a guide to social media marketing by deborah king

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING A Guide to

Deborah King Deborahking.info

Thanks for downloading my eBook. This is a short and sweet guide for the new and experienced social media marketer. It includes all the things you should consider when thinking about your social strategy. I hope you find this useful! Deborah Social Media Consultant

Hi!

www.deborahking.info 2

CONTENTS

3 Why Is Social Media Valuable?

5 Where to start?

10 Choosing the right platform for you

11 Insights

12 How to be mobile with your audience

13 How to plan your Content

14 Native Advertising

Why Is Social Media Valuable?

“ The biggest risk is not taking any risk... In a world that is changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks. “

- Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook

3 www.deborahking.info

When I first started in social media it was a buzzword that was thrown around, with no one quite knowing what to do with it. Innovation budgets were being used to experiment with social platforms. Fast forward ten years and social is very much here to stay. Social Media has become an integral part of people’s lives, but don’t take my word for it – the numbers speak for themselves.

Facebook has 1.28 billion people active every month. Pinterest has 70 million users creating boards. Twitter has 500 million people Tweeting. Every. Single. Day.

Youtube has people watching 6 billion hours of video a month.

Instagram has 20 billion photos shared with 1 million photo likes. Linkedin has 300 million professionals looking to connect and network with each other. Google+ has an 540 million active users,

4

Why Is Social Media Important?

www.deborahking.info

Think about what it is you want to achieve with social media and how that will that help your business. Do you want short terms sales and long-term sales? Or just engage people in good conversation? Think about the business objective as this will help you build out the content you will be producing and how you will speak to your social community. Here are just some of the business objectives you can achieve with social media:

Building brand awareness Establishing your brand as an industry leader Product launch Reach Customer Service

Generating qualified leads And Driving sales Audience research and feedback Driving traffic to your website or blog

5

Where to start 1. What is your business objec6ve?


Do you want to be known as a Thought-Leader in your field? Do you want to be known as funny and articulate?

Think about how you want your customers to perceive your brand. As this will help you build out the content and help you craft your tone-of-voice with your social community.

These are just some of the ways that you can represent yourself in social media.

6

Where to start 2. What does your brand stand for?

You need to know who you’re talking to. In order to attract your customers attention you need to understand who they are. Who are your consumers? What do they look like? When people are on social media platforms, they want to consume content that is relevant and useful to them. When you begin to understand who your audience is, you can produce content that they are interested in. You can then engage with them and they can become your advocates in their networks.

I always recommend that people build out several profiles of the people that they are trying to target. This should include demographic (age, gender, location, material status) and psychographic (interests, hobbies, values, lifestyle). This helps you to know what time of content your audience would like to see.

7

Where to start 3. Who is your target audience?


Setting an account up can technically be done with ease, but building a community excited about your business takes work.

You need to think whether there is a person/team/department that can take on the day-to-day management of the platforms you choose to invest in.

People are on social media 24/7 doing multiple activities - messaging friends, sharing content, shopping, etc. This means managing social media requires a lot of time and energy.

8

Where to start 4. Do you have the bandwidth?

This may seem like a funny question, but it’s a serious one. To be in social media you need to be social, and you need to be ready to take the highs with the lows.

People have opinions, and they’re not afraid to voice them…especially on social media. So you need to make sure that you’re ready to have an open dialogue with your social community, followers and ultimately your customers.

9

Where to start 5. Do you like people?

Choosing The Right Platform For You?

I’m a firm believer that you don’t have to be on every single social media platform. Especially when you take into account the points I’ve already covered. Not every social media platform may be right for you and your business – take the time to know what each social platform is about and choose the right ones to invest in for you.

“ I’m as proud of many things we haven’t done as the things we have done. Innovation is saying no to a thousand

things .” - Steve Jobs, Apple

Sometimes it’s better to invest in one or two social platforms. Rather than spreading yourself too thinly across multiple platforms, – make it work for you!


Insights

Some platforms are better than others with the amount of insights that is available. There are also numerous third party management tools that can help you measure success. Facebook, Youtube, Linkedin, Google+ and Pinterest offer robust analytics for you to see the impact your content is having on your fans.

Are you looking at these insights? -  Where are your fans coming from? -  Who is the most engaged audience? - How long into the video are people watching your video content? Make sure that there’s someone in your team analysing the content you are producing.


How to be social with your audience

Too often people think of social as a desktop based platform. This was the case ten years ago but with the dominance of smartphones social media has become mobile. So make sure your site is mobile responsive and think about the length of your content; especially video content. Make sure your video content is short and sweet; 30-45 seconds. People have data cost to think about and to be honest if you are on your mobile, you are unlikely to stop and watch a five minute video in the middle of the street.

Facebook has 23 million UK mobile Twitter has 12 million UK mobile users The next wave of social platforms emerges solely on mobile; Instagram has 200 million users Snapchat has 300 million users Vine has 40 million users Whatsapp has 400 million users


How to plan your content

Content will only drive engagement if it is relevant to your audience. To get started compare you business objectives with who your audience is. You should start being able to see themes of the content that you should be producing. Then add ‘what you are brand stands for’ into the mix. This will help you define what your tone of voice is. So that every time you publish and produce content – it is in line with what your business stands for. One thing to think about is SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). Become familiar with the keywords that will help you in your search ranking. Include these keywords in content.

13

Different types of content to think about : Blogs Photos Videos Newsletters

Native Advertising

Social media is leading the way for native adverting. Native advertising means that the ads on the platform look like the content on the platform. A simple way to think about it is an ad on Facebook is a page post, an ad on Twitter is a Tweet, etc. Just another reason for you to build out your social media strategy.

“ Facebook ads in the News Feed achieve 49-times higher click-through rates and a 54% lower cost-per-click than

traditional placements in the right-rail sidebar”

- Business Insider

You should think about the amount of investment/budget/cold hard cash you are investing or not investing in social advertising. With the numbers, I’ve highlighted earlier social media is becoming a competitive landscape.

14

Get in touch!

Deborah King deborahking.info

I'd love to hear from you to discuss to discuss social media, technology, Eastenders or how I can help with your social stagey. [email protected] uk.linkedin.com/in/kingdeborah/ @Kingdebs www.deborahking.info

a guide to social media marketing by deborah king

Technology