You can reach a lot of customers in the wide world of social media. The problem is they’re probably not looking for you. They’re also definitely not interested in detouring their social media activity to check out your sales pitch. Even with the challenge of attracting interest, social media marketing is a powerful tool to reach new customers.
Making sales pitch after sales pitch isn’t an effective way to do social media marketing. Building relationships is, though, which is what these this post will help you do, and quickly.
Sales pitch after sales pitch isn't an effective way to approach social media. Share on XBuilding relationships with customers doesn’t have to be hard. There are easy ways to take advantage of social media marketing. It all comes down to building relationships by being helpful and being trustworthy.
Learning to approach social media effectively takes practice but there are some things you can do now that don’t, and are easy to do too.
Easy Social Media Marketing
There are no rules in social media marketing books that say you must spend x amount of hours to succeed. Like most things the more time you spend the more success you’ll have, but social media isn’t your job.
You can spend just a few minutes a day on social media and still connect with customers. Not only that but you may start to build relationships with people you enjoy talking with and helping out. If you don’t get business directly from your conversations, you’re likely to get a referral eventually.
It's better to spend a few minutes a day on social media than no time at all. Share on XIf you’re just getting started doing social media marketing, take the middle ground. Don’t invest a ton of time, but don’t quit.
Hopefully you’re a little more at ease now that you don’t have to spend hours every day on social media. Now it’s time to discover how you can have an effective social media marketing strategy with little more effort than you already spend on your business.
Social Media Marketing In Minutes
You already do a lot of reading or consuming media to help build your business. This is all material you can repurpose into something you share with your customers.
Everything you find interesting for your business is likely something one of your customers will also find interested. Sharing quality information on social media is all about adding your own value to the information you already read. Just sharing something is nice, but adding value or your own perspective grows your expertise.
The time it takes to add value to what you're already and share is minutes. Share on XThe added time it takes to share and add personal value is just minutes. If you find something interesting in your normal workday, share it on social media!
Now you have a source of information to share, great! You also need to put a bit of thought into reframing the material you want to share so it benefits your target audience, though.
Benefit Someone
If you share something without any context or value, you risk sharing irrelevant (in appearance) information that’s hard to make sense of. Reframing how you share an article can change how people perceive your posts on social media, though.
How do you reframe what you found helpful so the people you want to help can find it?
First, don’t share to others like yourself. When you find a cool article, video, etc use hashtags or phrasing so people understand who you are sharing to and how it will benefit them.
Reframing Example
A good example of this is how I go about sharing the interesting articles I read. If I took what I read and shared it with others with no filter, I would probably share with a #marketing hashtag or something like that.
I do use some hashtags specific to what I do but that’s because it’s something a lot of people are looking for, not just marketing pros. I typically don’t want to share marketing tips with other marketers and web designers, though. Most of the time I want to share with an owner of a small business, my audience.
To be successful on social media, you have to know your target audience. Share on XSo, to be successful at social media marketing you absolutely have to know your audience. I often share interesting articles with the hashtag #smallbiz or #smallbiztips on Twitter. On Facebook, since hashtags aren’t the best choice, I often provide a good description of what the article is and what benefit a small business will get from it.
Formulate Your Post
How you share and formulate your social media posts will differ depending on the social network. For some guidance on some social media network basics, make sure you refer to the perfect social media post infographic.
You’ve set some expectations for how much time you need to (or don’t need to) invest. You’re also getting content from the quickest source possible, your content consumption. Finally, you’re framing that information for your target audience and not others like you.
Understanding your audience and how it relates to social media demographics is essential.
Now it’s time for the last step in sharing your content quickly and easily. You’ll learn how to streamline your social media marketing process so it doesn’t consume your day.
Streamline Sharing
There are a few things you can do to streamline the content you want to share whether it’s your own or someone else’s. Going to each social media network and creating your post there is inefficient and wastes a lot of your time. There’s no way sharing content every day will take only a few minutes if you approach it this way.
Luckily there is an amazing tool that will help you share to all the major social media networks from one place. Buffer is the best place to start for streamlining your sharing, best of all the tool is free! Buffer will let you set up several social media profiles for free and share to them all from one simple dashboard.
Not only can you share from one place, you can also get stats on how your posts are doing and reshare posts easily. The best part is, you can fill up a sharing queue and the posts will drip feed to your social networks at times you’re most likely to reach your audience.
Sharing With Images
That’s great, but getting attention to your social media shares takes more than just well crafted text. Images can work wonders to attract people to your shares. You don’t want to waste time creating images for others articles you’re sharing, but articles you write or awesome information you’re sharing for your business needs an image.
Images add a whole new level of engagement to your social media posts. Share on XLuckily there are two amazing tools you can use for free to create images for any social media network. Both Canva and Adobe Express are available to create images on your desktop browser and they both have apps too! Adobe Spark is really easy but lacks control for creating a lot of things, but Canva gives you some impressive tools to create amazing, and perfect sized social media images.
That’s all you need to do to have a simple yet effective social media marketing strategy. There are things you can do to take it a step further, though it also may take a bit more time. If you want to go further with your social media marketing strategy, read on!
Take It One Step Further
Without spending your whole day on social media marketing, there are a few more things you can do to take it a step further. With about 1-2 hours invested per week, you can build relationships with people in your target audience.
A great way to build these relationships is seek out Twitter chats with your target audience. You can find Twitter chats on any number of topics including small business, fashion, law, outdoors, or anything really. Refer to this nifty Twitter chat directory to find chats on a topic you think fits your target audience. Twitter chats are usually one hour where everyone sits down and chats at the same time.
Other place you can build relationships and more casually join the conversation are LinkedIn and Facebook groups. These groups are forums where you can post a message and answer messages in your own time. There are hundreds of thousands of groups on Facebook and LinkedIn. There are probably many dedicated to people who are in your target audience.
By being present with your target audience and building a human connection, you will become a trusted source and expert for helping your target audience.
If you take all the steps from the previous section in this post, you’ll grow your audience and trust with just a few minutes each day. Add on joining in the conversation and building relationships, with a few hours each week you can connect with your target audience and others in an easier way than going to networking events and you’ll reach your target audience more effectively and for less money than advertising.