Social media marketing - diy is a term that encompasses many social sites that may provide vastly different social actions. It is comprised of websites and mobile apps that allow the sharing of information with large numbers of people at the same time.
Social media marketing can be used to connect with prospects and customers, build your brand, drive quality usage to your website, establish expertise, make sales, gather competitor intelligence, and much more.
In order to have an effective successful social media marketing presence and results you need to
- Do your homework: research, listen, decide which social networks are right for your business, compare social media networks - these things help you decide on where you invest time and efforts (some social media may be a perfect fit topic wise but if their usage is dismal there is an opportunity cost of not spending time in highly popular portals that will result in more business).
- Define your strategy: what do you want to accomplish?, Who is your target market?, What types of content on which networks do you have or need to develop?, Where do you add value?, Are you going to do paid social advertising?
- Engagement: connect, engage, use best practices for social media posting, fill your social toolbox. Here are five top ways to engage your target audience with content that matters to them: promote your content, share others content, mentions, replies and favorites, direct and private messaging.
- Content: choose the right content, will your content add value for your audience? Does your content encourage conversation? Is your content personable instead of salesmanny? There are many types of content: how-to, inspirational, emotional, review, insightful and more.
- Measure success. What are you measuring? Are you getting a return on your investment in the forms of followers, fans, views, engagement, shares, clicks, and actions (signing up for a newsletter, buying product/service, submitting a contact form, and so on).
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Here are some ballpark stats, relationship types, and engagement opportunities for some of the major Social networks: (You need a separate business account and/or company profile page for all of these)
- LinkedIn: 364+ million users, you are seeking "connections", you are able to engage with likes, shares, and comments.
- Facebook: 1.44+ billion users, you are seeking "followers", you are able to engage with likes, shares, comments.
- Twitter: 300+ million users, you are seeking "followers", you are able to engage with Tweets, ReTweets, Favorites, Mentions, Replies.
- Instagram: 300 million, you are seeking "followers", you are able to engage with loves and comments.
- Pinterest: 50 million (USA only), you are seeking "followers", you are able to engage with Pins, likes, and comments.
- There are many others that you should research and investigate - the above is just a brief overview.
The below social media marketing tools help with social management, social monitoring, social analytics, influence marketing, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Social Networks, and more.
Here are some quick social media marketing audit/checklists
Social media marketing content performance review. What is working well with your content in regards to:
- Are you getting conversions in your sales cycle?
- Are your social efforts driving people to your website and other off-social destinations?
- Is your development of community working? Is your fan/following count increasing, declining, or remaining steady?
- What is your reach? Is social driving increasing brand awareness?
- Quality and ROI of traffic/usage: How do social users compare to other types of users in terms of page views, bounce rate, session duration, and conversions?
Social media marketing workflow health check: how well does your social media team work?
- Does your process facilitate a fast response to social conversation?
- Does it provide high-quality on-brand and shareable content?
- Do your social marketing goals mesh with overall company goals?
Social media marketing inventory. Take stock of everywhere you're active, or should be
- High-performing accounts: what insights can you use on other social media platforms?
- Under-performing accounts: how can you improve strategy to increase results?
- Dormant accounts: should you shut them down or relaunch them?
Digital Buzz. Use social listening to surface insights and opportunities
- What are people saying online about your brand?
- What is being said about your competitors?
- What conversations are forming around key industry terms?
A key to social media marketing is creating ongoing quality content. Publishing content in the right social media portals in the right format is also important.
To increase your social media marketing ROI it is recommended that you use a marketing automation solution. This will help you lead nurture prospects and customers throughout your new business and customer service sale cycles. Visit the marketing automation section in this website for more details.
Social Management
The below are social management tools help implement campaigns across multiple social networks.
