6 Social Media Marketing Tips to Consider

Those of us who work in social media day in and day out utilize our marketing knowledge to serve the brands we represent on a daily basis. When producing content for multiple clients, it can sometimes be challenging to transition ideas and inspiration into top-quality posts. Floating from one brand to the next may disrupt the creative process. However, this should not stop you from achieving the social media goals of respective accounts if you remember these social media marketing tips.

Each brand has a specific strategy for meeting objectives, but at the end of the day, your success as a social content marketer is judged by the results from the content you present. Your finished product should achieve at least one, if not more, of four goals:

1. Develop Brand Awareness
2. Improve Retention Rates
3. Drive Traffic to a Site
4. Generate Sale Leads

Here are six key tips that will help you achieve these content marketing goals during the creative process:

Perform an in-depth analysis of the brand’s target audience

Who specifically are you targeting? We here at Vert have used tools such as Spotright and Socialytics are great tools that can provide metrics and insights into audience demographics and engagement. It is useful to determine audience interests based on profile information and will give you an idea of what your audience is interested in.

Be mindful of what time content is delivered

Schedule the posts you’ve so carefully crafted for the highest-probability hours of your audience’s social media activity. Determining this may require a bit of trial and error, but over time the analytics will start to unearth trends based and can be used to compare weekly and monthly results.

Run a competitor analysis

Record what other competitor brands are doing with their handles, accounts and platforms, then apply your knowledge to see what is working and what isn’t. Just a few examples of things to look at:

1. Are they using a variety of media formats, such as GIFs and videos?
2. How much engagement are their posts receiving?
3. Do they run giveaways/ promotions?

Any numerical data is worth recording and can be used to benchmark other metrics for a future strategy refresh or additional projects that may arise.

Don’t forget to add link tracking

It’s extremely useful to know where platform users are directed from when looking at link clicks to your website. UTM tracking and other information from Google Analytics can be used to show the number of users clicking links from each individual platform. In addition to providing an estimate on clicks through a specific platform, it also directs traffic to the brand’s website (which is one of the four social content goals).

Find software and tools that work for you

If you’re using a content scheduling program that isn’t enhanced for you or your client’s needs, ditch it and switch to one that does. Don’t waste any more company time working around the shortcomings of an old program- seek out alternatives that fit your content needs. Most scheduling programs allow free monthly trials you can take advantage of and demo before making a purchase.

Create every single piece of content with a specific purpose

If you find yourself having a difficult time thinking of fresh content ideas, go back to the four goals from the beginning. A social content marketer’s purpose is to better the brand, which can be achieved through brand awareness, boosting retention rates, driving traffic to a site, or generating sale leads. Ask yourself what the purpose of your content is, and focus on that to get the creative juices flowing.