Focusing Your Social Media Campaign

No matter how much social media evolves, many people still view these platforms in terms of cat videos and family pictures, with a little bit of political snark thrown in along the way. Indeed, scroll through most personal Facebook or Twitter feeds, and ample helpings of each of these likely appear. But for business owners, this misses the point and the power of what a social media marketing campaign can and should be. If you direct and focus your social media presence, both within and across the various platforms available, you create opportunities for growth that are all but impossible to achieve through more traditional means.

Branding on Social Media

When you have an established brand for your company, you have a logo and color and design schemes that you have associated with what you do. Your website should have these built consistently across all of your pages. When you build social media pages, then, you need to make sure you maintain those themes. Too many businesses put out pages on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, and other social media sites that use images without regard to that thematic development. The result is that, if people click link from social media to your primary website, it feels almost like a misdirected link. You dilute your image and reduce your chance of success.

On the other hand, if you have not yet built an online brand, you should consider your social media pages and website as different locations within a coherent whole. The more you do to create a consistent, strong voice for your company, the more memorable that presence will be for the users you want to attract as customers. Take the time to connect your pages not just through links, but through an appearance and a voice that allow you to pull everything together in a way that makes sense.

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Balance Your Tone

One critical balancing act for your company comes between developing a strong, consistent voice and connecting with the kind of content that generates page views and conversions for your site. Many business owners yield to the temptation of trying to imitate content that has gone viral. The funny video that just got three million hits? Find a way to copy it! The approach seeks to find what works for other people and other purposes, and co-opt it for a new purpose.

This social media approach almost never works, for two critical reasons. First, it immediately moves you behind an existing trend, rather than driving something new. Today’s viral video is tomorrow’s punchline in all too many cases. When you show up late on the trend, you cannot lead it. The best you can do is grab hold of what is left, and hope it is still enough to make a difference for your marketing.

Second, imitation may be the best form of flattery, but it necessarily means you are giving up the opportunity to apply your own voice to your content. You can aim for humor or seriousness, for direct application to your business or a tangential connection to lead back, but you must always do so in a voice that reflects who you are. No one else’s content can do this, and trying to imitate someone else’s approach will always leave you short of what you are capable of doing.

Your content, regardless of the way you connect to your potential customers, has to reflect who you are. Just as your imagery needs to make sense across multiple platforms, so you need to ensure that the words and images you present connect readers back to you. Linking among disjointed sites leaves customers confused, and thus less likely to bring you the results you need.

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Conversions Trump Page Views

For many, the idea of making money through social media feels magical. You create a social media presence, people follow you in droves, and you get rich. How exciting! Unfortunately, the miracle money does not come; the views and links back never materialize, or even if they do, they provide great statistics and virtually no revenue bump to justify even the modest investment in time or money that the social media presence requires.

The reality of your online marketing, through your website, social media pages, and other online advertising, is that clicks are not an end goal that gets you real results. Rather, you want to generate clicks from the people most interested in your product or service, because those are the people who have a realistic chance of becoming your customers. Just as your content marketing through your website should focus on material relevant to those potential customers, so your social media should focus on what might spur them to action.

One benefit that social media platforms provide in this regard is that they already connect you to your location. While website SEO must include local search terms and SEO techniques to connect your site back to where you are, social media sites build this in from the beginning. Marketing through social media already lets people know where you are, and connects them to and through that location. Thus, it provides a built-in advantage by helping scope your audience for you.

But where you are is only half of the equation. Your potential customers do not consist of everyone in a metropolitan area. Rather, they are the subset of people in that area (and for some businesses, elsewhere as well) who have a genuine interest in what you provide. Your social media platforms should therefore use tags and join groups to not only extend their reach, but to specifically extend to people most likely to care about what they see from you.

Social media marketing, when you direct it to what makes sense for your brand and your customers, provides a powerful tool, one that can help you build exponentially on the reach you generate. Focus on who you are and whom you want to attract, and it can help your online marketing efforts more than almost any other approach you can take.