Reflection #2:6 Ways to Improve Your Social Media Marketing

6 Ways to Improve Your Social Media Marketing:

1.    What did you say to me? 

As a company, you need to figure out what you stand for or what product you are trying to sell. If your product is something very social or playful, use that to your advantage. Make the tone of your website playful or even the responses to users playful or sassy. The tone you choose to use through your social media platforms will help others remember who you are and how you interact with your brand. 

2.    Major Key: Interaction

   
 Allowing some form of interaction with your brand for buyers and consumers allows for more people to become a part of the brand. Interaction is the key to brand awareness. Therefore, by allowing certain opportunities such as live chats where workers can interact with the questions given to them by curious users; the company can improve the popular perception of their brand. Other ways of having increased interaction is having social media influencers promote your product- give them free merch in return for advertising. So, while they grow in followers on social media so does the number of people interested in your products! Or even having a place for customers to provide feedback goes a long way (they want to know that you are listening to them!)

 3.    Manage your accounts wisely 

A part of understanding how to be successful at marketing through social media is understanding that you cannot actively monitor each social media platform individually. You will not have enough time and the key to successfully marketing is being unified. If you have more than one person interacting with users or consumers you run the risk of not being unified in response or tone. This is where social media management tools: like Hootsuite or Social Sprout come to play. Platforms like these allows you to manage ALL (that’s right I said all) social media accounts linked to your brand from one place. That means you can reply with one single click, or even track your growth and performance.

 4.    You are unique, so use it!

As a brand you need to figure out what makes you unique and capitalize on it. Successful brands such as Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest have done so. They figured out what made them unique as a platform, being able to pin things, tweet, and like posts. You need to find what you are trying to sell or promote through the product or service you are selling. You know you’ve made it when what makes you unique is becoming a part of the everyday conversation and lingo! (ex. Did you see what I tweeted last night?)

5.    Monitor your competition

It is easy to focus solely on marketing for your own company or business. But did you know its ok to check out the competition? (I mean don’t go stealing their ideas-because lawsuits, duh!) But, if your competition is blowing you guys out of the water, then it is beneficial to you as a company to see what kind of marketing tactics they are using that draw in the consumers and users continuously. After that, you can take a step back and examine what is working in your marketing and advertising, and what needs to be changed to make your marketing more successful!

6.    Honesty, is the best policy!

To quote Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein authors of the journal article, "Users of the World, Unite! The Challenges and Opportunities of Social Media",

“Be honest and respect the rules of the game. Some Social Media–—such as Wikipedia–— may not allow companies to be involved, so do not try to force your way in. . . .Never expect that other participants may not find out who stands behind some anonymous user account; after all, you’re dealing with some of the most technologically sophisticated people on the planet (Kaplan and Haenlein 37).

If some bad publicity were to be linked to your company, do not try to hide it. Instead, be honest. Acknowledge that it happened, but take your time to evaluate the situation in its entirety before issuing out a companywide statement. It’s better to have all the facts so you can understand the extent of the situation, instead of excluding certain bits so you can retain you image in the public (because we know, someone will find it and it will be circulating the internet before you know it)

  

Works Cited:

Kaplan, Andreas M., and Michael Haenlein. "Users of the World, Unite! The Challenges and Opportunities of Social Media." Business Horizons 53.1 (2010): 59-68. Print.