Getting Started with Social Media – Part 3

In our last article we mentioned a list of free tools that allow you to schedule your content on the majority of your social sites. There is a good reason for this. It is important to post content to your social media sites on a regular basis. There is nothing worse than posting everyday for a week and then posting nothing for the rest of the month.

Posts do not have to be long and can be just a quick update of what you did in your business that day. You can post about a new product, ask a question to get feedback from your visitors and to share a link that you liked. This is why posting images is great, they are quick to post and you can just ask people to share or like.

It is often better to post shorter messages several times throughout the day. Some of the best known times to post on Facebook, for example, are the hours of 8am, 11am and then again around 2pm. This is when the highest number of users are online, so you have the potential of reaching more people if you post at these times.

If you are serious about your social media marketing methods then you may want to actually track how your methods are working.  You can track your results from within Facebook itself for example. If not you can track with Google Analytics or from within your web hosting account. If you are not sure how just ask your web hosting company, they will be happy to point you in the right direction.

For basic tracking you can set up a quick spreadsheet and keep track of how many likes, shares, comments, private messages and leads that come in. Track this month by month and see how your numbers are. They should increase nicely each month, if not then it may be time to change your tactics.

It is important to remember that social media changes over time and you will need to make the effort to change with it. Keep updated as each site changes. As new features are added be certain to take the time to learn how to use them.

Social media marketing can really help increase your bottom line if done correctly. It is a valuable tool that enables you to reach millions of people worldwide. What could your business do with this expanded reach?