes to social media marketing. Make sure you post regularly and offer truly valuable information that your ideal customers will find helpful and interesting. This includes:

  • How-tos, quick tips
  • Local and industry news
  • Data and insights
  • Polls, questions, contests
  • Updates and announcements

It also means making use of the variety of formats social media offers, including images, videos, stories, live streams, online stores, and more.

social media marketing tips - diverse content examples

For help with creating awesome social media content:

Stay consistent

Using social media for marketing enables your business to project your brand image across a variety of different social media platforms. While each platform has its own unique environment and voice, your business’s core identity, whether it’s friendly, fun, or trustworthy, should stay consistent.

Don’t just post—participate

In other words, don’t just log in once a month to schedule out all your posts. Social media channels are communities. You need to pay attention to who’s engaging with your content and engage back—respond to comments, like, share and comment on their posts, run live streams, post polls and real-time questions to spark discussions, and repost others’ content.

social media marketing tips - examples of engaged accounts

Use content creation tools

Don’t let anyone tell you that Instagram is the most visual social media platform. They all are! If you want to stand out in a person’s feed, you need to accompany your posts with attractive visuals—photos, illustrations, text turned into art. Content creation tools like Canva have templates and features that allow you to quickly create visuals that look professional, have your logo on them, and are consistent with your brand.

Repurpose, repost, recycle

Social media is a crowded place, so if you want to gain traction with your audience, you need to post great content regularly. The secret to doing this? The three Rs:

  • Repurpose: Create a Facebook post from a customer review, splice up a blog post into a series of Tweets, distill a case study down into a customer spotlight on Instagram; turn a webinar deck into a carousel post on LinkedIn. The possibilities are endless.
  • Repost: To be done in moderation, but a great way to fill gaps in your content calendar. Repost on Instagram and retweet user-generated and influencer content. You can also curate content from authoritative sources and share those links in your posts.
  • Recycle: Post your TikTok videos and Instagram Reels to YouTube; re-share your top-performing blog posts every month to get in front of new followers; add your Facebook Live recordings to your YouTube channel.

social media marketing strategy - tip: upload slide decks to linkedin posts

Curate your own feed

We’re always looking for ways to show up in others’ feeds, but we forget that there is value to be derived from our own. Follow your competitors so you can keep tabs on them, get ideas you can adapt to your own strategy, and identify gaps you can fill. Follow influencers to stay on top of trends and educate yourself. Follow brands that share your values or that have great content strategies for inspiration and outside the box ideas.

Measure success with analytics

You can’t determine the success of your social media marketing strategies without tracking data. Google Analytics can be used as a great social media marketing tool that will help you measure your most triumphant social media marketing techniques, as well as determine which strategies are better off abandoned. Attach tracking tags to your social media marketing campaigns so that you can properly monitor them. And be sure to use the analytics within each social platform for even more insight into which of your social content is performing best with your audience.

Advertise

Among the many reasons to advertise on social media is that it is a highly cost-effective way to expand your reach. If you play your cards right, you can get your content and offers in front of a huge audience at a very low cost. Most social media platforms offer incredibly granular targeting capabilities, allowing you to focus your budget on exactly the types of people that are most likely to be interested in your business. Below are some tips and resources for getting started with paid social media marketing:

social media marketing - facebook ad example