So we’re here to go over a few things in regards to Social Media Marketing, mainly the argument of ‘Quality over Quantity’ and how to achieve this. If you’re new to social media marketing and you’ve finally decided to take the leap into social media marketing for your business, we’ll start with the basics.
First step is deciding which social channels to use. There’s that many these days that you’ll probably be thinking which do I use? Just Facebook? Or all of them?
Think about these things before considering which to use:
What social channels will your potential clients be active on most frequently?
Who is your target demographic and what channels are they most likely to use?
Which social channels will work most efficiently to represent your brand or product?
If you’re an eCommerce business you might think about sharing new products on Pinterest and Instagram.
How much time will I have to assign to social tasks?
If you already run a department and this is just an extra task which you won’t have much time to assign to, it might be best limiting your social channels to just one or two.
That’s it. You’re ready, you’ve set up your social media channels so now what’s next, followers? Here at Unit36 we offer a social media marketing service on a monthly digital marketing retainer basis. With this we manage clients’ social media channels and email marketing. This increases customer engagement through clever social media campaigns which helps increase; brand awareness, social following and converting followers into new customers.
What you find with a lot of agencies who offer social media marketing as a service is that they think it’s solely a numbers game. If you have 50,000 followers at the end of year one they’ve done their job? Wrong.
Ask yourself this; what’s the point in having 20,000 fans on your Facebook page if 5,000 are male, 10,000 are over 30, yet your company sells a product that is aimed at 18-25 year old females. 75% of your social media marketing efforts have already been wasted on a demographic that will probably never buy your product or service.
It would have been more cost effective to spend that extra time getting an extra 5,000 “Likes” to your page of potential female customers aged between 18-25. Okay, so you only have 10,000 likes to your page rather than 20,000, but that’s 10,000 potential customers rather than 5,000. I know which I would rather have. Also be careful of agencies buying “Likes” to your page. Buying Likes is cheap and very easy-but will add no value to your business.
Now you’re thinking, ‘but how do we gain a social following of potential customers and not just random followers?’. It’s actually quite easy. Most social media campaigns involve a sweepstake, promotion or competition of some form or another. You will find 100’s probably 1000’s of competitions where you like a page and enter your details for a chance to win an iPad or Kindle. However this just gets you a load of Likes from people who want to win an iPad, they will probably never actually interact with your brand or business through social media and may even unlike your page when the competition is over.
The real key to gaining potential clients as followers is really very simple. You offer them a chance to win one of your products or services which only encourages followers who are interested in what you offer as a business.
Big brands like Coca Cola often work in a slightly different way as they might give away the chance to win an all-inclusive trip to New York-but this is more of a brand awareness campaign rather than trying to win potential sales. However both methods will work for a brand of this size.
So there you have it. Quality is better than quantity when running a social media campaign for your business. 100,000 likes to a competitors Facebook page doesn’t necessarily mean they’re managing a successful social media campaign.
If you have any questions or want to contact us regarding social media marketing please do so by emailing us on [email protected] or give us a call directly 0161 241 54 53
