Social Media Strategy: 5 Time-Saving Tips

What makes for a successful inbound marketing strategy? Building relationships with your customers by educating them and offering them great content!
One channel for building these relationships is through social media marketing. This type of marketing is an excellent way to circulate your content offers, provide links to optimized landing pages, and nurture your leads. Essentially, social media allows you to spread your inbound marketing as far as possible, exposing your business to a much wider audience than traditional marketing tactics would allow.
Here are a few statistics showcasing why you need to make time to develop a well-thought-out, content-driven social media strategy:

• Approximately 2.4 billion people have Internet access (source: Internet World Stats).

• 1.5 billion people may own a smartphone by 2017 (source: Business Insider).

• 77% of consumers interact with brands on Facebook (source: Social Media Today).

Trade shows, billboards, cold calls, and advertisements used in outbound marketing are not geared towards this audience. Not only that, it’s hard to accurately measure your ROI when you’re just tossing your message into the world and hoping for the best. According to Hubspot, these traditional approaches are also becoming less effective as people acquire more sophisticated tools, e.g., DVR, satellite radio, and Caller ID, for blocking unwanted marketing messages.

Social media marketing employs a suite of targeted techniques such as content creation and search marketing to engage these potential consumers, leading them to your business when they’re ready to buy. Fundamentally, your business gets found!

As you can see, it’s very important to take the time to engage in this type of marketing. Check out these five tips that can help you develop a social media marketing strategy in the midst of your busy schedule.

Social Media Tip #1: Define Your Audience

Begin by asking yourself, “Who makes up my target audience and which social sites do they use the most?” When you have the answers, join those sites and participate in their activities. You’ll begin to build a strong blog and social media foundation that will help you connect with your audience.

Social Media Tip #2: Organize Your Information

Create a business portfolio in a spreadsheet. Include the following information:

• Company name, address, and contact information.

• Categories in which your business would appear.

• Relevant business keywords.
• Three versions of team member biographies:

• • short (70 characters or less)
• • medium (up to 350 characters)
• • long (up to 1,500 characters)

• Links and account information of social media, website, and blog accounts that you intend to use.

• A link to a folder of company images.

• Descriptions of your company’s services and products (150 characters or less).

• Description of your ideal customer (to ensure you always have them in mind while creating content).

With your business portfolio stored in one location, you can use it to save time by copying and pasting the information every time you want to create a new social media account and user profiles.

Social Media Tip #3: Rethink Content

Writing online is like having a short, meaningful, yet informal conversation with someone. Try to keep your blogs to 600 words or less. You should also consider adding visual elements to your content, as most consumers like to see visual representations of your products or services.

Social Media Tip #4: Use Management Tools

Using management tools to develop a routine and schedule content ahead of time can be a huge time saver! We use Sprout Social for social media management, WordPress for blogging, and Smartsheet for organization.

Social Media Tip #5: Enjoy Social Media

Using social media is fun, and it’s easy to do. When you engage with like-minded people for whom your company fulfills a personal need, promoting your business with inbound marketing can be an enjoyable experience. It allows you to capture the attention of people not reached through traditional outbound marketing.

It’s time to make the switch. It’s time to move from traditional marketing methods to a social media marketing strategy. It’s time to save your time, and your money.