3 Social Media Marketing Best Practices that Ensure the Best Returns

Personal interactions are increasingly moving from the real world to the online world through the use of various social media platforms. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ are just some of the many social networks that are having a huge impact on how we lead our daily lives and stay connected with our friends and family. They are even playing a role in the kind of products and services we choose, and restaurants we eat at, etc. Suffice to say if your business isn’t leveraging the immense reach of social media and its ability to give your brand the virality it needs, you are doing something wrong.

If you have decided to make social media marketing a part of your larger marketing campaign, it’s important you keep a few best practices in mind. Here are three of them:

1. Give Importance to Content
   
   Social media works on the principal of sharing. You can share news, personal messages, and links to all sorts of content with the friends and followers on your network. If you are business who wants to make optimal use of social media, you must be careful of the kind of content that you share with your friends and followers, who incidentally are also your target audience. You need to make sure that content is well constructed, useful and share worthy; because if it isn’t worthy of sharing these links will not be passed on by your friends to their friends and so on and so forth.
   
   By ensuring that the links to the content or the information that you share is always of top quality, you are improving the credibility of your social media presence. This credibility will in some part, transfer to your business as well.
   
   
2. Don’t Sell, Just Inform
   
   Yes, social media is a powerful marketing medium but it shouldn’t be used as such. The purpose of your social media presence is to make available the right information to its followers. This could be useful information about the domain your business belongs to or something that offers people newer insights in the various techniques or methodologies that are a part of the domain or news about the latest happenings in the domain. What you are essentially trying to do is not sell your products or services but helping your business become more visible amongst its target audience. What you are also trying to do with your social media marketing activities is ensuring that your brand rises in the estimation of its target audience so much so that they begin trusting your business name. This invariably leads to more people wanting to know about your products and services, and trusting you enough to buy them. But, the core objective of your presence remains sharing useful information.
   
   
3. Build Relationships, Not a Clientele
   
   The purpose of social media networks is to facilitate social interaction between people on a one-to-one basis. It helps people build relationships with one another online. So, as a business, you need to do the same. Don’t think of social media as just another marketing channel that will help you improve your sales figures. The scope and scale of social media is vastly different and must be seen and used as such. Use social media to directly interact with your target audience. With social media, your business can form a personal connection with its target audience. So, why not use it to build relationships and not just a client base. Relationships are enduring and can help you build a loyal customer base.

Adopt these social media best practices and see your business flourish. Keep learning how to make better use of this medium to derive the maximum benefit from it.