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Social Media Marketing: The Beginner’s Guide

  Social media is an effective tool for building brand awareness, communicating with existing customers, and building loyalty. It’s particularly attractive to small business owners due to its low cost and ease of access.

Add to that the malaysia telegram data fact that there are  2.62 billion   users worldwide. Whether you want to make local sales or use your online store and offer international shipping to reach a wider audience,  is the most effective way to raise awareness of your store.

About a third of consumers  prefer to communicate with a brand through  media. This offers exciting opportunities. Whether you’re looking to optimize your social media strategy or are just getting started, this short guide to social media marketing will help you get off to a good start. It explains how to:

  • Research your local competitors
  • Choosing your platforms
  • Set clear goals
  • Use local influencers
  • Follow the 60/30/10 rule

Research your local competitors  Media 

The best way to figure 19 abandoned cart email best practices and tips out what you should be doing on is to start by looking at what your competitors are doing. This is called competitive research . Look at what they’re doing and what’s working. For example, what drives engagement, likes, and comments? Study your competitors both online and offline—if they have the same audience as you, that information will be valuable.

Follow this competitor research checklist for analyzing each account. Create a spreadsheet to record your findings; it will serve as a handy reference when you begin preparing your own strategy. When conducting your competitor research, try to answer the following questions for each competitor:

  1. Active Accounts : Which social Social Media networks are your competitors using?
  2. Subscriber demographics : age, gender, and location of their target market?
  3. Content : What types of content do they publish? (Product photos, videos, lifestyle photos, educational content, etc.)
  4. Content Distribution : How many posts do they publish for each of the above content types?
  5. Times and frequencies : How many times per week do they publish content?
  6. Fan responsiveness : Which posts get the most shares, likes, comments, retweets, etc.?
  7. Promotional content : What percentage of their posts are promotional in nature?
  8. Influencers : Which influencers are they partnered with?

When you’re finished, analyze your chart to identify patterns and use them as starting points for your own social media marketing strategy.

Example

If you find that product photos like the one below generate the most engagement on Instagram, schedule these types of photos into your content calendar. Focus your efforts on creating content that generates high engagement (likes, shares, comments, retweets, etc.).

Image:  Oliver Peoples

 Choosing your platforms

Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat: the list seems to grow longer every year. With so many options, choosing which platform to use can be difficult. Rather than trying to take advantage of every available platform, take a step back and consider which one might be most beneficial for your business. Identify one or two platforms where your competitors are most active or present most frequently.

Choose platforms used by your target audience

Next, consider your audience’s demographics. For example, 78% of 18- to 24-year-olds use Snapchat, according to a  Pew Research Center survey . If your target audience is 65 and older, Snapchat likely won’t be the best platform for your business. How do you find the right platform for you?

Cross-reference the demographics from your competitor research with those of your own target market. Then, check out this comprehensive breakdown of  demographics  from Sprout Social to identify the social media platforms most used by your target audience. Choose one or two platforms used by a significant portion of your target audience and focus all your efforts there.

Start small, expand later

If you’re short on time, it’s b2b reviews better to focus your efforts on one or two  platforms and work on them effectively, rather than choosing three or more platforms and using them ineffectively. Also, keep in mind that you can always expand your activities to more  platforms later.

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