social media marketing

4 Key Steps to Create a Successful Social Media Marketing Strategy It takes a lot of hard work to develop and execute a successful social media marketing strategy. In fact, your first strategy may take several hours and even days to get results. You must invest ample time to do it well. With an effective social media marketing strategy, you can drive more number of targeted traffic to your site thereby increase Domain Authority of your site. It will also help establish customer relationships, and enhance customer satisfaction, customer retention and sales. Here are some key steps you need to follow to create an effective social media marketing strategy Maximize the Power of your Content Knowing the right amount of content to be shared is important. Sharing in excess may make your readers or followers think you are a spammer. They will also stop following you. Experts have researched and found out that the following is the best frequency for posting on social media: Google+ (discontinued) - Less than thrice a day. Twitter – Only thrice a day. Remember that the engagement reduces after the third tweet. Instagram – Twice a day or even more. Instagram does not experience any decrease in engagement on posting more. Facebook – Only twice a day or less. Likes and comments tend to drop significantly after the second post. Pinterest – You can post 5 times a day or even more. Most of the brands on Pinterest adopted the strategy of posting ‘several times in a day’ which helped them experience steady or rapid growth. Blogs – A minimum of twice a day posting will help with blogs. Those who focused on increasing blogging to 6-8 times on a monthly basis experienced double growth in their leads. LinkedIn – Here, you need to focus on posting 20 posts per month. This way, you can reach out to 60% of your audience. A testing frequency of posting is important to see what works best for your audience. When you test it out properly, you know what works the best and can optimize your strategy accordingly. Consistency When it comes to success with social media consistency is the key. In case, you are unable to keep up with this routine, use tools. There are a number of free and paid tools available these days. This will let you automate your posts. Some of the most popular ones include Buffer and Hootsuite. Increase Traffic Most people fail to understand that creating new high-quality content takes a good amount of time and resources. Hence, it is good to add some power to your efforts by sharing older, more popular posts in conjunction with new content. This will increase traffic to your website. Sharing the same post several times a day won’t help. Maximizing traffic is possible when you use varied descriptions while promoting older posts. This is important to increase exposure for your content. Track Results Monitoring results are crucial. It allows you to know what’s working and isn’t working with the social media strategy you have been following. The process helps you to improve your efforts in the future. Start with recording your social shares including clicks, impressions, shares etc. This will let you see the social media posts and content pieces that receive maximum clicks. It helps you know about the posts that push potential traffic to your website and those that failed to do so. Some of the best tools in this respect are HootSuite, Buffer, and Google Analytics. These are very helpful in collecting crucial stats. Tracking these numbers on a regular basis will let you know what attracts the maximum number of reads and clicks.