These tips will set you on the right path to success in your social media marketing efforts.

The number one piece of marketing advice you will receive today is to use social media.

What they don’t tell you is that simply setting up your social media accounts and posting about your brand or website won’t bring you thousands of visitors. You need to do more.

Whether you’re just starting out or you’ve been running your social media profiles for some time, the tips in this article will help guide you on how to start or what to do next.

Without further ado,

Here are 10 Social Media Marketing Tips to Bring You Success:

1. Start With a Plan

The worst mistake you can make is to jump into Social Media Marketing without a plan.

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.

Without a concrete plan, you won’t know the platforms to use, who your target audience is, the most effective strategies to reach them and a lot more.

It’s very important for you to have a concrete plan if you really want to achieve results.

2. Have a Tailored Plan for Each Platform

A common mistake a lot of people make when they attempt social media marketing is to have a generic plan for all platforms. This hardly gets any results.

Even though the core features of most social media platforms are the same, they are at the same time very unique. A strategy that works on one won’t work on another.

You should have different goals for different channels and a tailored plan to achieve those goals.

3. Avoid Shortcuts

We all know it takes time to build an active community. There are times when you will post and no one will even see your post or engage with it.

At this stage, a lot of people tend to take shortcuts like buying fakes likes and shares. It’s best to avoid these tactics because even though you’ll get instant results, they won’t bring any long-term value to your page.

4. Spy on Your Competitors

You obviously have competitors. Some may even be bigger than you. This means you share the same audience. By spying on what your competitors are doing, you can easily tell the ones that are working for them.

Because you share the same audience, what is working for them will most likely work for you too. The key here is not to copy blindly but rather to understand the dynamics of their working strategies and use it to create your own.

5. Create a Content Calendar

In social media marketing, consistency is key. Whilst you may get a few successes randomly posting things on social media, your results won’t be consecutive.

This is why you should stay consistent. Consistency builds anticipation among your audience and guarantees a certain level of engagement.

A content calendar will help you stay consistent. A content calendar will guide you on what to post, when to post and where to post it.

6. Test a Variety of Content Formats

There are a lot of content formats you can use on social media. You can make text posts, share photos, memes, videos, infographics, GIFs and a lot more.

Whilst you don’t need to use all the available formats, it’s a good idea to switch things up from time to time. Posting the same type of content will get boring over time.

Related content: Drive Engagement With These 4 Content Types

7. Pick the Right Curation Tool

Creating content consistently takes a lot of time and effort. There may be days where you don’t have any content of your own to share with your audience. This is where curation saves the day.

Having the right curation tool means you always have a catalog of fresh and relevant content you can share with your audience when the need arises.

Related content: Top 10 Tools to Help you Curate Better Content

8. Ask Questions

We all know the importance of engagement in social media marketing. Engagement is the new standard for measuring the effectiveness of any social media strategy.

A sure-fire way to generate a lot of engagement from your audience is to ask them questions. There are a lot of things you can ask your audience.

A few ideas:

• What content to create next
• Where they are from
• What they do
• Things that could make their lives better
• Their dreams and goals

9. Experiment With Different Cover Photos

Cover photos are often overlooked but they present a huge opportunity. Cover photos are like a giant advertising board for your company.

Most brand pages maintain the same cover photo for a long time so it gets overlooked by their audience.

Don’t repeat the same mistake. Change it regularly and put some relevant information on there. Your audience will start noticing the regular changes and pay more attention.

10. Post More Videos and go Live

Video is the future of content. It is projected to make up 82% of all internet traffic by 2021. Even today video dominates the majority of almost all social media platforms and is also the form of content that is most engaged with.

Don’t be late to the party. If you aren’t using video as part of your strategy, it’s time to rethink it because video is and will continue to take over.

“Dread it, Run from it, Destiny still arrives” – Thanos

Whilst most content creators often think you have to generate entirely new ideas for videos, this is partially false.

It’s always nice to come up with new ideas for content but if you’re just starting out with video content, you simply repurpose your existing written content into a video.

Do you have any tips or tricks for successful social media growth and marketing? Let us know your ideas in the comments section below. 

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