A presence on social media is indispensable for inbound marketing. People check Facebook all the time to see what their friends are saying. They even have Facebook installed on their phones so they’re constantly receiving updates. A lot of recommendations are made through social media and this means there are a lot of potential customers out there.
And yet a lot of companies go on social media only to find it makes no difference whatsoever to their inbound marketing goals. They might spend a lot of time writing and posting comments. They might make an effort to engage customers. They might put up interesting photos of what’s going on with their company and product. But nothing seems to make any difference.
Is this because all their competitors are also on social media? Or are they making some mistake in their approach to this platform? Read on to understand what might be going wrong with the way you’re incorporating social media into your inbound marketing.
Aiming For Virality
Sometimes companies go online or go on social media thinking their sales are going to increase dramatically right away. It’s not impossible for this to happen. One of your posts might go viral and you might get a lot of traffic coming to your website as a result.
But virality is temporary. A post might go viral for a day or two, maybe even a week. But after that, its popularity will probably diminish.
On the other hand, if you keep posting regularly to social media, you’re slowly going to build up a following which won’t suddenly diminish after a week. So you need to think of social media as a process rather than a quick fix.
Aiming for virality is addictive. Once you post something that goes viral, you want to do it with another and another. You’ll try anything to make this happen. You’ll make use of shock value and salacious gossip.
And this can be bad for your brand. You don’t want to become known for things having nothing to do with your product or service.
So it’s a better idea to go for the slow and steady buildup of your social media presence, as part of your inbound marketing goals. This can take months or even years. But it does have an effect in the long term as long as you keep going at it.
Posting At Magic Times
People constantly talk about how there’s a spike in social media at certain times of the day or certain days of the week. Different experts have different opinions about this and different explanations for their opinions.
But the truth is, everyone has social media on their smartphones now. So they’re constantly getting social media updates. There is no particular time when they tend to check more. Sometimes people even get up and check their phones in the middle of the night. Although this is likely to cause insomnia and is generally bad for health, the fact is, it happens.
So as a company, the best thing you can do is to keep posting regularly to social media 2-3 times a week. Don’t try to go viral or post at a magic time; there really isn’t one. Remember, you’re in it for the long haul. As with everything else, hard work works with social media too.
The more you post on social media, the more likely you are to draw customers to your website, which is the aim of inbound marketing. However, just keep in mind there are no quick fixes, no magic times and no get-rich-quick schemes when it comes to social media. Just like other forms of inbound marketing, you need to keep doing it for the long term before you see results.
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