Exploring the dos and don’ts of social media marketing

There’s a lot more to social media marketing than most businesses realize. Establishing a web presence, publishing a blog, and paying for the placement of expertly crafted advertising copy is only a small part of the overall effort needed to pull off a successful social media campaign.

And yet, accomplishing this does not require any particular level of skill, savvy, or higher education. Instead, overwhelming success can be achieved through the implementation of common sense, and a little knowledge on the dos and don’ts of social marketing.

The Dos…

Be Consistent with Your Message

With SEO copywriting, consistency has a lot more to do with focus than it does with maintaining a reliable publication schedule. Sure, it’s crucial to stick to strict timeframes with content writing – your audience should come to rely on receiving regular blog updates or email messages from you to keep them in the loop of the latest happenings – but it’s even more important to ensure that those messages are consistently on target. This means putting serious thought into your words, and not just hiring a copywriter or copywriting service to fire off weekly press releases that sing your praises but don’t really say anything that hasn’t been said before. Whether you work with a web copywriting service or opt for the hands-on, DIY approach, it’s crucial to carefully consider the messages you’re putting out there in your content writing. Most importantly, keep all of your blog posts and email messages to your customer base business related. Don’t cross the line between business and personal matters, which means that if you’re feeling particularly zealous about the stakes of an upcoming political election you’d better keep your opinions to yourself if you don’t want to alienate a large segment of your audience. Keeping your messages on target is all about unification under your brand, not division.

Use Your Audience

While this may sound like a working title for some long unreleased Guns ‘n Roses album, it actually reads more like a page torn from the book of rules forged by people such as Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber – two contemporary music phenoms who took social media by the ear and turned it to their advantage in their equally successful bids to break down barriers on the road to famedom. While neither approach relied on the strength of web copy or content writing to succeed, it serves to teach us an awful lot about the potential for social media marketing to reach previously unreached heights – whether you’re a an aspiring singer or a plumbing company with dreams of competing with the heavyweights. Generating buzz among your target audience is imperative (something that can be done with online savvy, stellar online copywriting and skillful web copy just as it can be done through the publication of a viral video) but engagement is even more critical. An audience that feels it has a voice in the decisions that a company makes and the directions that a company takes is the social marketer’s greatest tool. Make your customers care about you as a company, and you’ll find that they’ll willingly act as your staunchest supporters.

The Don’ts…

Put All Your Eggs Into One Basket

There’s a reason that the saying “don’t put all your eggs into one basket” is an idiom that people of all walks of life subscribe to. That’s because there’s an inherent truth that can’t be denied. Having an active presence on Facebook, for example, while completely ignoring other social marketing websites is a crippling limitation than even fabulous web copywriting cannot overcome. If you really want to make the most of your social media presence, publish a blog – but utilize numerous social media avenues to get that message out to as many readers as possible.

Forget Your Manners

If this sounds like an admonishment you might have received as a child from your parents, perhaps it’s high time you realized that your folks may have been right all along about some things. Facts are facts: you can hire the best copywriter in the world and place genius advertising copy on the most high profile platforms known to man, but if you don’t remember your manners – in particular, if you forget to express your gratitude to the very people in your online social media circle for their efforts – you might as well be spitting in their faces. A company engaged in social media lives and dies by the support of its social fan base. Forget it, and you’re sunk.