5 Tips for social media marketing 

I’m going to be sharing 5 tips that you need to dominate your social media marketing, tips that I’ve learned after years and years of running a social media marketing agency. let’s dive right into 
Tip #1: Be selfless. Now, what I’m talking about here is creating content that is incredibly customer focused. Way too many people, way too many businesses,create content that is business focused and essentially, really selfish content that serves pretty much nobody other than the business or the person that’s creating it rather than really trying to get into the mind and the shoes of the person that they’re trying to serve and to connect with and creating content that’s going to resonate and benefit them.
You see, one of the biggest things with social media today is that it’s now become well, a relatively sophisticated marketplace with most customers having seen pretty much everything and having already heard all of the spammy and sales these tactics that so many people have used for so many years now. This means, if you want to succeed, you’ve gotto flip the script and essentially, approach it like, well, a normal nice, kind of human being would which means creating content that’s going to resonate and really provide value to your market rather than just creating stuff that you think might be interesting to you. 
Now, here’s the catch,doing this way easier said then actually done which means if you’re going to create customer focused content, really content that serves and provides value to the people that you’re trying to reach, well, first you’re gonna have to deep dive into that ideal customer that you’re trying to connect with so you can know what kind of content they want you to create.

Now,there’s a few different ways that you can go about this but by far the best way is to really spend some time crafting an ideal customer avatar which is essentially, just a fictional representation of all of the best characteristics of your absolute best customers, the kind of people that love you, love what you do, want to do business with you or happy to pay you for the value you provide and want to tell all of their friends and family about just how great you are. So, to do this, you really want to take a look at those common characteristics between your top customers, between the people you want to serve, you want to look at things like their demographic details like: age,gender, income, occupation, title, things like that, their geographic details like:what cities, state, province or country they live in and their psycho-graphic details like: their attitudes, interests, beliefs and basically, all the head stuff that goes on it. Also, pays to really dive into what I call their miracles and their miseries.
 Their miracles being all of their wants and their dreams and their desires and everything that they’re trying to get that hopefully,your business is positioned to give them and their miseries being all their fears and frustrations and problems and nightmares and all the stuff they’retrying to get away from that again, ideally your business is positioned to help move them away from. Now, if you have no idea what any of these are, well, it’s time to do a little bit of research and that means having some conversations with your customers. Also, you can take a look at what are the most common questions you get in your business or what are the most common questions out there about the type of business you’re in which is widely available with just a simple Google search. Now, once you’ve got all that dialed in, the

Next tip #2 is to go about creating content, that does one of two things or hopefully even both which is to either educate them or entertain them or again, combine them both with edutainment. The reason education is such a powerful tool when it comes to marketing your business, is because we’re naturally programmed as humans to respect and essentially to value those that teach us stuff. Now, I could go into the details and the studies behind why this is all true but the reality is all we have to do is think about it for just a few seconds about how we’re raised and how were brought up to kind of respect authority and respect teachers and respect people that are imparting their knowledge on us. Well, you want to put yourself in that position for your customers. The other side is to entertain them. Now, especially today when attention spans are getting shorter and there’s entertainment all around, you want to do your best to ensure that your content is providing some kind of entertainment value to your customers.This doesn’t mean you need to be funny or have really long drawn-out stories or be overly creative, it just means that you need to keep them interested and keep them engaged with whatever content you’re creating. Basically, just try not to be boring and you’ll do okay. The final point on tip number one of being selfless, is just to try to give more than you ever intend on taking and ideally, give with no intention of ever taking knowing that by simply giving away content and providing value, well, the receiving for you it’s gonna come naturally. 
Alright, my next tip (no-3) to dominate social media is to double down.What this means is to really deep dive into your metrics and your analytics and find what works best for your business so you can do more of that and less of the stuff that doesn’t work. Now, I know, this isn’t the sexiest topic to talk about.
 After all, metrics and analytics math and numbers there it’snot a lot of fun, especially when it comes to social media where we’re often sold on the promise of artsy and creative and making funny pictures and gifts and things like that, but if you want to succeed and if you want to dominate social media, you’re gonna have to dive into the metrics and into the analytics.
 Fortunately, the platform’s whether we’re talking about Facebook or Instagram or YouTube or whatever, well, they’ve made their analytics dashboard sway more user-friendly than they’ve ever been before, making it a lot easier to get the high level overview of exactly what type of content is resonating best with your ideal target market. If you’ve never looked into the metrics before,can’t seem a bit overwhelming at first but it’s okay to start with really high level metrics like: what kind of content gets clicked on or gets more likes or gets more shares it gets more comments, these are all vanity metrics which don’t necessarily, pretty much never, equate to actual monetary returns but there’s still a pretty good place to start when kind of getting your feet wet and getting used to the whole metrics dashboard. If you’re a little more advanced or have the functionality to track exactly what type of content leads to more sales, well, then this is kind of a no-brainer. You basically want to do more of that stuff. This is where the 80/20 principle or Pareto´s principle really comes into play.
 Essentially, 20% of your content is likely to get 80% of all the likes and comments and shares and probably revenue which means, you really want to keep focusing in on that top 20% that’s giving you those 80% returns. Do more of that so you can get more of that.Over time as you create more and more content, well, again you can take the top 20% of your top 20% which again is going to give you exponentially greater returns then by just kind of looking at everything and just doing whatever.Overtime you’re gonna find themes about what kind of content resonates best with your audience and what they want to see more of.
For example, on my channel, well,anytime I create content around social media or Facebook ads or Instagram ads,well, it tends to perform incredibly well. Contrast this with a couple of years ago,when my highest performing content was around content marketing and how to write great content. So again, you’ve got to stay tuned in to your market and to their wants and their needs and their desires so you can make sure that you stay kind of up-to-date and give them exactly what they want. The take away point with tip #2: hunt double down, is you want to find what works and then do as much of that as possible. Alright, and that leads me perfectly into 
My next tip No 4 which is that quality comes from quantity. Now, essentially when you’re just getting going and even if you’ve been going for a long period of time,well, so many people over analyze and scrutinize and strategise and really really try to dial in the type of content they’re gonna make which gives it the greatest chance of success. Now, in theory this sounds fantastic and I’m all for strategy, in fact I think you should be strategic, but not overly strategic if it’s starting to hinder or to get in the way of you actually creating content.

