Post by Kimberly Grimms

In the past several years, social media has become an essential part of every business’s marketing toolkit.

The right social media campaign and marketing strategy can help your business in a lot of ways — engage both customers and potential customers, increase your brand awareness, attract more people to your website and even boost your site’s conversion rates.

Social media marketing is powerful but perhaps it isn’t as easy as you thought it would be, especially if you’re just getting started or delegating some tasks to an intern. Just as with other marketing mediums, you have to have a concrete plan on how to get the message across to your target audience, depending on which social media platforms you’re using.

If you’re planning to jumpstart your social media presence for your business, here are 15 tips you should find useful.

Set goals

1You should identify your goals because if you don’t know what you want, how are you supposed to achieve it? If you’re aiming to, say, have 50 more Instagram followers in a month, you should first think if your goal is specific (50 IG followers), realistic (can it be achieved?) and timely (in a month). Once you set a goal, you should stick to it and focus on achieving it before moving on to another set of goals.

Know your audience

2One of the most important steps in boosting your social media presence is getting a better handle on your audience. If you know who they are, you’ll have an idea of knowing what their interests are and what type of content you need to share to reel them into your social media pages and your website. You’ll be able to effectively engage them, too, and that’s a key to success.

Familiarize yourself with the platforms

3Knowing the audience gives you an idea what social media networks they’re using. If, for example, your audience targets are the “visual” types, you’re going to be more effective in engaging them through Pinterest, Instagram or YouTube. Text-focused? Maybe Medium or a blog post.

Be consistent with your content

4Post content regularly to build your social media presence. Also, make sure your content is consistent with the products or services you offer so your audience will be clear about what your business is offering. For instance, if you’re selling baby products, focus on content related to infants and parenthood.

Create valuable targeted content

5By targeted content, I mean posts your target audience would find interesting. As the saying goes, content is king. So focus your efforts on creating material that would entice potential customers to visit your business’s website. Also, make sure you post valuable information that your ideal customers will find helpful as much as they might find it interesting.

Repurpose top content

6Yes, recycling or repurposing content is not a bad idea — especially if the content garners a lot of attention when you initially posted it. If a blog or a video gets so much attention from one social media platform, you can use it to get more mileage in another platform that is not garnering as much traffic.

Share others’ content

7As long as you stay consistent with what you usually post, you can increase your social media engagement if you share external posts that your audience might find useful or interesting. Just link and credit outside sources honestly and eschew paid advertising within your content.

Influencing via influencers

8Influencers are celebrities or experts who have a large social following. Wooing them to promote your products or services will help in making your offerings known across different platforms. Getting them on board is another matter, so be judicious in how you approach them.

Engage your audience regularly

9Take time to reply to queries or to suggestions left on your social media comment sections. Your followers and customers should know that you spend time reading the comments section, fostering a more collaborative environment.

Create a social media calendar

10There are a lot of productivity tools on the Internet that will help you manage your social media accounts much easier. This will also help in making sure you post stuff on a regular basis. Start by creating a social media calendar and stick to the schedule.

Connect with other marketers

11Building relationships with other social media marketers will help you get into your business niche. This will also make it easier for you to get more ideas on how you can boost your social media presence.

Put more effort on visuals

12Humans are visual animals, which means that more people will likely check out your content if it looks great. So make sure to put more effort on the images you’re posting to attract your target audience. There are dozens of free image galleries online that you can pull from to use on your site, blog and in your social media accounts.

Use hashtags

13A hashtag is a useful mechanism to make your content easier to find. This will also help with your branding. Explore the top hashtags in your sector — #TravelTuesday if you’re in the travel business — or create some new ones.

Join communities

14Joining communities that are in the same niche as yours will make it easier for people to find your content, as communities usually allow their members to share posts on community walls. Also, you’ll be able to tap into the latest trends and news in communities.

Measure the results

15Last, always check to see if you’re achieving your goals. Are your efforts paying off or are they crashing? Along the way you’ll be able to adjust to your audience’s wants and needs. The number of followers, likes/shares/comments, clicks and leads should be able to tell you if you’re achieving your goals or not.

The post 15 social media habits that will boost your marketing appeared first on Inside Social Media.

Gain support by letting people know the real you

This is the first of a two-part series.
How much transparency have you shown today?

I bet you’re wondering why I am constantly begging you to stop being a nice guy, daydreamer, or introvert when it comes to being online and to put yourself out there. Well, it’s because I am trying to help you break down your inhibitions. I want you to be more willing to treat your social media followers the way they deserve: at the very least like allies, fans, and acquaintances; and, hopefully, like the friends they are or will become.

I know my methods are unconventional, but you really need a push. A chum of mine who will go unnamed picks at me on Facebook because I am getting to him.  He’s conflicted! He is fighting me, however, he doth protest too much. He really wants to enjoy a fair world: a world where someone who is as completely over-the-top talented at what he does should rightfully attract the sort of social and financial rewards that he fully and rightfully deserves.

