Social Media Basics for Beginners
Simple Tips to Transform Your Business and Inspire Brand Loyalty
Social Media Basics for Beginners Basic Overview:
As you probably know, social media is a term used to describe websites and apps that allow users to share personal and focused content with their network and a globally reaching community in real time for free. For businesses, it’s a direct link to consumers.
The goal of using social media as a marketing tool for a business is to create compelling content that viewers share with their own social networks, therefore growing your audience and brand recognition.
Social media marketing can be used to obtain clients or tenants, direct sales of products and services, income from advertising and referral links, increasing a subscriber list, building brand loyalty, and many other things. Social media allows for interactivity and an opt-in community, as opposed to the traditional approach to marketing where the message is one directional and intrusive. This leads to a more positive and lasting relationship with the consumer.
Social media can be viewed on many types of devices, including computers, tablets, smart phones , gaming consoles, watches, TV’s, and even some digital cameras.
Social media is an amazing way to drive traffic and customers to your business, but it takes time and consistency. Don’t expect to see results overnight. You’ll have to stay committed to your plan long-term to see great results!
Why is Social Media So Effective?
The law of compounding makes social media so effective! When you create awesome content, your audience will share it for you with their network of friends and colleagues. But this is not just true of human sharing—as more people share your content and discuss it, more pages are created that include your content for search engines to find.
Just remember that once you put your content online, it’s there forever on some server, even if you later delete it. If others share it, then it will have a life of its own—so take care when posting!
Keep your content interesting and useful to your target audience, too. If you only post ads, or just brag about how great your life is, then you’re not providing enough value to build a community around your brand. If you’re a real estate professional and want to use social media to advertise your services and listings, you may want to intersperse inspirational quotes or real estate investment tips in between any posts about what you’re selling.
You could also use quizzes or polls to encourage your audience to interact and provide feedback, or share personal stories that illustrate the quality of service you provide to your clients. Sharing links to related resources, or sharing industry trends, are some other ways you could engage your audience.
If you’re concerned that you’ll have to create videos or write long blog posts, that’s really not necessary. Just start by having a consistent schedule and providing content, no matter how brief, that provides some value to your target audience. You may wish to add more complex or detailed content into your social media strategy down the road, but when you’re starting out it’s just important to work on growing your community with consistent posting.
Be Authentic.
While professional writing and production quality would be ideal, as well as having a great brand strategy, these are no longer the days when professional journalism or network TV advertising were the only acceptable standards! People want authenticity—they want to know the personality behind the brand, and want to connect on a personal level to your content and company. This is far more important than an expensive video.
Many studies have shown that people make decisions for emotional reasons, no matter how logical they think they’re being. If they like and trust YOU, they will like your brand.
You can charge a premium for what you do when people connect with you and see you personally and content as valuable to them. This is the way small companies compete with large companies, because they can’t always compete on price, but they can have a more compelling story, more passion, more personalized customer service, and more authenticity.
You Can’t Please Everyone.
You don’t need to. Don’t try to.
It’s too easy to feel devastated by negative comments or feedback, but you have to resist this trap.
Use any legitimate criticism productively, and ignore the trolls who have nothing to do but try to make people feel bad all day online. Some of them are just bots and not even real people—how silly it would be to feel offended by a bot! But sadly, real people who enjoy spreading negativity also do indeed exist, and they seem to thrive online even if they hide in the real world. Resist the urge to engage with these types of comments because it’s a waste of your time and energy.
That being said, even though it’s tough, any negative feedback that’s actually constructive or insightful is worth listening to so that you can continually improve your content. This can be difficult at first, especially since we tend to give more weight to the negatives than positives, but sometimes it can be extremely valuable.
Constructive criticism can help us learn how we could improve our strategy and content so that we’re more successful with our message. Just be sure to keep a bit of emotional separation between your social media work and your personal life so that you can set it all aside when you’re not working.
All Social Media Content Should Put Mobile Platforms First.
You can view your website stats to evaluate where your visitors are coming from, but in most cases they’re coming from mobile platforms. Keep this in mind when creating your content, and be sure to view it on mobile devices to check how it looks.
Remember to Keep it Simple.
Just select one channel for your social media when you’re getting started. After you master that one you may want to start adding more, but keeping things simple at first will help you stick with it.
Think in Terms of Daily Processes Instead of Distant and Lofty End Goals.
It’s definitely important to have a clear vision of your goals, but it’s your daily processes that will get you there. These are much more useful than thinking in terms of goals!
Goals are just distant dreams until you implement manageable processes and make consistent progress to reach them. Once you do that, if you stick to it, you’ll find it’s hard not to achieve your goals!
Be specific and break down each milestone you want to accomplish into small, actionable steps.
For example, what if you’re a real estate agent and have the following list of items you want to accomplish?
- Draw more traffic to your website or Facebook/Pintrest/YouTube/etc.
- Get more page followers.
- Grow your list of email subscribers.
- Grow your client base.
- Add additional passive income through social media channels.
You could start first by creating a Facebook business page, then compiling a list of 30 useful tips for homebuyers, then implementing a daily routine of posting one useful tip every day for the next 30 days.
When you only think in terms of goals, every day that you don’t reach those goals can feel like you’re failing. But by breaking your goals into easy to achieve steps, then implementing daily processes from those steps, you’re creating a system in which you are sure to succeed.
Even better, you’re already succeeding every single day, little by little. Then one day soon you will realize you’ve already reached or surpassed your original goal!