How to Integrate Social Media to Assist Your Marketing Campaign

Is your social media campaign working in direct correlation to your overall marketing campaign?

To develop a more consistent and strong brand image, implement an inbound marketing campaign that brings together all of your marketing efforts, including social media. 

There are new social media platforms popping seemingly on a daily basis. To stay up-to-date and engaged with followers, not only should you be creating profiles on those sites, but you should also stay current, stay active and keep users coming back to your profile.

You shouldn't be developing separate campaigns for each marketing activity, develop one campaign where you nurture and target leads through social media marketing, email marketing, blogging ... etc.

Don't think of social media as just another way to interact and engage with people, think of it as an additional way to expand the reach of your brand and effectiveness of your website.

4 Ways to Integrate Social Media

User Experience

How often does your brand interact and engage on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest? When it comes to posting on the big three social media platforms, once a month just doesn't cut it! You cannot effectively and actively engage with fans and followers when you're not frequently updating your social media profiles. More importantly, you can't drive traffic back to your website without engaging on a consistent basis.

It's important to remember that you need to treat each social media platform differently. You want your content to resonate with the audience using that platform. By targeting your content to your audience on that platform, you are more likely to see more shares and engagement by your fans and followers.

Need to improve your social media user experience? Consider adding these elements into your marketing campaign:

• Memes

• Humor

• Infographics

• Videos

• Photos

Don't just use social media to talk about your product or service. Show your personality. It might sound like a broken record but people LOVE visuals. Be graphical. Be pictorial.

Make your social media profiles DIFFERENT from your website, no one is going to want to visit your social media site when they can find the same information on your site.

Assist...Don't Exist

Does your social media just exist? Or is it assisting your overall marketing campaign and lead generation efforts?

Just because you've created a profile doesn't mean that you exist, users want to see what content you're generating and sharing.

Social media profiles should be adding value, don't just post the same content on all platforms. What you're saying on Twitter should be short and sweet, right to the point. Whereas on Facebook, you have more room to provide a more detailed and informational post.

Social media is a great way to drive people back to your website with shared content. So you blog, create weekly videos, and are continually develop premium content, are you taking advantage of social media to expand the reach of your resources? Sharing your content is a great way to drive fans and followers back to your site.

You may be posting information, but are you taking it one step further and frequently responding to fans and followers?

When you're providing value by offering exclusive content for each platform, you will find that fans and followers are sharing, retweeting and leaving comments on your posts. To keep followers coming back and to grow your audience, cultivate a community. Post and share content your fans and followers will want to talk about, allowing you to develop conversations with your responses to comments.

Not sure what content your fans and followers engage with the most? Need some help? A great way to see which content received the most interaction on Facebook is to take a closer look at insights under your profiles admin panel.

Under insights you can see what types of posts are generating the most reach and engagement. Now that you know what posts grab the attention of your fans and followers, you can begin to develop more posts of that kind.

Consistent

Consistency can take many forms when you're talking about social media. Not only do you want all social media platforms to have a consistent look and feel to increase brand recognition, but you also want to post consistently. Don't create different identities for each profile, keep each cover photo and profile photo the same to create a consistent brand image. A great way to send mixed signals and confuse your users is to have different photos for each profile.

Check out some of our profiles below to see how we keep each profile consistent.

Facebook

Pinterest

Twitter

Now that you have a better idea of how to keep your profiles consistent, you need to develop a consistent social media publishing schedule.

Determine how many times a day you want to be posting. Keep in mind that you should post at least once a day. Depending on the size of your company, your audience, and each social media platform, will determine how many times you will post whether its every hour, three times a day ... etc. 

Not only should you consistently post to your social media accounts, but you should also consider the time of day you're posting. The time you're posting will affect your fans and followers engagement whether it be positively or negatively. Therefore, you should determine what times of day are best for your audience.

Track & Measure

How is your social media marketing performing? Make sure you track the performance of each platform, identifying which platforms are driving the most traffic.

Has any of that traffic turned into leads? By knowing how much traffic and leads are coming from social media, you can track and measure the success of each activity through closed-loop reporting.

If you look at all of your results and conclude that you're not generating sufficient traffic and engagement through social media, you might need to make adjustments accordingly to help increase awareness and interaction.