In today’s world, technology and social media play a huge role in the success of a business.  With the advent of social media, creative new marketing campaigns and strategies have flourished to meet the demands of an ever-expanding world.  It’s no surprise that accurately integrating social media into your business is key to capturing a target demographic, and since it’s still relatively new, it can be a daunting task for those who aren’t well versed in social media marketing.

When it comes down to it, there are just four easy steps you can remember to better maximize your social media marketing potential: Establish goals, Content, Engagement and Analyze

Before you decide to develop a social media marketing campaign however, you must first think about you target audience; who are they? What are they doing? How can I get them interested in our business?  How can I relate with them?  With these question in mind you can better equipped to setting goal for your campaign and soon set goals for yourself.

1. Establish Goals–When setting goals for social media marketing, you have to be SMART about it. Your goals should be:
   • Specific
   • Measureable – track what is working in you campaign
   • Actionable – create a call to action
   • Realistic – know your demographic and link your calls to action to them
   • Time – what time of day is your demographic going on social media?

The two most important things to ask yourself are who is buying your product?  And who do you want to buy you product?  You should focus your social media efforts on the latter.

2. Content – After setting goals for your campaign, you should create a content strategy. The best way to do that is to plan what type of content you want to post online.  As you’re brainstorming content ideas, think of your social media strategy as a percentage:
   • 25% of content should be Engaging, meaning your content should interest followers to interact with you posts.
   • 25% Conversational – Content should be in a conversational tone and get readers to respond to the content that you are posting.
   • 30% should be Educational – Posting informative content that teaches people something is very important if you want your followers to be both engaging and conversational. They will be most likely to share it with their followers and so on.
   • 20% should be Promotional – This is where you get to plug yourself, there’s nothing wrong with a little self-promotion!

Another important thing to keep in mind when devising a content strategy is the social platforms themselves.  The demographic of users on each social media site differs.  As you can see below, the age groups, times of day they are viewing content, and even gender, vary from platform to platform.

After you’ve deciding what type of content you are going to post, you have to become organized and plan ahead by creating a content calendar.  The calendar can detail the type of the content that is going to be pushed out on what days and on which platform.  Below, you can the view an example of a content calendar.  This can be dependent upon you, as every calendar is going to be different because not every business is going to be using the same social media sites to post their content.

3. Engagement – whatever your goals may be for your social media campaign, engagement should be an important one. Social media provides an open forum to which everyone is invited to collaborate and share ideas, experiences and interests.  In order to flourish and grow, businesses must embrace the opportunity to engage in the lives of consumers.

A successful engagement strategy means you have to be resourceful and switch up your content.  Don’t just stick to posting pictures or videos every day, mix it up and post quotes, informative articles, ask questions, fill in the blank posts, there are many possibilities open for excellent content, you just have to be creative and think outside the box.

4. Analyze – After the brainstorming, setting goals, creating the content calendar, posting relevant and engaging content on social media, what is there left to do? You have to measure the results, of course.  All your planning and hard work will mean noting if you are not meeting your goals and being aware of whether your campaign is working.  Just as important as the content you create, analyzing the metrics of your social media campaign

With these four steps in mind you can be on your way to growing your business through social media.