 The biggest reason for this is, especially when it comes to social media content,well, you can have a rough idea of what type of content is really gonna resonate and really gonna get you good results but you can’t be sure, in fact the best thing you can do is take a pretty good guess and then go for it. So, how do you find those good things? Well, it’s by creating a lot of not-so-good things and knowing that the good things are gonna come through as well you’re not gonna get to those good things unless you can kind of get all the bad things out of your system too.Anyway, I think you get the point but just to make sure, the point here is that when it comes to dominating social media, especially with the competitive landscape, the secret is more.
Alright, so on the topic of more, let’s move on to the next tip which is to invest. Now, what I’m talking about here is investing in education, investing in assets and resources and possibly team members or even new gear, essentially, taking social media marketing seriously and investing in it accordingly. You see, a funny thing happens when we start talking about social media marketing and people tend to focus on the social media and they forget about the marketing which is essentially, the proven marketing fundamentals, the principles, the concepts that have been around for decades.
You’re going to need to be strategic, you’re gonna need to have an ideal customer avatar in mind, you’re gonna need to have a business direction or goal or objective or something you’re trying to accomplish, so you can make sure that you’re in alignment with the content you’re creating. Now, when it comes to social media marketing, there’s kind of two different camps and two different things that you’re gonna need to study in order to stay on top of the situation: number one is the fact that social media changes constantly. There’s new algorithm updates, new channels that get released,new ways of doing things, new features, all the stuff that you’re going to want to be aware of so you can take maximum advantage of it.
The other side of course though, is those proven marketing fundamentals, those concepts, those strategies, those theories that have been around for as long as people have been making buying decisions. If I had to make a recommendation, I’d say spend around 70 to 80% of your time on the fundamentals and those proven strategies and then around 20 to 30% of your time on the tactics and on the platforms because tactics and hacks and platforms and channels, they’re going to come and go, but those proven fundamentals, well, they’re gonna last you a lifetime. Lastly, when it the social media marketing, whether you choose to outsource it or delegate it to someone on your team or hire marketing agency or whatever, well, the best way to learn and to really dominate is to be a practitioner first, because otherwise you’re not gonna really know what they’re doing and if it’s effective or if they’re just wasting your time and money. Alright, and that ties in perfectly with 
Tip#5: choose the best channel. Now, I’ve talked about this a lot before but I’m all about avoiding what I call “the marketing wasteland”. Essentially, the marketing channels and platforms where none of your customers are active or present on and yet are hyped up as the newest and latest and greatest marketing strategy or marketing channel and social media network or whatever that you just”have to be on”. No, you don’t have to be there. In fact, being there is terrible,terrible advice.
You should pretty much only be where your customers are active and present on. It sounds like totally common sense, you’d be amazed how many times I see businesses that have no business at all being on certain different social media channels and yet they’re there simply because they thought they had to be doing everything and trying to be everywhere, is probably the worst marketing advice ever,  you only need to be where your customers are and this means looking at probably some of the major players like: Facebook,Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn which are pretty much gonna cover most of your bases. In fact, I can probably almost guarantee that most of your market is on at least one of these four channels.
Now, once you’ve identified which one or two or maybe even three of those channels they’re on, you can start looking at other options like: snapchat and tik-tok and Pinterest but they’re going to be very niche specific and really relevant to which customers are sort of active and present on them. So, make sure to do your due diligence and do your home work on that ideal customer avatar and where they’re spending their time online.Fortunately again, all it takes is a quick google search on social media network, demographic, usage statistics, so just Chuck a bunch of words like that  into the search bar and you’ll come up with all sorts of different graphs and charts and data telling you exactly what type of person is on what type of network.
Then you just really have to align up the pieces: your customers and the right network. If you’re at a loss though and you still really don’t know what to choose, well, there’s two great channels that have already mentioned butI want to reiterate them here because they’re just that valuable: number one being Facebook and the second being Instagram.