Why be so shameless? Why expose yourself? I mean, celebrities and stars and whatnot don’t need to do that, do they? Right? Wrong. Everyone reveals themselves painfully one way or another, be it in a role in a movie, lyrics delivered with passion in a pop ballad, opening a vein in the pages of a novel; and, what’s more, all of these adored people who are “easily” and “naturally” followed, aren’t.

All of these people have publicists, marketing agencies, PR firms, TMZ, blogs, mainstream media, morning television, newspapers, and every place else.

So, in the same way that acting schools work on breaking through shyness, stage fright, and the general inhibitions of being self-conscious, I want you, too, to realize that in order to be the best community manager, brand representative, or your social media face, you’ll need to take all of this social media stuff as serious as a heart attack.

I don’t want you to become a fool for social media; I need you to realize that you aren’t so much trying to become a cult of personality so much as you need to work hard at this.

If you build it, they won’t necessarily come. Even if it’s beautiful, charming or funny — not until someone (either a super-someone or a lot of someones) know it’s there will it begin to garner attention.

And it doesn’t matter how much money you’ve spent on ads or on an SEO consultant or even the way-too-many-tens-of-thousands of dollars you’ve spent on a gorgeous, perfect brochureware website.

Even that eBook or properly published book of dead trees will mean nothing if you don’t have a prepared audience — a very large audience at that — then your brand won’t fly, your hours won’t be spoken for, your products won’t fly off the shelf, and your books won’t be read.

Just remember: There’s nothing inauthentic, duplicitous, untoward, skeevy, antisocial, or cultish about behaving such a way — unless, of course, you are those things.

So, please do work hard at building a lively congregation; that should be your goal. And, like a church, coming back to your social media pews is not mandatory at all — you shall always be competing with football, 5ks, 10ks, marathons, CBS Sunday Morning, and also a warm beckoning bed. You need to be better and more compelling than all of these things and more.

It’s time to get over yourself and do it now. While shamelessness and fearlessness might not be the right answer for you, it would surely be worthwhile to find ways of loosening up, lowering your inhibitions, and getting to know the online community you have and want. Do so openly, honestly, and with the goal of growing your audience and amplifying your own good message.

Related articles

• 3 Things You Should Know About Social Media (projecteve.com
• Applying the 80/20 rule to Social Media (domo.com)
• How Cavemen Used Social Media (mashable.com)

The post Learn to lower your social media inhibitions appeared first on Inside Social Media.

For the past several months we’ve been working behind the scenes on several changes to our site that I’d like to share with you today.

First, some quick background: I’ve been blogging since May 2001, when there were about 50,000 blogs worldwide; today there are a million blog posts created every day. In 2005 we switched the name of this blog from New Media Musings to Socialmedia.biz, before hardly anyone knew what social media was. But there was something in the air, and it was big. In 2009 I brought in a number of amazing partners to work with, both to provide some leading-edge thinking around the major social networks and the changes wrought by emerging media — but also to work with on consulting projects for major brands and business clients of all sizes.

Since then, my partners Chris Abraham, Ayelet Noff, Christopher S. Rollyson, Deltina Hay, David Spark and new partner Carla Schlemminger have shared where we think this train is heading, as new networks (I’m looking at you, Google Plus and Pinterest) crop up and new tools emerge to turn noise into signal.

That, I think, is why when you type “social media” into Google, this site comes up high in the results, even with thousands of social media sites out there. (Until last week we were No. 3; now, after the redesign, we’ve dropped a notch or two. What’s up with that, Google?)

New look and a new approach

The new site offers more — and a bit less:

• We’ve trimmed down, losing some of the widgets and gadgets from the sidebar and footer, which were nice eye candy but which were slowing down the site, while retaining some old favorites like the social media jobs board in the footer.

• To make things even zippier, we moved from HostGator (so long, we won’t miss you) to WPEngine as our hosting platform.

• We purchased a TypeKit license to make the typography pop.

• We moved to a versatile new WordPress theme, twentyeleven.

• We have a new Clients page, Team page and Services page.

• We jettisoned thousands of our oldest posts while keeping the best. (Thank you, Twitter, for transforming blogging from short bursts to more substantive entries.)

• We recently launched a Socialmedia.biz Facebook page — please come like us and join the conversation there.

• And, most importantly, we have a new business focus, which you can see on our new front page — and we’re eager to hear from you about how we might help with your strategy, online presence or campaign.

What do you like or hate? What should we be doing differently? Drop me an email at [email protected] and tell us what you think.

And do tell me if anything looks awry — we haven’t tested it on all browsers and platforms (but if you have a really old browser, some things may look out of kilter). Thanks!

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