Rules of Social Media Marketing

With millions of active users, social media has grown to be one of the most effective form of marketing for a lot of business. So, it’s most likely your business is utilizing it already. But it’s not about just being on social media, what matters is how you use it.

In order to enjoy the full benefits of social media offers, and build a strong brand for your business online, here are 7 social media marketing rules you should abide by:

• Listen

On social media, it’s important to listen more then you talk.Join discussions, pay attention tot what your network is saying, look out for comments from potential clients and customers to know what’s important to them. With this you’ll be able to create content that sparks conversation and add value.

• Be Focused

Don’t try to be everything. It’s better to specialize than to be a jack-of-all-trades. By creating a highly-focused social media and content marketing strategy, you stand a better chance of being able to build a strong brand that has a better chance for success than a broad strategy that attempts to be all things to all people.

• Stick to Quality

Quality is a lot better than quantity. There are too may social media accounts with 100s of followers who do not engage. When you focus on quality content rather than chase growing your following, you attract those who would be interested in what you’re doing. Having 1,000 online connections who read, share and talk about your content with their own audiences is better than 10,000 connections who disappear after connecting with you the first time.

• Create Value

Don’t spend all your time on social media promoting your products and services is a wrong way to go. People will tune off, and you’lll literally be talking to no one. Focus less on conversions and more on creating valuable content and developing relationships with online influencers. With this, those people will in turn become a powerful catalyst for word-of-mouth marketing for your business.

• Acknowledge People

Just like it is offline, you wouldn’t ignore someone who reaches out to you in person so don’t ignore them online. To accelerate your business’ growth, you need  to build relationships, and this is one of the most important parts of social media marketing success. Acknowledge every person who reaches out to you.  Don’t publish your content and then disappear. Be available to your audience.

• Reciprocate

You can’t expect others to share your content and talk about you if you don’t do the same for them. So, a portion of the time you spend on social media should be focused on sharing and talking about content published by others.

• Connect with the Influencers

Spend time finding the online influencers in your market who have quality audiences and are likely to be interested in your products, services and business. Connect with them and work to build relationships with them. If they find you as an authoritative, interesting source of useful information, they might share your content with their own followers, which could put you and your business in front of a huge new audience.

• Be Patient

Success on social media doesn’t happen overnight. You have to have to be consistent and give it the full attention it deserves. While it’s possible to catch lightning in a bottle, it’s far more likely that you’ll need to commit to the long haul to achieve results.