Social Media Marketing: How to slay the beast

You’ve started your business, you’ve built a site, got your product ready to go, and a little word of mouth is beginning to spread from your friends. Things are looking like they’ll start well, maybe hit the ground running. You don’t have a real marketing budget though, maybe a couple of hundred dollars at most. Well, there is an option: Social Media Marketing.

Now I’m fully aware of how daunting this sort of marketing can be, you’ll see ‘influencers’ with millions of followers getting millions of likes on each post and you’ll at the start get maybe 20. Don’t fret though, Social Media Marketing is really a game of chance. There isn’t a surefire way to blow up in this space but there are some strategies you can employ to give yourself the best odds possible. Now you’ll probably hear that you should post often, multiple times a day, and never let anyone forget about you. Well, there is a reason this doesn’t really work in traditional media and it’s the same reason for it not working in Social Media; it’s really, really annoying. If you think about it this way: imagine one user at the end of the day scrolling through their feed, they see the 5 posts you made that day about your product all in the same 30-minute sitting. It gets annoying, then the only thing that they’ll remember about your product is that you have a lot of time to spend on Social Media making posts. Instead, find out what are the most trafficked times on each platform you’re posting to and for each demographic you’re looking to hit. Then 5 minutes before that time comes around you make a longer-form post with multiple images (You want the gallery design on your post that requires them to interact to see all the images). That will make it the most likely your post will hit the top of your potential audience’s feeds when they are most alert in their scrolling.

Boosting your post, in other words, paying the platform some money to push your post to as many people as they can for the budget you give them, isn’t a bad idea or a good idea. This all depends on what the post is, I definitely wouldn’t boost every post, that will be a waste of money in the end, but if you have worked hard on a post (Multiple days of work and maybe even sunk some money in it) I would definitely suggest boosting these sorts of posts. In general, I would say not to bother though you’ll find your audience with strong informative posts with eye-catching images. There is no substitute for hard work, and that applies to marketing as well.

There is one more roadblock you’ll run into while running a social media campaign, no one cares. It is heart-breaking and it doesn’t take many low interaction posts to start feeling disheartened. Just remember that social media is inherently designed to keep your eyes moving and to keep you engaged on the platform but not specifically on posts or photos. It will happen where you work really hard on the post and it gets no interest, just remember the golden rule of Marketing, it’s a game of numbers. Keep your chin up and keep making posts, keep showing your already engaged audience that you’re not walking away. Even if it is a slow growth it’s better than nothing. The only real way to lose followers on mass is to stop interacting with them or to make an inappropriate comment on your social media, both are pretty easily avoidable. Just remember that it will most likely be a slog at the start, push through keep working and remember why it is that you are doing all of this.