Social Media Marketing (SMM) involves sharing and creating content on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. And you know that you need to be in your social media.
There are over a hundred million active users daily. But as a beginner, social media can be overwhelming and complicated. So how do you start?

Here are the 5 Important Social Media Marketing Tips for Beginners

1. Pick the right social network.

Yes, there are a lot of them. Whether it’s Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter, it ultimately depends on which network you want to be on. You could be on all of them; however, if you do, you may not spend enough time on each to make them amazing. Thus, you don’t want to take it for granted. In other words, you want to excel on LinkedIn, and the same principle applies to other social media platforms.

Social media was significantly easier to leverage and get traffic from six years ago. Nowadays, due to strict algorithms and increased competition, you need to pick the right social network. Moreover, what’s right for one person may not be right for another.

If you’re in Business to Business (B2B), the chances are LinkedIn is the best social network for you. On the other hand, Twitter is also a good social network for B2B, although LinkedIn generally outperforms it.

Conversely, if you’re in Business to Consumer (B2C), Facebook does well, as do Instagram and YouTube. Notably, YouTube works for both B2B and B2C. Here’s the thing: you also need to consider the type of content you enjoy creating. For instance, if you excel at videos, you might want to focus on YouTube or LinkedIn. Facebook, in contrast, is much more competitive.

With YouTube, you can achieve longevity even without an initial audience, as you can attract more traffic over time. Conversely, Facebook users typically do not perform searches like YouTube users, who actively search for videos all day long. Therefore, your videos can gain views if you rank higher on YouTube. Additionally, if your target demographic is older, Facebook is highly effective. For a younger audience, Instagram and Snapchat are exceptional choices. So, now that you have a rough idea of which social network to target, you can proceed accordingly.

2. Start creating content.

Yes, you’re like “hey I have no friends, I have no following.” It doesn’t matter, no one’s going to follow if you don’t have any content.

So start creating content that starts off with completing your profile.

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram all have profiles.

You need to complete everything from a username, email address, a nice proper image and a description of who you are or your company. If you don’t complete your profile, you’re not giving people a reason to follow. And when you’re completing your profile talk about the benefits that people are going to experience from following you or subscribing to your page.

But as I mentioned it’s all about creating content. So it starts with the profile and then it gets to content. If you’re not sure what content to create, you need to check out your competition.

You all have competitors. You want to see what content is doing well for them, and what contents not.
That’ll give you an idea of what you should do more of.

If you don’t know how to create content, it could be as simple as status updates: you pulling out your phone recording a video of yourself.

Sharing some links. And if you’re not sure what links to share you can go to buzzsumo.com. Type in any keywords from your industry it’ll show you all the popular articles.

That shows you what people like on Facebook, Twitter etc and will give you an idea of what kind of content will resonate with that social network and what doesn’t.

3. Build a connection.

You need to build a connection with people, it’s a social network. Just because you’re on a computer doesn’t mean you’re not connecting with humans. So make sure you’re friending all the people that you know, following them. You’re engaging and you’re building connections. So if it’s your friend already, you can invite them to friend you on Facebook or follow you on Twitter.

If it’s someone you don’t know you have to work more to build that connection. And here’s how you do this. You go and look for all the people in your space who are putting status updates post.

If they have questions respond to them. Help them out. If they have articles feel free and share them if you think they’re valuable, right? You can repost, re-share, whatever it may be.

If there are other people on these channels, fan pages who are asking questions you can respond to them. Help them out. That’s how you build a connection.

Even when you’re posting on your own page, when someone responds with a question or a comment, you should acknowledge that they’re there. Thank them for leaving a comment. Respond when they have a question. That’s how you engage. And what I found is over time as you engage what you’ll see is a lot of people will come back over to your site, they’ll follow you. You’ll engage deeply with them and they’ll become a loyal diehard follower. It’s not just about growing your number and having 1,000 followers or 10,000 followers.

4. Don’t go for follower count.

It’s all about having valuable connections. Because if your first 100 fans or followers aren’t that engaged with you, all these social networks have it in their algorithms where they’re looking at a percentage. So if you have a million fans but only 1,000 engage they’re like whoa this is a terrible engagement rate. We shouldn’t show your content to anyone ’cause no one likes it.

But if you had a hundred followers and every single one liked it, shared it and commented, they did all three of those things, social networks like Facebook are going to be like ‘this content is amazing it needs to go viral because everyone loves it.’ So it’s not about having the most amount of fans, it’s about having the most amount of engaging fans.

If someone’s not going to engage you don’t want them. Don’t just pay models to talk about you so you can get more followers. It’s about having the most relevant diehard fans.

5. Don’t push people to your business from day one.

Within three months or six months, by all means, you can start talking about your business, slowly mentioning it. Try to get people over to your site. You can do simple things like just sharing a link.

But you don’t want to do that from day one. Why would you promote your business when no one’s following you, they’re not engaged.

If you walked up to a random stranger on the street and you said, “Hey my name is John. I know that you buy toilet paper because everyone uses toilet paper. Would you like to buy my toilet paper?” They would be like, “You are crazy, who are you? We don’t want to buy anything from you.” You need to build a connection first. No one’s going to buy from you until you build that relationship. So don’t promote your business until three to six months. (I prefer to be extreme and wait nine months to a year.) if you’re trying to build up everything organically. If you are advertising, you can promote your business instantly.