If you run a small or medium-sized business, then you should make sure to focus the majority of your marketing efforts online since you’ll have a better chance of increasing your exposure with a smaller budget. One of the best ways to do this is through inbound marketing, in which you entice customers to come to you by offering them something of value, whether it be informative content, free eBooks or special discounts. When planning out your inbound marketing campaign, one of the areas you’ll want to focus on is social media marketing. Social media allows you to maintain direct contact with the consumer, thereby gathering valuable information, as well as providing followers of your social media pages with benefits for their loyalty. Here are 15 social media marketing tips that you should be sure to follow in order to create a successful social media marketing strategy. 

1. Know Your Target – Find out who your demographic is so that you can specifically target them. Targeting everyone in general is not going to help you gain potential customers.
2. Use SEO – Search Engine Optimization will help your company climb the search rankings ladder and increase your exposure. Be sure to do research on your demographic, your area and what keywords your targets are using to find similar products and services.
3. Keep Your Brand Consistent – The branding of your company is incredibly important. You need to keep your branding consistent on all of your social media sites in order to create brand awareness. This means using the same loco, colors, font and more.
4. Create a Strategy – Don’t just jump onto a social network and call it a day. You need to have a goal in mind in order to take advantage of everything that social networks have to offer.
5. Post Regularly – Whether on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or any other social media site, make sure that you post regularly to keep followers interested and to simply remind them that you exist.
6. Hire a Marketing Firm – Managing your entire online presence can be overwhelming. A marketing firm will allow you to focus on the business side of things.
7. Create a Blog – Keep a company blog that provides fresh and informative content to consumers that links back to your main website.
8. Create Useful Content – Create content that is informative and useful for your followers or they’ll have no reason to follow you.
9. Communicate – Make sure to communicate with your followers. Ask for feedback and be sure to respond to it as well.
10. Offer Incentives – Trying to build your mailing list? Offer incentives via a landing page, such as a free e-Book in return for signing up to your mailing list.
11. Use Analytics – Use the different business analytics available to you via many of these social media sites in order to see how successful different aspects of your online presence are and to adjust accordingly.
12. Use High Quality Images – Images attract the eye, but make sure they are of high quality. Make sure it communicates your message.
13. Avoid Too Much Text – Followers don’t want to read through walls of text. Keep it simple; break up your text with bullets and add images.
14. Be Where your Customers are – You don’t need to be on every social media platform available. However, it’s important to be where your potential customers are. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN and Google+ are all great platforms to start out on and the most widely used social media platforms.
15. Limit Re-tweet Requests – Although you want your followers to re-tweet your tweets, asking them to do this is akin to asking for a favor. Limit how often you ask.

Use these tips to create a successful social media marketing campaign for your business today. Ready to begin your social media plan but need some consulting on where you should begin? Let’s talk!