93% of marketers use social media to promote their business. It’s growing so fast that any business without proper social media presence is loosing out on a large chunk of their potential audience and customers – if done right they can tap into in a much more diverse market and increase conversion rates than ever expected. Originally published at - http://ujz.me/social-media-marketing-strategy/

1. Creating a Social Media Marketing Strategy
ujz.me /social-media-marketing-strategy/
93% of marketers use social media to promote their business. It’s growing so fast that any business
without proper social media presence is loosing out on a large chunk of their potential audience and
customers – if done right they can tap into in a much more diverse market and increase conversion
rates than ever expected.
The social media strategy for your business/project or anything for that matter would have to be unique
to itself; but this doesn’t necessarily mean that it has to be original or different. Look into your
competition and other similar businesses, find out what works and jump on board – you don’t always
have to re-invent the wheel. The point is, there is no point in trying to be original if it doesn’t yield
positive results.
Creating a social marketing strategy needs a certain amount of experimenting; some will most likely
fail while other give positive results. Below are a few tips to get you started.
Set a daily quota
Have a strategy or plan for your social media platforms. Setup a quota of posts per day and make sure
you meet them – it is a good idea to follow the 5-3-2 rule - 5 should be content from others, 3 should
be content from you relevant to the audience and 2 should be personal content to humanize you brand.
Without personality, social media is not social.
Responsiveness
Respond to any and all replies/tweets/comments posted to your social media. Both positive and
negative feedback need to be deal with in a timely manner. Responding to customer develops trusts
and builds connections, and responding to negative feedback with calm and at they say “The first ‘soft’
skill marketers need to develop is empathy”.
Fridays are Facebook’s best days for engagement.
Think out of the box
Giveaway a few free stuff, may be a random free t-shirt to a comment or share – it can always give you
more publicity than you would expect. Heard of the Chipotle Twitter stunt? They faked a Twitter hack
and got over 4000 follower in one day! Of course it could as easily have blown up in their faces – but it
went great for them!
When planning media stunts make sure that they don’t offend anyone and be ready to react if things go
wrong.
In the digital space attention is the currency. We earn it . We spend it.

2. Aim to increase your conversion rates
After all the whole point of marketing is to sell more products, increase awareness or get people to do
something. So aim for it! Couple free giveaways and products for sale, giveaway coupon codes or
samples!
Do some smart marketing – try not to directly ‘sell’ products through social media, instead tell a story
and inspire your customers to share/re-tell it. This type of marketing is more likely to increase your
brands likability and thereby automatically drive more sales.
Embrace Mishaps
Mistakes are inevitable. Embrace them instead of trying to cover up for them or deleting them; with live
social media such as Twitter it is likely that at least some users notice them – so apologize or if the
mistake as simple as a grammatical error simply let it be instead of re-posting it.

3. Photo source : peterdarling.typepad.com
Photo source: venturebeat.com