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Hootsuite
Hootsuite helps manage, collaborate, and report your social media campaigns across multiple social networks. Organize all your social accounts on one dashboard to streamline your workflow. Read More
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Sprout Social
Sprout Social helps successfully reach, build and maintain your social media community by starting, monitoring, and joining social conversations. Read More
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Buffer
Buffer saves you time managing your social media by scheduling, publishing, and analyzing all your posts in one place. Read More
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Sendible
The Sendible social media management platform helps manage your social networks, schedule messages, publishes content, engages with your audience and measures ROI. Read More
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Edgar
Edgar stores in an organized library arranged into categories, such as "Quotes," "Blog Posts," or "Funny Puns." You are able to schedule content by category and connect to an RSS feed. Read More
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Oktopost
Oktopost is a B2B social media management platform that helps manage, measure and amplify your social media marketing. Read More
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OnlyWire
Onlywire instantly posts content from your website and blog to social media. You are able to post to 40+ social media sites, automate posts, schedule posts, post from your browser, and run analytics on your campaigns. Read More
Social Monitoring
Social monitoring in real time while measuring conversation sentiment and analytics helps you stay on top of your brand mentions across the web. The below are social listening tools to help you monitor conversations, links, tweets, photos, videos, influencers, hashtags, keywords, URL's and more.
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Mention
Mention provides real-time media monitoring. Get live updates about your brand from the web and social media, along with competitive analysis, find influencers, custom insights, and automated reports. Read More
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Colibri IO
Colibri.10 helps find opportunities on social networks and search engines. Helps discover quality websites to build influence, guest blog or get mentions and positions in search engines being crawled by Google. Read More
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Trackur
Trackur social media monitoring software fully monitors all social media mainstream news, provides social analytics such as trends, keyword discovery, automated sentiment analysis, and influence scoring. White labeling reporting for Agencies. Read More
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Keyhole
Keyhole social media analytics features real-time metrics to guide your social campaigns, content strategy and overall marketing approach. Read More
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BuzzBundle
BuzzBundle social media software helps promote your brand, drive quality usage, and improve your SEO campaign with social media. It monitors who mentions your brand or keywords and helps manage your company's social presence. Read More
Social Analytics
Social Analytics tracking and reporting software helps you understand your social media marketing referral statistics so you are able to provide the ongoing successful evolution of your branding and messaging in real-time. The following are social analytics tools:
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Crowdbooster
Crowdbooster helps you make data-driven decisions and schedule unlimited Tweets to engage followers and fans. Real-time up-to-date data that reports your key performance metrics and shares them with your dashboard via editable graphs and tables. Read More
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Social Report
Social Report is an all-in-one social media management platform. Helps with engagement, advanced scheduling, listening, sophisticated analytics, and a lot more. Read More
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SharedCount
SharedCount tracks URL shares, likes, comments, Tweets, Pins, and more. Read More
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Socialbakers Analytics
Socialbakers Analytics measures, benchmarks, and reports your social metrics across all social channels. It measures your performance against competitors and the industry, giving you insights on customers, competitors, and content. Read More
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quinly
Quinly social media analytics tracks, benchmarks, and optimizes your social media performance. It provides competitive bench marking and saves you time and focus by tracking your social media KPIs. Read More
Influence Marketing
Influence Marketing is a focusing on specific key individuals instead of the target market in general. The below are influence marketing software and/or providers that specialize in personalized content creation and distribution:
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Klout
Klout helps brands or agencies with creating and sharing great original content. They strive for content that gets a reaction and strikes a chord with friends, fans, and followers. Track how retweets, likes, and shares change your Klout Score. Read More
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Pitchbox
Pitchbox influencer outreach and content marketing platform helps brands, publishers, and SEO agencies promote their content with data driven decisions. Helps find influencers in your niche, integrates with top SEO providers, and has customizable personalized outreach and follow-up email capabilities to target opportunities. Read More
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Traackr
Traackr helps brands with influencer relationship management - IRM. You can upload influencers to manage your data in one place, assign ownership to foster team collaboration across multiple brands and geographies, and track conversions, validate real influence, and separate the winning signals for your brand. Read More
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Social Crawlytics
Social Crawlytics provides social metrics, most shared authors, scheduled monitoring, and an API to help identify the influencers and your competitor's most shared content. By analyzing data Conspire informs you of who knows each other and how well. Relationships are scored and connections are shared so you are able to find the strongest path to the person or company you're interested in. Read More
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Conspire
Conspire helps you unlock your professional network to uncover your best paths to people, ideas, resources and opportunities. Read More
