Gaining fans and followers, having an engaging conversation and great conversion rates don’t happen overnight. Social Marketing success is the product of a lot of effort and strategy. It’s not a race but a marathon.
Listen
As in real life, do more listening and less talking. Imagine you’re having a nice chat with a friend. If you overwhelm them with a lot of unwanted information, do you think they’ll come back—or stay at all? It’s the same when marketing. Read your target audience’s online content, join their discussions. Learn what’s important for them and then create dedicated and useful content. They’ll stay with you.
Focus
In these modern times, creating content for a general, wide audience, it’s the same as creating it for no one. Have a clear notion of your audience and elaborate all your brand’s messages towards it.
Look for Quality
If you’ve spent a lot of time focusing and listening, you might want to have valuable responses and conversions. It’s not about having a thousand fans on Facebook that never engage with your company, it’s about having online connections who read, share, and talk about your content.
Find the Influencers
When you’re in the “listening” part, you’ll surely find the online influencers in your market. Connect with those people and work to build relationships with them. They’ll likely be interested in your product or service and might want to share their good opinion to their own audiences.
Offer Value
Let’s go back to the conversation scenario. If you’ll talking to a friend and, instead of telling an entertaining story you start to sell (insistently), your friend will ignore you or just leave. Add value to the conversation. Focus on creating amazing content and developing relationships with online influencers and your audience.
Reciprocate
Share and talk about the content created by others. Discuss and be honest about what you do. Don’t ignore somebody just because what they said is negative, be polite, and respond. Always acknowledge every person who reaches out to you.
In the end, all of these steps can be compared to being a nice friend: listen—listen a lot!—and, when talking, say something that’s fun and useful. Be the soul of the party!