Social media marketing is basically using social media platforms as part of your marketing strategy to build your brand, increase brand awareness, and drive website traffic—ultimately boosting sales or conversions.

Small businesses often include social media marketing efforts in their current marketing plans because of how effective and cost-efficient it is. Backed by a well-thought-out strategy, consistently publishing content on your social media profiles can increase your engagement, boost your followers, deliver great insight about your audience, and provide a scalable platform for advertising.

There are important differences between how you use your social media platforms personally and how to use them for business.

1. Strategy

For business, anything you put out on social media should be aligned with your brand’s overall strategy. What are your overall business goals? How can social media help you achieve them? Given your target audience, what platforms should you focus on, and which ones can help you generate maximum engagement around your brand? Which ones can serve as a channel to provide a direct connection between you and your customers? Where can you build a loyal community?

Answering all these questions will also illustrate what kind of content you should share. Will images, videos, articles, or unique content be more effective for reaching your audience?

Remember that these ideas aren’t set in stone, either. As you implement your marketing strategy, you will likely make tweaks here and there to improve your ROI.

2. Publishing

Consistency is key when it comes to social media marketing. By showing your followers that you are a consistent presence, you’re giving your business an opportunity to be considered a credible source of information for followers. This can be as simple as a practice of sharing posts or images, reposting videos, or commenting on trending posts.

My advice, however, is to plan your content ahead of time instead of constantly posting on the fly. Aim to maximize your reach using the right timing—when your audience is present and engaged.

3. Listening

You’ll notice that following the first two tips will inevitably allow you to boost your brand’s presence on whatever social media platforms you’re focused on. More comments will be made on your posts, people will tag you on their own posts, and they might message you directly. You want to pay attention and monitor all these interactions to understand exactly how audiences feel about your brand.

Anything positive means you have an opportunity to maintain your efforts. If you get negative feedback, you have a chance to improve and do better.

4. Metrics

Simultaneous to your efforts to monitor what followers are saying about you, make sure you’re tracking actual numbers behind your social media initiatives. Most platforms are built with analytics tools that help you understand how well your social media marketing efforts are doing. What posts gained the most engagement? Which ones didn’t get any interaction? What topics do your audience respond to best? You can easily check these metrics and see which areas need improvement.

Hope I was able to answer your question. If you want to continue this conversation, head over to our Twitter or LinkedIn or simply leave a comment below.