You Don’t Have to Use Them All
Unless you have unlimited resources, pick one or two social media channels and use them VERY WELL.
If you are killing it with two, then think about a third.
Like a colleague of mine once said: “Don’t try to boil the ocean!”
There is very little “free” about social media. It takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of creativity. There are no short-cuts to creating and managing successful social media channels and campaigns.
Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are what most businesses use. Your particular target audience might use social media differently than other business categories, so you will have to do some research and testing.
For example, if you target a younger audience you may want to use SnapChat. If your ideal customer is between 30 and 50 years old, you might focus on Facebook. If you are targeting engaged couples who are planning a wedding you might want to use Pinterest. LinkedIn is a social media channel that a lot of professionals with good paying jobs connect with regularly.
To help you develop your own social media marketing strategy, take a look at what your competition is doing and the results they are getting on different social channels.
Post Consistently
Set a schedule, stick to it, and post to your social media feeds regularly. Once a day or three times a week, whatever you choose based on your resources be sure to do it consistently. Active social media feeds, be they Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, get more algorithmic visibility. In other words, the more you post, and the more regularly you post, the more likely people who follow you will see your posts.
Use Interesting Graphics
Use interesting eye-catching graphics that will get the attention of your audience. Think about it, in most cases the first thing that gets your attention when viewing your own social feeds is a graphic. Get some attention and interest with the graphic, and then use engaging and interesting text to create desire and action (A-awareness, I-interest, D-desire, A-action).
Optimize Your Social Media Channel Profiles
Each social media channel offers you the opportunity to create profiles with information about your business, images, a description of what you do, and how people can connect with you, by phone, website, etc. Take the time to fill in this information carefully. When using a physical location address, be sure to use the same address and format everywhere, this is an advanced search engine optimization (SEO) best practice known as NAP – name, address, phone.
Learn more about NAP at this link:
https://www.bluecorona.com/blog/local-seo-nap-consistency-guide
Tools
There are dozens of tools available to help you manage your social media marketing. Two that I’ve personally used, still use, and would recommend are Hootsuite and SmarterQueue. I like the ability to reuse content and reschedule it automatically in the future using the SmarterQueue “evergreen” post option.