Anyone in the business of selling a product or service knows that social media marketing is no longer optional, but rather integral to any overall marketing strategy. This is why so many entrepreneurs put as much effort into their social media pages as they do the websites that they actually pay web hosting fees for.

Unfortunately, there’s no magic bullet to successful social media marketing. Everyone wants to go viral overnight, but that’s not feasible for every single organization. However, there are skills that can be perfected in order to better market your business via social media. Here are five skills to perfect in order to excel at social media marketing.

1. Good Communication

We understand that there are plenty of self-proclaimed “techies” out there who don’t have any interest in becoming masterful wordsmiths. While that’s fine, communicating well is essential to a strong social media marketing campaign. This doesn’t mean that you need to become Hemingway. However, writing clearly in social media posts and communicating well in direct messages is crucial if you want to build your brand on social media platforms.

Clear communication is about expressing what you want to say concisely and succinctly, without rambling on. Great communication with customers is about replying to messages politely and cheerfully, even when the original message wasn’t particularly kind.

There’s nothing more toxic to a brand than a Tweet or Facebook post that looks like it was written by an angry third grader. Again, you don’t need to write the next great American novel, but you do need to create compelling text.

2. Appropriate Humor

Brands with funny social media presences tend to do well, but brands that try to be “edgy” usually just end up at the center of letter-writing campaigns and outrage mobs. People like humor; it’s the reason that everyone is familiar with the brand Geico despite the fact that their insurance isn’t particularly cheap or spectacular.

Humor on social media can be truly great for building your brand and attracting a larger following. However, it’s important to avoid offense. If your gut is telling you that a blog post or video could be offensive to some people, don’t post it.

Sure, there’s a debate to be had about whether or not our culture is collectively becoming too sensitive. But if you’re in the business of making money and building a brand online, then you’re in the business of attracting the public to your company, not shocking or repelling people. Leave the overly edgy stuff to stand-up comedians.

3. Consistency and Dedication

While unpaid web hosting fees may render many abandoned blogs defunct, the free blogging platforms serve as a sort of digital cemetery to blogs long abandoned by their creators. There’s a good reason why there are so many abandoned blogs floating around on the Internet. Many people start with great intentions, write passionately, and then realize that they’re shouting into a void and that no one’s reading what they have to say. This is because any web presence, be it a blog or a social media page, needs time to grow an audience, no matter what sort of SEO is being used.

When you first embark on your social media marketing efforts, you might feel like you’re talking to no one. However, it’s essential that you don’t abandon ship. It takes time to build an audience and the only way to do that is to stay dedicated, even when your audience is miniscule. It will pay off eventually.

4. An Eye For The Trends

One of the fastest ways for a brand to blow up on social media is by exploiting the freshness and lack of competition of new social media platforms. YouTube is littered with famous vloggers and content creators who, to put it bluntly, aren’t particularly talented, funny or interesting. However, they started with the platform very early when there was a serious lack of competition and they’re reaping the rewards of getting in on the ground floor to this very day.

Watch out for new platforms. Watch out for new trends. The best time to jump on social media platforms is at the very beginning. Keep an eye on the trends and strike when the iron is hot.

5. Customer Service

You may think that the fun part of being an entrepreneur is no longer having to “suck up” to customers. If you think this way, you need to change your mindset as quickly as possible.

Great social media is all about customer service. The reader is your customer and you’re a content creator, providing them with soft advertisements for your brand masked as entertainment. When you create content for social media, you should always have the reader or viewer in mind. It should be about pleasing and entertaining them, not about just pushing your brand.

If you approach your social media presence with a customer service mindset, you’ll be light years ahead of the brands that just spam their customers will obnoxious advertisements. People don’t like being advertised to; rather, they like being spoken to and entertained.

Excelling At Social Media Is A Race, Not A Sprint

No one expects you to perfect all of these skills overnight. After all, a lot of marketing is trial and error. You might embark on a campaign with high hopes only to find that your consumer base really isn’t responding to it.

Practice makes perfect when it comes to artfully marketing your brand across a wide array of social media platforms. Work on perfecting the five skills listed here and don’t be afraid to put some actual effort into your social media strategy. Lazy social media marketing reads and it’s repellant to your consumers.

If you can perfect social media marketing, however, you’ll be quite pleased with the results. In this day and age, it’s simply the most effective way to sell a product or expand your brand’s reach.

Republished by Imagincreation