The first and most important part is to make sure you have the right social media marketer platforms. If you just start on a platform that no one is using, it will be almost impossible for your content or message to reach anyone. You need to pick some of the more popular social media marketing channels as starting points. Once you build up a following there, then branch out into less popular social media sites as well as ones that your target audience use too.
Here are some key things to consider when deciding which social media channels to use:
Who is my target audience?
Where do they hangout online?
What types of posts/messages do they respond best to on those sites?
How many people on visit each site?
How much engagement do they get on average?
How much ease is there in building a following or getting social media exposure through that site?
What other social media marketers and influencers are using it?
Online research is important for this, but you should also know how to make use of existing contacts. Your friends and family could be all over different social media channels that you might not even know about. It always helps to find out what's popular or where the action happens before you get started.
Once you have your social media channels picked out, it's time to start putting together a social media marketing strategy and begin implementing the days and times that you will be active on each platform. That way you can get in front of as many people on those networks as possible, instead of just spending all day on one site and not making any progress on any other sites.
How do I pick which ones to use? How much time should I spend on each social network? Which strategies work best for social media marketing? Is my target audience even present there? What content am I going to share? How will I communicate with my customers and potential customers? What metrics should I track (b "likes" or "followers", maybe engagement levels?)?
These are all questions you should have an answer to before you start on social media marketing.
What is social media marketing?
How do I know which networks will be most effective for my business? What tools should I use to monitor what users are saying about me on social networks? When should I post on social network sites, and how often? How can I promote our brand through the use of these channels without being overly promotional or spammy on them? How can I measure the success of my efforts on social media platforms in order to continue to improve performance over time, and how does that feed back into improving our marketing strategy overall?
