If you’ve been wanting to make the shift to a career in social media marketing, you can start with these basic concepts as your learning guide.
Social media marketing, under the bigger umbrella of digital marketing, has grown in popularity in the last few years. The shift towards freelancing and
working from home has made it even more attractive for people to transfer to
social media marketing as their new career.
How To Start Off In Social Media Marketing
In my opinion, this trend was fuelled largely by health concerns because of the pandemic. However, even before COVID-19, people were already shifting to
freelancing because that meant that they can work and take on several jobs
without having to leave their homes.
What is social media marketing?
In social media marketing, products and services are promoted using social media as the primary channel. It uses the same concepts as conventional marketing such as planning, copywriting, layout and creatives, audience analysis, research, social media advertising, and promotions, to name a few.
It doesn’t necessarily mean that a single person will do all of these.
There may be three persons working on copy and planning (social media writer),
layout and design (social media artist), and promotion to attract traffic or
visitors (virtual assistant).
It may sound simple to the uninitiated individual but if you know how
competitive and saturated the social media landscape is, you’d know that it’s
a tough job to gain visibility on social media. If you own social media pages
on Facebook and Instagram, you’d feel how tough the current scenario is
because of the decline in audience engagement over the last few years thanks
to the ever-changing newsfeed algorithm.
Never lose hope though, you just have to find the right formula to succeed. A good social media strategy will reward you with a lot of gains and you might
even attract your own circle of loyal followers who will either buy your
products and services or endorse them to their peers.
You can even collaborate with your fellow marketers and bloggers to launch promotions. Another popular way to gain success is to collaborate with a
social influencer if you know someone or your budget will permit it.
Shifting to social media marketing
How does one really begin a career in social media marketing? You can opt to not make the jump immediately and focus on learning social media marketing first. This is what I’m currently doing. But before I proceed, allow me to disclose that
I’m not a full-time social media marketer. I do it for one client, for brands that would ask me to collaborate with them for their campaigns, and for my own blog. Other than that, I have a full-time office job.
I wasn’t always into social media, in fact, I hated the toxicity of the people in it (this was in 2011, so it’s already that bad). However, after three years, I realized that social media can be a good medium for practicing my writing.
I wasn’t always confident in writing but I wanted to solve it, so my blog and my social media pages became my training field. I gained knowledge on using social media for marketing by reading trends and asking fellow bloggers
about them.
On top of learning about it yourself, you can also enroll in a social media
marketing course where the facilitator will teach you the basics of social
media marketing. Some of the key concepts that you need to learn in social
media marketing are the following:
1. Content creation
What are the types of content that you need for your or your client’s social media channels? How can content help in selling a product or at least put it out there where the right audience can see it? Those are some of the topics
covered in content creation.
2. The basics of a social media calendar
A social media calendar contains your posting schedule. It’s good to have a
social media cleaner because it will give you a larger view of how one message
relates to another and how they will work together for the benefit of a brand,
on the whole.
A social media calendar can be a combination of text, quotes, tips, and
creative images to avoid audience burnout and keep them interested in your
content.
3. Resources
These are websites that allow individuals to use inspirational quotes,
pictures, and sounds for free. You will need to know where to get pictures and videos so that you will never run out of materials for your posts.
4. Design tools
Sometimes, you don’t really need sophisticated software to design your posts.
There are many free design programs and apps available out there such as
Canva. They are easy to use and provide stunning results.
For resources and tools, you can get more details in this post:
The All-Time Ultimate List Of Free Blogging Tools To Help Newbie Bloggers
Succeed.
5. Attracting an audience
You will also be taught strategies on how to attract your audience. But first,
you need to learn to use your social media page’s audience analytics tool to
find out the most optimal posting time for your materials. This is the time
when your audience is most active, which means the likelihood of them seeing
your posts is also high.
Next, you also need to learn the right strategy for sharing your posts – where
you need to share them to get people interested in your products.
For example, if your product is food, you can share them with Facebook groups about food. It will be unwise to share them with a group about, say,
motorcycles because that’s the primary interest of the people belonging to that group. Worst, you might even be branded as a spammer or someone who mindlessly floods newsfeeds with unrelated topics.
6. Getting clients
Clients will not necessarily troop to you to get your services or hire you for your professional assistance. You need to be
visible to them, thus, you need to sign up on freelancing sites like Upwork,
Fiverr, Freelancer, Online Jobs PH, We Work Remotely, and Working Nomads. Go
to their respective websites and create an account to start pitching to
clients.
You can also send email proposals to companies that are active in social media. Suggest possible areas that they may have missed or they are lacking in and offer a solution. If they find you impressive, they will surely hire your
services as a social media marketer.
Furthermore, you can offer a one-month free trial to your target clients so that they can gauge if you are right for their promotional requirements.
Emphasize that the engagement is non-binding and that they have the option not to hire your services after the trial period if they didn’t like what you did.
Epilogue
The lure of shifting to a social media marketing career is strong. It’s really
an ideal career because you can do it at home and you have the flexibility to
take on any number of clients depending on your proficiency.
What’s important to remember though is that it’s not something that you learn overnight. You have to invest time and money in order to learn the concepts
that will help you succeed in the field of social media marketing.
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Social media marketing is a great idea to get behind, it is incredible all the ways people manage to find to use it - I have to admit I am not good at social media.
ReplyDeleteThis is helpful. I usually always do my business on social media! It gets info out fast.
ReplyDeleteThese are useful tips for expanding into social media marketing. Always helps to have some pointers.
ReplyDeleteGlad to read this post. I'll follow all your tips. They are so helpful.
ReplyDeleteThis was a really interesting post about something super popular. Social media is such a big thing, the marketing side is booming.
ReplyDeleteI find the Social Media Marketing a very interesting field that makes me curious and learn more and more about it.
ReplyDeleteThese are great tips for getting into social media marketing. I think the best one is the social media calendar. It is a life saver of making sure that you have all social media posts scheduled out correctly and you do not miss a day/time/or post.
ReplyDeleteGreat tips! And yes to the design tool. I use a design tool that is absolutely great and yet free. Gotta love that! -LYNNDEE
ReplyDelete