What does it take to become one of the top respected brands on the web, in any niche?
It takes a LOT of hard work and grit – that’s for sure. But it also takes a lot more than that. It takes strategy, cunning, and actually a big helping of luck!
If you want to be one of the major players in your chosen niche, then you need to know exactly how to build an audience, gain their loyalty and keep them coming back to your site time and time again.
But there’s not just ‘one secret’ to this. In fact, there are countless little things that the very best do differently. These are the things that set apart those incredible brands and make them the huge household names they are today.
Here is the single most important thing you must know about thriving on social media: it is absolutely imperative that you always provide value.
What does social media marketing do?
The word social media marketing (SMM) guides the usage of social media and social networks to market a company’s products and services. Social media marketing supplies a way for companies to connect with existing customers and gain new customers while permitting them to promote their desired culture, mission, or tone.
What are social media marketing examples?
Social Media Marketing (SMM) is marketing that targets social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok for brand promotion, target audience growth, driving website traffic, and increasing sales.
Is social media marketing Easy?
As free and easy as each medium may be, a reliable social media marketing strategy needs multiple media and often a mix of organic and paid strategies. This can be resource-heavy, and while it’s a good pain to have, the more you grow your audience using social media, the more difficult it will be to keep up.
What are the principles of social media marketing?
Here you will get to see some points about the six main principles of social media marketing:
Provide Value
Here is the single most important thing you must know about thriving on social media: it is absolutely imperative that you always provide value.
What does this mean? It means that you’re going to be offering something concrete and tangible to your audience and giving them something that they can benefit from. Think of your social media much like a product or a service in its own right and NOT just a means to get as many people to your blog as possible.
This simple paradigm shift is the absolute difference between a successful social media channel and an unsuccessful one. You need to give people a reason to follow you, a reason to share your content, and a reason to keep checking back to your page. Don’t just expect people to follow you on Twitter because they ‘like your brand’!
How do you know if you’re doing this right? Ask yourself this simple question: if your social media channel were to shut down today would your followers be disappointed? We’re not asking if they would notice – we’re asking if they would genuinely feel that something they enjoyed had gone.
If the answer is yes, then congratulations! You are officially providing value.
Don’t Just Promote
But just as important is what you need to avoid doing.
What is the polar opposite of providing value?
The answer is simply promoting your business. And this is what too many misguided small businesses actually use their social media to do. These tend to be the kinds of companies that feel a little stuffy and out of touch with the user.
Local service businesses like plumbers and removal men, or more corporate operations like EPOS providers and time clock solutions/accountants.
These are the companies that will use their social media to post things like ‘Visit our site and see why we’re the best at what we do!’. Or, ‘Our software solutions are second to none!’.
This is literally just advertising and it completely misses the point of social media.
Don’t do it!
The post What YOU Would Want to Read
So why is self-promoting wrong?
The answer is that it’s not offering any value. People do not want to go out of their way to be advertised and they don’t want adverts showing up in their home feeds alongside posts from their friends and family!
This will simply demonstrate a lack of understanding on your part (hurting your reputation) and it will frustrate your visitors likely motivating them to simply unsubscribe and leave.
And can you imagine anyone actually clicking on a post about why you’re the best accounting company in the [INSERT AREA] region? No, didn’t think so…
The best way to get a good idea of whether your posts are ticking the right boxes is simply to ask yourself: would you read them?
If this came up on your home feed, how would you feel? If you’d be pleased and then go on to read it and possibly share it, then it’s an ideal choice for your own social media channel!
But if you’d ignore it, or worse yet feel frustrated, then that’s a sign you shouldn’t do the same.
Look at your own history on these sites and ask yourself why you clicked on the links you did and shared the things you did. What are the best posts you’ve seen?
Learn How to Create Titles That Grab Attention
Writing content and sharing posts that can do this is the crucial skill you need to develop if you’re going to build and grow your social media channels.
But there is nowhere where this is more important than in the titles of your posts. Your title is your first impression – it’s like wearing the right suit to an interview.
In this case, if you want people to read your content, then you need to make sure you are creating really great titles that will really stand out and sound fascinating, unique, and exciting.
We can see this when we look at clickbait and that’s the reason that clickbait has become popular
In case you’ve been living under a rock, a clickbait title is a title that is designed to grab attention and encourage clicks. Often, it does this by piquing the interest of the reader with some kind of mystery or shocking statement.
Here are some examples:
“This Man Told Me His Secret to Making Money Online… What Happened Next Will Shock You”
“Try This One Weird Trick to Get Rid of Bodyfat!”
Understanding the ‘Value Proposition’
Something to understand as you’re doing all this is what your value proposition is.
Your value proposition should go beyond just your social media. This is rather the entire ethos behind your brand and it should be the reason your business exists: your ‘why’.
So what does all that mean? Essentially, it means that you should be aiming to sell more than just a product or a service, you should be selling a dream, an idea, or something that can one way or another, improve people’s lives.
The old saying goes that you ‘don’t sell hats, you sell warm heads. What this means, is that what you sell is more than the sum of its parts. What you sell is the result and the way that result makes you feel. And this is what will provide the emotion behind your products – the emotion that drives people to want to buy from you.
When you can tap into the ‘value proposition’ of your business, then you can find an emotional hook for your posts that will be relevant and that will make people actually stand up and take notice.
Always Deliver on Your Promise
Wait a minute…!
Did I just recommend that you use clickbait?
