Social media is an extremely influential marketing, brand awareness and sales tool if utilized correctly. Trouble is, I often hear business owners and entrepreneurs say that they use social media, but don’t know if it actually produces results. Many try their hands at it and fail, mostly because they’re too busy and lack the experience to manage their social networks correctly.

Hey - we’re not here to judge. It takes a ton of time and elbow grease to grow your social channels. We should know, we manage social media accounts for a living.

Most successful business owners simply don’t have the time to dedicate to their Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin, etc. It’s no wonder that many don’t see the benefits and end up giving up on social media entirely.

If you’re looking for ways to boost your social presence so that social media can work for you vs feel like a giant pain in the ass, keep reading. Not many marketing agencies dish out their top insider tips for free, but at Dynamic, we’re all about providing value and helping others.

Without further adieu, here are insider tips from a social media marketing agency:

1. INSTALL A FACEBOOK PIXEL

First and foremost, you need a Facebook pixel installed on your website. If Facebook and Instagram is a part of your marketing strategy, which it likely should be, you MUST utilize the pixel.

What is a Facebook Pixel, you ask?

The Facebook pixel is a bit of javascript code that allows you to measure and optimize data from people who visit your website. Facebook will capture information from your website traffic and match that data to a Facebook user ID and VOILA! You're in business, baby.

With a Facebook pixel, you can create custom audiences that categorize website visitors by several actions and factors including:

+Time spent on site

+Specific Webpages Visited

+Website Purchases

+Checkouts Initiated

+Conversions

Sound awesome? It is. You can make marketing and sales magic happen when you utilize the Facebook pixel and ads manager the way it's intended. Forget boosted posts and ad campaigns that "don't work."

Thanks to the Facebook pixel, you can capture data of your website visitors to serve retargeting ads to them later. Say someone visits one of your service or product pages, but doesn't convert (ie: book a consultation or purchase a product), you can specifically target those audiences later in a Facebook or Instagram ad.

If you’ve been on the internet at all in the last 15 years, you’ve been retargeted. Have you ever looked up a hotel and then were served ads from that hotel over the next week or so? That’s retargeting/remarketing. When you utilize retargeting ad strategies in your social media marketing plan, you can reach key audiences and deliver specific messages that drive intent.

Installing a Facebook pixel is simple - click to learn how.

2. POST WITH INTENT

When you’re posting to any social media platform, ask yourself this: “Am I inspiring, entertaining, or educating?” Hopefully you can achieve one or more of those when sharing social content. Don’t post just to check a box for the day. Aim to motivate, provide value, or add humor. Be authentic and relevant to YOUR target audience.

Every single time you post, ask yourself “is this something my ideal customer would enjoy or appreciate?” If the answer is no, skip it. If the answer is yes, publish away.

Social media is meant to be light, fun, and engaging. Stay away from overly sales-y or promotional posts. Users will spot that quickly and grow tired with you.

3. HAVE A PLAN

Don’t have a plan? Then you can plan to fail…or something like that ;)

In all seriousness, you need to have an outline for your social content. Your social content needs to have a healthy mix of engaging, inspiring, and educational focuses, and it’s not easy to just whip up posts on a whim. If you post by the seat of your pants, you’ll notice that it can take up to 30-40 minutes to publish anything decent. I don't know about you, but I don't have 30 minutes to time to waste each day trying to think of what to post to my social media accounts.

Additionally, Instagram is arguably the hottest social media platform today. The grid layout of your Instagram feed makes curating branded content ESSENTIAL. If your feed is not cohesive with color schemes and tone of voice, you can kiss brand recognition and user experience goodbye. When you have a well-curated feed, users will recall your brand as they’re scrolling through a sea of endless content. It's all about standing out from the crowd.

If you’re going to take social media marking seriously, you need a content strategy and plan. Curate your social content basis on a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly basis. The more you can outline and plan out, the better.

We like to curate content and use a powerpoint presentation to outline dates, captions and imagery. Our team utilizes Google drive to store content and we love using Buffer to schedule and analyze posts. Facebook also has it’s own publishing tool which we use as well.

4. ENGAGE LIKE YOUR LIFE DEPENDS ON IT

If you want to manage your social media correctly, you need be engaging. That means responding to every comment or message in a timely manner. Your target audience will have questions or feedback about your product or service, and being unresponsive is just about the worst thing you can do for your brand image. Not to mention, Facebook publicly displays how quickly you respond to messages - so stay on top of it.

In addition to being responsive to messages and comments, it is ESSENTIAL to engage with the community. This is particularly important with Instagram. Let's face it, your profiles are not going to grow organically if you don’t put in the effort.

Community engagement means leaving relevant and well-thought out comments on profiles that are relevant to your target audience. This can be as blatant as commenting on the posts of your ideal customer, or leaving meaningful comments on profiles that your target audience is likely to follow as well.

An easy way to stay on top of community engagement is to follow brands and hashtags that are relevant to your target customer. If you spend 10 minutes per day leaving 8-10 authentic comments, you will notice growth in your accounts - guaranteed.

5. MONITOR THE DATA

As marketing strategists, we have to constantly analyze the results of our creative efforts. Without the facts, it's impossible to know what marketing initiatives actually work.

The same goes for your social media. When starting out, it’s crucial to know at these these two things:

+Which posts performed the best that week/month (by engagement AND reach)

+Which social platforms drive the most website traffic, engagement, and conversions

The best way to analyze this information is to visit the Insights tab on your Facebook business page. See the image below to find the Insights Tab:

Additionally, you’ll need Google Analytics installed on your website so you can monitor website traffic from various social platforms.

You'll want to look at the data on a monthly basis, at minimum. When you can clearly identify areas of success, failure, and opportunity, you can refine your social media strategy for the following week or month. In marketing, experimentation and optimization is everything. Know your numbers and you’ll develop a firm understanding of the kind of content your target consumers identify with and respond to.

That’s all for now! We hope you got value from these top 5 social media management tips from our team at Dynamic! If you have questions or would like to dig deeper into any of these topics, please contact us! We’d love to help you refine your social media marketing strategy so that you can start seeing measurable results from your efforts.

5 Insider Tips from a Social Media Marketing Agency