Regardless of what you are marketing, you have to use social media. More importantly, you have to create cross promotions where people can connect with you on more than one platform. There are more social media platforms than ever before and you cannot rely on just one of them to connect with your target demographic.
Facebook and Twitter are still amongst the most popular websites to use. However, marketing with Twitter can be exceptionally difficult because of the 140 character limit. How are you supposed to tell people all about your product in about 10 words?
The simple answer is that you cannot. Twitter is meant to be a way of wetting one’s appetite. Figure out a way to lead someone towards your product and then provide a link. To be sure you meet the 140 character limit, you can use various link shortening sites so you can include any link you want.
What do you link to? It doesn’t matter, as long as it provides people with more information about you and your product. You can send them to Facebook to check out a promotion, Pinterest to see ideas you have, Google+ to connect with you, or LinkedIn to join your business network.
Various demographics use the different social media platforms. There are over 50 different platforms that you can use now. Facebook and Twitter are only the beginning. You can also use YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr and others as a way to create a following. Each one you choose will need to be set up based upon the look and feel of your brand: continuity of branding is essential.
By utilising the different platforms, you can cross promote – you shouldn’t have to create the same promotion over and over again. The various social media platforms can help you cover multiple demographics with the same message: in many instances, you can connect all of the social media profiles so that when you post in one, it will automatically post the others. For example, twitter will instantly put all of your tweets into your Facebook page – thus saving you a significant amount of time. When you create a Facebook profile, you can also point people towards all of your other social media profiles.
There are also various services that can help to connect people to all of your different profiles. Rafflecopter has become a popular method for running promotions. You can have your target demographic enter to win a contest by liking you on Facebook, tweeting about you on twitter, sharing a photo with you on tumbler, and much more. You determine what people do in order to get contest entries – and this exposes everyone to the different social media platforms that you are using.
Plenty of researchers have tried to pigeon hole users on social media by saying Pinterest is for women, Twitter is for people who don’t have a lot of time, and Instagram is for teens and those in their early 20s. However, this is not always the case as there are plenty of men on Pinterest and plenty of people in their 30s and 40s on Instagram.
This is only as hard as you make it: you can create the profiles and then virtually forget about them – as long as you have the tools in place to monitor posts and messages directed to you and to ensure you are posting on them in a regular manner.
Utilise the tools within each of the platforms to assist you. While you can hire a social media expert, it can be just as simple to spend a few hours in a day creating all of the posts and schedule them inside of an app that will do all of the work for you e.g. use TweetDeck for scheduled Twitter posts.
Remember that you cannot pigeonhole your customer base and that means you need to use all of the cross promotions possible in order to reach as many people in your target demographic as possible. There are many people who are not on Twitter or Instagram or Facebook, so by using all of the different social media platforms you reach more people and make a more effective marketing campaign.
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