Isn’t clickbait essentially spam?
Why yes it is. I’m glad you picked up on that and I’m glad that you see the problem here. I am not recommending that you start posting clickbait articles.
All I’m saying is that you can learn from clickbait articles. These stand out because they have interesting concepts that speak to us on an emotional level and get us to want to click.
The problem? They never deliver on their promise. And they’ve reached the point of becoming transparent and contrived.
Very often, you’ll read about this ‘one weird trick’ or the supplement that ‘should be banned’ and it will be nothing but an advert for something very generic. Or you’ll watch a long video to see ‘what happens next and you’ll be disappointed to find that nothing much happens.
Often you’ll need to click through lots of sliders filled with large amounts of adverts.
And as such, you’ll learn NOT to click on clickbait because it never delivers.
So it’s a catch-22. What is an internet marketer to do?
The answer is to take what works about these posts and avoid what makes them suck…
And when you share content that other people have valued, you need to be just as selective and make sure that it ticks all those same boxes: sounds amazing, and delivers on its promise.
Make Your Followers Feel Important
If you do all this then your social media channel will instantly be better than a huge proportion of what’s out there at the moment. But it won’t be perfect.
Why?
Because if you look at social media only from that perspective then you’re missing out on a very big part of it. Simply put, social media is a social tool. It’s intended for communication and that’s a two-way thing.
Even if you’re posting the very best content in the world, if that’s all you’re doing then it will still feel like a one-way bombardment that will quickly become frustrating for your following.
So instead, you need to focus on that social aspect too by actually engaging with your audience and communicating with them rather than making this a one-way thing.
And this starts by treating your visitors like VIPs.
This is a small and simple difference but it’s one that can have a huge impact on your success.
The key is to make following you on social media seem like an exciting lifestyle change and the first step on a great journey.
If your social media channel is about fitness for example, then you can create a situation where simply signing up to your social media channel feels like the first step toward the body your audience wants.
Promote Your Social Media on Your Blog
Here’s a very simple principle that nevertheless gets overlooked a lot –which is to promote your social media channels on your blogs. Too often, companies and marketers will think of their social media as a tool to promote their website only, not realizing that this actually can work both ways.
In fact, though, promoting your social media on your blog is a great way to promote both aspects of your business and capture your visitors and turn them into warm leads.
This way, if someone should land on your website for the first time and find they enjoy your brand, then they might decide that they want to follow you and learn more. Once they’ve seen your logo right there on the page, seen some of your posts, etc., they will have a much better idea of what you’re all about.
Then, if you have social media buttons right there – and you draw attention to them in your content – your new visitors can opt to follow you and stay updated (and this is easier than capturing email addresses).
Now you have direct contact with your audience and you can promote to them in the future. That means they’re more likely to come back to your blog and it means that they’re more likely to share your blog posts with their connections on social media. This then creates something of a ‘virtuous cycle’ (the opposite of a vicious cycle!).
Everything you do to promote your social media will now better promote your blog and everything that promotes your blog will lead to more traffic on your social media! This also establishes that clear link and ensures that it’s very obvious that you are one brand that has multiple social media channels. The whole thing becomes a self-sustaining loop!
Of course, this also goes for social sharing buttons – make sure it’s easy for people visiting your site to share your content on their social media pages by liking it or Tweeting it. This is a great way to get more exposure for your blog posts.
Respond and Engage
Just as you need to focus on the social element by encouraging people to feel like a part of a movement, it’s also important to emphasize two-way communication by actually talking with your visitors and engaging with them.
Don’t underestimate the value of a single fan. Because that one fan could end up being the person who promotes your post on a forum somewhere that leads to your big break. Answer questions, respond to compliments, and let your audience feel like they can talk directly to you.
This will once again also inspire trust and give them the confidence to feel that they can buy from you and not worry about their money disappearing and the product never appearing!
It can take a while to answer everything and once your influx of content gets too big you’ll, of course, be unable to answer everything. But in the meantime, responding regularly is a great way to get people behind you!
Oh and don’t think that you always necessarily have to wait for them to make the ‘first move’ either. There’s nothing wrong with occasionally reaching out to someone by liking one of their posts, or by commenting on something they’ve done. This is a great feeling for someone who is a fan and can create a feeling of gratitude.
And it might interest you at this point to know that whenever we feel in debt, that feeling doesn’t go away unless we give something back of greater value. So if you like someone’s post, it’s actually not out of the question that they might feel moved to repay your kindness by buying your product!
You can also invite communication by asking questions – and remember that this is actually a whole secondary usage for your social media too: you can use your social media as a way to survey your audience and to get their advice and opinions on matters.
Conclusion
So there you have it: 9 social media principles that can transform your approach to growing on social media and help you to gain a loyal, passionate following that will lead to exponential growth and eventually to sales.
It sounds like a lot but actually, there are a lot of common threads between these tips. The key is to have a brand with a vision and a purpose. It’s to be passionate about what you do and to have a brand that people can really get behind.
You’ll then express that value proposition and vision through high-quality content – rather than just posting promotions and advertising. Engage with your audience, get them involved with your movement and be consistent.
If you do all this and work to get your brand onto every social media channel you can, then it is only a matter of time until you begin to grow.
Oh and that’s one more reason to make sure that you really enjoy and believe in what you’re doing. If you don’t, then it’s very easy to become disheartened when you don’t see results overnight. Do it for the love and your following will come.