Social Media is whole and soul of any business marketing strategy, it may not essentially guarantee a big bang success but it gets you closer to your goals and business objectives. Smart content marketers exactly know how to develop business ideas and what works best for their business and how social networks can be effectively used in making the sales and engaging the customers. Social alignment is highly important when it comes to maintaining consistent style of communication with customers.

Get your content right first

Social Media networks are heavily used by people for connecting with family and friends and moreover it takes a leap ahead by helping business to involve and engage their customers. Customers are looking for relevant content online, so blasting too much content is not a right technique towards attaining one’s business goals. Brands need to take time to learn the facts about their customers, what they like to watch and read and the channels that are most useful to them.

Communication and Content plan are important

Customers love when there is clear communication from the brands; the content that is shared should be totally aligned with the business goals. It is not specific to any social channels but the way communication is led across different channels. There are several ways through which social content could be made available to the users. Before you start posting the content, you may ask yourself some questions like –

1. What are you looking for in social media and how it aligns to your core business goals?
2. What is your story and how relevant it is for social audience
3. Customer profile and type of content that they will respond to
4. Current state of market and how competitors perform socially
5. Who needs to involve in content production and marketing
6. Measuring social content success, optimizing and improving

When you answer the above questions, you get a clear idea about what your audiences are looking for in your content. The plan provides for simpler guidelines that help to focus social marketers on what they are basically looking for in content marketing.

“Without a useable comms and content plan it is much harder to gain traction with your audiences. You may achieve siloed spikes in activity through individual campaigns but it is much harder to build momentum around brand awareness and engagement. By having a content plan in place that clearly answers the Why, What, Who and How, you will be able to be more adaptable and reactive with your content.” – Sejal Parekh, Brand and Creative Strategist.

Analyzing Competitor’s Social accounts

The markets are overly flooded with lot of competition and competitors, the new comers are still buzzing for opportunities. With the highly saturated markets, it makes sense to go with the flow. By this, we mean looking for contents that your competitors are creating and how they are attracting customers. A close looks up in their social accounts, studying the things that they are sharing or following or offering, shall give you a quick content gaps.

You would know –

• The contents that they aren’t sharing
• The topics that are poorly covered and you have the possibility to create a niche market

Original is the key to grab markets

Creating original and creative content helps to reach people’s heart and furthermost, the genuineness. These are the key components if you want to rule the market game. People are ambitious and hence inspiring things attract them. There are several media engagement programs that can be used to drive social engagement. Businesses can announce free events, live tweeting of events, famous personality speak, write-ups about events, interviews, etc. and if you see the after effects, the results are astounding. One may see increased event attendance, increase in the number of followers, increase in social engagement and more.

Social Media Content Calendar helps!

Your social media strategy does not have to be extravagant, keep it simpler for your customers to understand what you are sharing with them. A consistent strategic plan goes a long way in building engagement and loyalty. Work out on a quarterly plan and build your content on ideas aligning to previous content that is shared with your customers.

Planning a content that levels itself to high level content stories is a good idea since there is clear link in the overall content of the strategy. Hence, every time you plan content, it needs to contain a key story. Do not give irrelevant content with the customers for the heck of it.

Optimization a must!

Businesses should not restrict to the content that is just shared on social, there are numerous things by which they can create infinite content that can be unconditionally used for audience engagements. Customer executives spend a lot of time talking to users; they collect vast data in terms of user preferences, likes, dislikes, etc. Attractive posts on social accounts attract attention that can be linked to a more detailed landing page on your website.

Hooks are a major attraction

Content format plans should be rich in quality, creating regular posts helps people to come back to the brand. The below example shows the Twitter account of @Craft posts from its Flickr updates.

Hashtags are good means to get your brand popular, by tagging people or brand; it is more likely to be noticed since they are monitored. It further helps to build engaging communication. Social conversation threads can be created by the use of hashtags.

Expansion of Content Reach

Brands are always vouching to reach highest audiences so that maximum benefits can be attained by the way of campaigns. The social reaches can be enhanced by way of users sharing the brand content on their networks. How is that possible? Let us look down on few of the basic techniques to achieve this:

• • Creating a lack of resource – It is not actually creating a lack, but for bigger promotions, it requires bigger marketing. So publicizing your product or event launch in advance helps to drive social activity and get people talking about it. The below example shows how Brighton SEO in UK grew the event into one of the leading European SEO event and tickets went selling too sooner.

• • Offering Unique ideas – People look for content and ideas that are very unique in nature, and if they do not get to see uncommon idea other than yours then surely they are up running for you. It increases the chances of brand awareness and attention grabbing material helps to boost the engagement.

The above is good idea placed by Oreo, the brand created several spoofing videos for Halloween that are funny and liked by all hence people share it.

• Amplifying the reach – Brands can amplify their reach by encouraging users to engage with their brands. The followers should be those people who are actually listening to and not just listed as followers. The actual followers who are interested will listen to brand and check for any posting updates and share it eventually.

Test and Evaluate

This is one of the most crucial stages for knowing what social media content is working for your campaign. The simplest way is finding through engagement metrics like the total number of likes on Facebook, Retweets on Twitter, etc.

For getting optimum benefits from running the campaign, one must do the following:

• Campaign tracking to be put in all posted links.
• Using social reports for monitoring social sessions and conversions, the referral reports can be used for comparing social domains to create referral traffic.
• Using landing page reports and applying social segments to check social impact on web pages.

The Top Preferred Social Media Marketing Tools are basically a set of toolkit that helps to coordinate and automate social content marketing. The social tool helps the content to reach audiences more efficiently.