Scroll to top

5 Steps to Optimizing Your Social Media Marketing Efforts


Nathan Johnson - February 25, 2016 - 0 comments

Businesses of all sizes and industries increasingly use social media to market their products and services. It makes perfect sense, considering that most American adults spend their time on Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms and are easily reachable there.

And yet, social media is time-intensive. Especially considering the plethora of networks available for your business to market their services, it’s easy to become lost in the weeds. So it’s not a surprise that “how do you manage all of your social networks” is a question we commonly receive from our audience. If you’re wondering the same thing, here are 5 steps you can take to optimize your social media marketing efforts!

1) Know Your Audience

First, any successful marketing has to begin with knowing just who you’re trying to reach. If you have not narrowed your audience down to its most relevant segment, you will waste much of your time and resources on efforts that have little chance of reaching that audience.

Knowing your audience includes not just coming up with geographic and demographic averages (such as 18-29 year olds living in Florida), but also estimating their interests, and how they spend their time. You can achieve this by surveying your current customers, and using the information to create unique buyer personas that give you a better idea of who your customers truly are.

2) Focus Your Attention

Once you have a better idea of your audience, you can use that information to optimize your social media presence. Above all, that means narrowing down the network(s) on which your audience spends most of their time, and focusing your attention and resources in that area.

For example, a B2B business looking to target executive buyers will have little use for Instagram, and should instead focus their efforts on LinkedIn. A fashion outlet targeting teenagers, on the other hand, is perfect for ‘younger’ networks like Instagram. Facebook remains the exception to this targeting rule, remaining unequivocally popular across all ages.

3) Be Unique, But Coherent

Next, you should narrow down your message and ‘voice’ for each network on which you have a business presence. Twitter and Facebook, for example, require very different posts based on their limitations and audience, and the differences only increase when moving to more visually-oriented networks like Pinterest and Snapchat.

That means you should never post the same content on multiple networks, though it may seem like a time-saver at first. Instead, jot down a unique voice and goal for each of your networks, which you will adhere to at all times. As long as you make sure these voices are consistent with your brand identity, this will significantly help yours social success.

4) Develop a Content Calendar

Speaking of success: to ensure your social media marketing is worth your efforts, you need regular content with which to populate each network. This is where most businesses struggle, and probably why we get the question about difficulties managing all social accounts so often.

One tool that can help you significantly in ensuring you post regular content at all times is a content calendar. This can be a simple Excel spreadsheet in which you plan your content ahead of time, with each line standing for a date and each column representing a social network. If you set some time aside at the beginning of each week to plan your posts for that week, you will save significant time throughout the week.

5) Don’t Be Afraid of Help 

Finally, especially if you manage multiple networks, don’t be afraid of asking for help with your social media marketing efforts. That can include using a social management platform like Hootsuite or Buffer, both of which aggregate your social networks into one convenient screen.

But if you need strategic help as well, these helpful tools may not be quite enough. In that case, you need professionals who help you strategize, plan, and execute your marketing strategy throughout social media. If that applies to you, we’d love to have a chat to see where we can help! Contact us to get started on the road to a successful social media strategy and presence.

Related posts

Post a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *