If you don’t have a presence on social media, you’re missing a prime opportunity to reach new prospects for your business.

Considering that 74% of people use social media when making purchasing decisions, you don’t want to miss an opportunity to help nudge them towards buying your products.

But if you’re unfamiliar with social media, it may feel like a daunting task to figure it out. Our social media 101 guides can help, as we cover critical information like:

• Why you want to use social media
• The social platforms you can use
• Organic vs. paid social media
• Tips for creating a successful social media strategy

Social media 101: Why you want to use social media

Before we dive into the social media basics, let’s cover the reasons why you’ll want to use social media for your business:

1. Social media helps you build relationships

Social media is a superb place for you to create relationships with prospects curious about the products and services you offer. It provides you with a medium to interact one-on-one with prospects through features like direct messaging and commenting on content posts.

Building relationships and communities are valuable for helping your business grow online. When people know your business and feel comfortable together with your brand, they’re more likely to settle on you when it comes time to convert.

2. Social media helps you increase brand awareness

Brand awareness is prime to assist you to earn prospects for your business. When people connect with you on social media, they learn who you’re and what you offer.

Social media enables you to place your brand ahead of prospects. you’ll post content that appears in your followers’ newsfeeds and encourage your followers to share your content with folks that follow them. It helps you’re taking up more online land, which successively, results in more people seeing your business and increasing brand awareness.

3. Social media helps you increase traffic on your website

Social media is a valuable avenue for you to increase traffic on your company’s website.

When you create a social media profile on any number of channels, you can share links to your website and encourage users to visit pages on your site. As a result, more people spend time reading your blog posts, checking out your products, or learning about your services.

By driving this traffic to your site, you can capture these leads, by using tactics like email sign-ups and gated content, to nurture them into sales for your business.

Social media 101: The platforms

Next in our guide of social media basics is that the social media platforms you’ll choose between. There are dozens of social media platforms you’ll use to grow your business online. Here are a number of the foremost popular social platforms you’ll use to grow your business:

• Facebook: This platform is popular for sharing multiple types of content with your prospects. From photos to links to content to polls, you can create numerous types of content to engage and inform your audience.

• Instagram: Instagram is a popular platform for taking a visual approach to your marketing. This platform focuses solely on sharing photos and videos to provide followers with an insight into your company’s products or services.

• Twitter: Twitter is a popular platform for sharing short blurbs about your company online. Like Facebook, you can post content like photos, videos, and polls to engage prospects and get them familiar with your brand.

• Pinterest: Pinterest is another visual social media platform that enables you to share photos, videos, and GIFs with your audience. This platform allows you to create boards of content and organize them to provide your audience with a seamless experience.

• LinkedIn: If you’re looking to make professional connections, LinkedIn is the platform for you. This platform enables you to connect with industry leaders and businesses to share helpful information about your company.

• YouTube: This video-based platform is an excellent place for you to share helpful content with your audience. From how-to videos to informative videos, you can provide your prospects with the knowledge they actively seek.

You can use any combination of these platforms to help you engage with prospects. Generally, you’ll want to stick to platforms where your audience engages the most so you can reach them effectively.

Social media 101: Organic marketing vs. paid advertising

When you learn more about the basics of social media marketing, you’ll find that you have two options for reaching and engaging prospects: organic marketing or paid advertising.

Organic social media marketing

With organic social media marketing, your content appears ahead of individuals who follow your business by way of your wall or timeline.

The goal of organic social media marketing is to interact with prospective clients in a natural way through your social platforms. Organic content are often anything from links to your blog to product updates.

Paid social media marketing

With paid social media advertising, you run advertisements that appear in others’ social media feeds. These ads target prospects that you simply know have an interest in your business — which you’ll find supported demographic or previous interest in your business.

The goal of paid social media is to show prospects into leads or sales for your business to assist you to grow online.

Organic or paid social marketing?

So, which strategy is best?

Using a combination of both strategies will help you drive the most success with your social media marketing efforts. Your organic presence will help you build valuable relationships with your audience, while your paid ads allow you to discover new prospects and nudge current leads towards conversion.

Social media 101: 4 tips for social media success

We’ve covered tons of information in this social media 101 guides, including why you want to use social media, the platforms you can use, and the difference between organic and paid social media.

Now, let’s dive into some tips to help you launch a successful social media strategy.

1. Choose the platforms that are best for your business

When you see what percentage of social media platforms are available, you’ll desire you would like to create a presence on all of them. But simply because there are dozens of platforms available doesn’t mean your audience is on all.

You don’t get to build a presence on every social media platform, but you are doing got to create a presence on social media sites where your prospects spend their time.

Instead of spreading your business thin on a spread of platforms, spend most of some time that specializes in the platforms that your prospects frequent.

To find the proper sites, check out your audience. You’ll want to work out characteristics like:

• Age
• Gender
• Location
• Occupation
• Income

Use these characteristics to determine where your prospects spend their time and try to reach them where they’re likely to engage.

2. Keep a consistent brand image across the platform

If you’re building a presence on multiple social media platforms, you want to ensure that you have a consistent brand image across the board. Whether people find you on Twitter or Facebook, you want them to identify your brand easily.

To build a consistent brand image, make sure you:

• Use your logo as your profile photo
• Have a consistent banner photo (where applicable)
• Share images and videos that have the same style
• Use the same tone in all your social media posts

3. Post content often

Posting content often is one of the foremost important aspects of social media 101.

People follow their friends, family, and other businesses on social media. They’re seeing posts from hundreds and thousands of other users, which may cause your business to urge lost within the mix.

To ensure that users can see your content, post content often. Posting content often creates more opportunities for people to return to your content in their social media feed.

You can use a social media calendar to make sure that you simply post content frequently. This calendar will assist you to organize when you’re posting content to make sure you post often. it’ll also assist you to identify gaps in your calendar where you’ll not have any social media posts.

4. Monitor your social media

The last part of this social media 101 guide focuses on monitoring your social media.

When you launch a campaign, you want to ensure it’s driving success for your business. You don’t want to put money, time, and effort into campaigns that don’t help your business grow.

By monitoring your social media, you can discover what posts or ads are working for your business. You can track key metrics like:

• Clicks
• Clickthrough rate
• Engagement
• Conversions

By tracking these metrics, you can optimize your social media strategy to produce more effective content and ads to help your business grow.

Going beyond the social media 101 guide

Now that you know the basics of social media marketing, you’re ready to launch a campaign! But if you’re still feeling overwhelmed with trying to create and launch a social media strategy, Digitizal is here to help.

We have a team of over 50+ social media experts that are ready to help you craft your business’s unique social strategy. With over a decade of experience, you can feel confident we’ll craft a custom social media strategy that drives results for your business.