Advertising is good, targeted advertising is even better!

Many people and businesses assume that social media marketing is easy. It mostly is, but you need to dedicate time to building strong communities targeting the people that will be interested in your services and business – cutting and pasting a couple of times a day isn’t going to give you the results you want.

Focus your time and energy on the right channels. Study your existing clients profiles to inform this strategy. Identify which social platforms are most appropriate for your business, industry and target audience. Don’t try to be everywhere at once.
What you are looking to do is to engage with your audience and forge genuine and meaningful relationships, that will hopefully boost the chance of future interactions and possible business. You are not looking for one-off transactions.

To establish and maintain a successful community, you need to be focused on to delivering real and relevant and useful experiences that are useful to your audience. It will take time so be prepared to play the long game to achieve marketing objectives.

Social Media

It’s not difficult, but it does take hard work.

The key points to take into account are:

  • Prioritise relevance and authority
What you’re looking for isn’t one-off transactions; but genuine and meaningful relationships and communication, to boost the chance of future interactions and possible conversions.
  • Engage and inspire your followers
Communities will flourish with content that members find useful, reflects how they want to be perceived, and allows them to interact with likeminded people.
  • Create and use brand advocates
Focus on utilising your existing brand advocates – the ones that already love your brand. Identify them, reward them and get them to help push your brand / business forward
  • Utilise Groups
Again choose the relevant platform to suit your business. The two best known are Facebook and LinkedIn but most social media platforms have created Groups to help with the development of communities.
  • Manage communities

Watch over what is going on in your community and don’t be afraid to remove spammers and people using bad or inappropriate language. As a rule of thumb; if your Grandmother wouldn’t like it DELETE it.

  • Create relationships with high profile social media gurus
Harness the power of their existing network by following and engaging with their community members.
  • Essential traits for social community managers
For your community to run smoothly, you need a solid understanding of social networking along with an in-depth knowledge of your business.