Facebook is the largest online social media and social networking service. The below businesses help you set up and manage your Facebook (and other social media platforms) profiles and campaigns:
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Fanpage Karma
Fanpage Karma helps manage all your social media interactions on one platform. It helps track and analyze engagement, informs the best times for posting, best posting frequency, best topics, types of posts, analyzes and improves your posts, and more. It also analyzes your competitor's pages. Read More
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Wolfram|Alpha FB
WolframAlpha personal analytics for Facebook helps you gain insight on yourself and your social network. It geotargets your friends, shares how popular they are, details what you talk about on Facebook, when you use Facebook, details ages of friends and relationships they are in, explores the structure of your friend network, details who play special roles, shows your most popular photos, and more. Giving you a new perspective on your friends. Read More
Twitter is an online news and social networking service. The below providers help manage your Twitter account and campaigns:
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ManageFlitter
ManageFlitter helps you manage multiple accounts: sort, filter, and manage who you follow on all your Twitter accounts. It helps you grow your business on Twitter by finding relevant people to connect with along with providing a set of engagement tools. It provides analytics and the ability to schedule tweets at optimal times. Read More
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SocialBro
SocialBro helps you find new customers, eliminate market research costs, develop sophisticated strategies (such as affinity marketing, values-based marketing and personalisation), and increase customer loyalty and lifetime value on Twitter. Read More
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Twellow
Twellow helps you get more Twitter followers in relevant business categories, or in your geographical area through their Twellowhood tool. Read More
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Tweepi
Tweepi helps to engage users, get Twitter followers and grow your brand(s) with their Twitter Tools. Read More
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Tweet4me
Tweet4Me allows you to Tweet anytime, schedule or Buffer a Tweet for any date, from any Twitter application. Read More
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TweetDeck
TweetDeck creates a custom Twitter experience, organizes and builds collections, keeps track of lists, searches, activity, and more. Helps you create searches to track topics, events, and hashtags. You are able to manage multiple Twitter accounts from one of your accounts. Read More
Instragram is an online platform for you to see and share photos and videos. The below providers help manage your Instragram campaigns:
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Hootsuite
Hootsuite helps you manage all your social media efficiently. It organizes all your social accounts into one dashboard & streamlines your workflow. You are able to add team members, assign posts, and collaborate to improve efficiencies. Hootsuite also measures performance and provides insightful reports and analytics. Read More
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ScheduGram
Schedugram helps you manage your Instagram account(s). Social media managers help their clients and brands with uploading of images or video, scheduling posts, and managing multiple accounts. Read More
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Latergramme
Later helps manage your Instagram account with calendar view scheduling, conversion oriented engagement tools, and viewing and arranging how your Instagram feed appears to prospective followers. Read More
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Onlypult
Onlypult is an SMM-tool for working with Instagram that schedules posts, provides analytics, and helps with fast content development. You can manage up to 40 Instagram accounts at once though one web-based interface. Read More
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Iconoquare
Iconosquare is an Instagram analytics and management platform. It helps measure, understand and improve important aspects of your Instagram activity. Read More
Pinterest is a social networking platform and content sharing service that allows members to "pin" photos, images, videos, and more to their "Pinboard." The below providers help manage or sync your Pinterest account:
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Pinvolve
Pinvolve automatically syncs your Facebook and Pinterest. This is useful by populating all major imagery outlets into one place so viewers can see updates and interact without leaving Facebook. Read More
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Tailwind
Tailwind is an end-to-end visual marketing solution for Pinterest and Instagram. It helps discover content, schedule posts, monitor conversations, amplify reach, and analyze results with one tool. Read More
Social Networks
Social Networks are online platforms that are used by people to build social networks or social relationships with other persons who share similar interests, activities, backgrounds, or real-life connections. The below social network platforms are the current largest and most used social media:
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Facebook
Facebook is a leading social media and social networking service based in Menlo Park, California If you are implementing a social media strategy or campaign starting with Facebook is usually a sound decision. Read More
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Twitter
Twitter social networking service is an online news and social networking service. Registered users can post and read Tweets, unregistered users can only read Tweets. Read More
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YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website owned by Google. You can upload videos, music, and other original content and share it with friends, family, and the world. Read More
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Instagram
Instagram is an online platform where you can share photos and videos with friends. Read More
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Pinterest
Pinterest is a content sharing service that allows members to "pin" photos, images, videos, and more to their pinboard sharing what they. Pinterest is also a social networking platform. Read More
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LinkedIn
LinkedIn Corporation is a business and employment-oriented social networking service. Read More
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Google+
Google\+ is Google's social networking platform. Read More