If you aren’t using social media platforms to market your brand, you’re most likely missing out on a huge chunk of the potential traffic and awareness you could be getting. However, taking an unguided approach to social media marketing can lead to inconsistent or lackluster results, especially if you’re putting time into tasks that provide suboptimal returns. To ensure you’re getting the most out of your efforts, it’s best to start with the methods that have been proven to work for other marketers. After all, there’s no sense in deviating from the beaten path when all you have to do is follow a paved road to success. With that said, here the top 10 social marketing tips that every entrepreneur should learn:

1. Set Specific Short-Term Objectives to Achieve Long-Term Goals

This tip can be applied to any area of business progress, but it’s particularly useful for social campaign management because there are often so many small steps involved in optimizing a campaign. By breaking down your overall goals into smaller objectives you can make your vision easier to reach and create a foundation for a detailed schedule that will ensure you’re always on track. Plus, by separating the work into piles, you can eliminate the anxiety that comes with having to surmount a huge mound of progress.

2. Conduct Audience Research

Knowing your audience is key to delivering promotional content that will effectively engage and persuade people into becoming viewers, visitors, subscribers, or buyers. Luckily, targeted advertising platforms like Facebook Ads make it easy to track the interests, demographics, and other personal details of your site visitors and brand followers. When you know what people already like, you stand a better chance of giving them what they want in the future.

3. Focus on Content Quality

Once you’ve created a comprehensive to-do list and have become familiar with your target audience, it’s time to focus on improving the quality of your content. You can either invest in better content production services or spend your time to become a better content producer yourself. Either way, the idea is to make your social media posts more entertaining, informative, and visually appealing to encourage viewers to like and share.

4. Hold Contests and Raffles

Most people will at least consider the opportunity to win something free, especially if it’s something of decent value. You don’t need to make a habit out of giving stuff away, but occasionally providing the allure of a prize can be enough to catch the attention and engagement of people who might never notice your brand otherwise. Social media sites are perfect platforms for marketing a raffle or contest because people tend to share these events with their friends and families in hopes of increasing their chances of having someone in their circle win.

5. Share Third-Party Content

If you’re only sharing content that your brand is producing, you’re not doing social media right. Social media marketing is about sharing content that engages your audience, regardless of what the source may be. While you don’t necessarily want to link to the content of competitors in your niche, mixing generally entertaining or useful content in with your own is a good way to keep people interested and capitalize on the popularity of relevant trends.

6. Avoid Sales Language

While you might think that putting a call-to-action in every social media post is a good idea, that sort of thinking is archaic because people don’t like to be pitched while browsing their newsfeeds – they want to be entertained. Ultimately, your job is to provide irresistible value that people will gravitate towards, even if that means refraining from constantly promoting your brand directly.

7. Utilize Stunning Photography

Eye-catching imagery is everything on social media. If your thumbnails and image galleries aren’t popping out at the user when they’re scrolling down, you’re simply not going to get noticed that often. The goal is always to create a post that someone will almost have to stop and look at, even if only for a brief moment. If you’re not in a position to upgrade your photography equipment and produce your own HD images, consider the advantages of using a stock image service to source high-quality photos.

8. Launch a Video Marketing Campaign

Marketing studies have proven that video is by far the most engaging kind of content that you can produce. After all, someone can only stare at a single-frame picture for so long before they’re ready to move on to the next intriguing post they come across. Investing in quality video production services may be costly, but if it’s done right it will be more than a worthy investment – it could become the cornerstone of your brand’s public image.

9. Engage and Converse With Customers

Staying in contact with your customer base and making yourself accessible is one of the primary benefits that social media can give your brand. People like to deal with companies that they can trust and surveys prove that consumers tend to trust brands that are active and contactable on social media sites. Making it easier for people to reach you on the same platforms that they’re already using will also encourage more inquiries.

10. Use Social Media Tools to Simplify Your Job

If you’re not using automation and analytics tools to manage your campaigns, you’re probably wasting a lot of time and missing out on essential insights. Thus, comparing the top social media tools should be the final step you take before you get back to all of the hard work involved in creating and promoting great content. At the very least, you should be scheduling posts in advance to keep yourself from having to log in and out of your accounts throughout the day.

Heeding the Tips Above Will Practically Guarantee Growth

While there are never any 100% assurances when you’re entering into a social marketing campaign, if you base your approach around the tips given above, there’s a very high chance that you’ll see some sort of considerable improvement in brand awareness within weeks to months.