Social media marketing has become a cornerstone in digital marketing, which helps boost countless businesses and help them become unicorns. Over $89 billion was spent in 2019 on social media marketing by businesses all over the world on major platforms.
Social media amplifies transparency, which makes a brand more authentic to audiences, and more makes customers more loyal. At least 53% of consumers say they’re more inclined to buy from brands that are transparent on social media, according to Sproutsocial.com. But social media marketing is hard work.
When marketers and entrepreneurs first get into it, they find out how much effort it takes to make it successful. If you’re looking to do social media marketing to boost your business, you’ll have to do it smart in order to make the most of your hard work.
1. Focus on the Right Audience
No matter how much work you do, it’s all gone to waste if you’re not targeting the right audience. People who are not interested in the first place won’t ever want to engage, no matter how good your marketing is.
You can boost the effectiveness of your social media marketing by applying The Pareto principle is a rule of thumb which states that 80% of results tend to come from 20% of effort. You can apply this by looking at your analytics and identifying where most of your engagement is coming from. Also, you should find out which channels and types of posts are getting the most engagement from that audience.
Focus more of your efforts on those audiences and channels to boost the effectiveness of your social media marketing. Through this, you can get a lot more from doing much less.
2. Use a Social Media Calendar
Social media can be easy to ignore and forget about, making consistency hard to achieve. Consistency is the most important thing when it comes to social media marketing success. You may miss a few posts here and there, and that won’t yield immediate consequences. But one missed post can then become two, and then more, which eventually leads to people losing interest.
Having a calendar to map out your posting schedule can be a tremendous help for your social media marketing. This can be done with a spreadsheet that lists the posts you have planned for each posting day. The social media calendar can be mapped out however you wish, according to what may work best for your audience.
You can have a weekly schedule that has a different type or theme for each day. You can have a special post scheduled for holidays and other special days. Having a social media calendar can help you plan out your social media marketing and maintain posting consistency.
3. Batch Similar Tasks at a Set Time
Working hard and working smart go hand in hand—it’s all about time management. Batching has been a proven technique for boosting productivity for a long time now. It’s simply doing similar tasks in a single batch instead of separately, like all in one day instead of one each day.
This technique can help you maintain focus instead of having to switch from one task to another. Make all your posts for the week in one day, schedule them in another, and so on. By doing them in batches, you get them out of the way quickly and free up the rest of the week for other things.
4. Create Posts from Templates
The majority of work in social media marketing tends to be repetitive. You may find that most top posts look the same and fall under a handful of categories. That’s because they’re what the audience is most interested in, so you may want to make more of them.
If you do, you can use templates to curtail much of the tedium and save time in making them. For instance, you can use headline formulas to create powerful headlines without splitting hairs. List down the headline patterns that had been previously successful and reuse them for future posts.
Create templates for image posts so you don’t have to recreate layouts every single time. Have an outline for blog posts that lets you write them faster and have a solid structure to work on. Templates can prove to be a boon for social media marketers who tend to get bogged down by repetitive tasks.
5. Recycle Old Posts Strategically
Creating quality content is certainly not easy. Every infographic, image post, blog post, or so on has hours of research, graphic design, writing, and careful thought behind it. Social media marketing is mostly focused on new content, but you can also resurface evergreen content to boost it as well.
You can re-promote old content that’s still relevant every now and then to generate renewed interest. Pick out the best performing content from the past, tweak them for the current day, and post them again as a throwback. Doing this can help you maintain your consistency, especially when you’re falling behind or coming up dry at the moment.
That’s what stuff like #ThrowbackThursday are for.
6. Build a Social Media Toolkit
Having a dependable social media toolkit can help you do more work in less time. There are now tools available online for every social media marketing task. You can find tools for social media listening, social media management, content curation, and analytics.
Tools for creating posts like graphic design and video editing software should also be included. A tool that can handle multiple functions is even better as it decreases the bloat of your toolkit. The less tools you need to have in your toolkit, the faster you can do your work as you won’t have to switch between tools as much.
You also won’t have to log into as many tools separately.
7. Install a Chatbot
As your business grows, handling user inquiries will occupy more and more of your time. Soon enough, you may find yourself responding to messages for most of your days. The solution to this is to use a chatbot to automatically send responses to these inquiries. There are plenty of chatbots available these days for businesses that need a helping hand with their customer inquiries.
A platform like MobileMonkey lets you build a Facebook Messenger chatbot that can handle inquiries in a few minutes without any coding, whether it’s for messenger, native web chat or even sms! If the query is advanced, the chatbot has a live chat takeover feature that lets an actual person jump in at any time. You can also use the chatbot to create a drip marketing campaign that users can choose to opt into. Using a chatbot can save you tons of time and boost the effectiveness of your social media marketing in various ways.
Conclusion
There are many things that can make social media marketing more successful, like using tools to make it easier. But the most important factor is putting thoughtful effort into it. Being productive with your social media marketing is about serving your audience as best as you can. Creating a strong social media presence can enhance the ROI of a business in the long run.
However, if you’re wasting hours a week posting aimlessly without a specific target audience, achieving that is not possible. That’s why a more strategic approach to social media marketing is necessary to be more productive with it.
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