Social Media Marketing Strategy

Social media platforms, these days, are veritable marketing tools available for the use of entrepreneurs to reach out to numerous prospective patrons of their products, services and brands.

These social media platforms include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube, Pinterest, Instagram, etc. To, however, ultimately enjoy the fruits of ones investment in engaging social media marketing tools, one needs to understand what each social media platform can do and achieve and what it cannot and, then, go on to fashion out a long-term effective social media marketing mix that will be suitable for the kind of business under consideration.

Take Twitter, for instance. Many entrepreneurs allude to the saying that, "the shorter the better online", as instructive and decide to apply Twitter as their sole social media marketing option.

This is because, with Twitter, one can easily promote a business, product, service or brand in just 140 characters.

Many of them, however, get disappointed when this strategy does not yield the desired positive results and they wonder why.

The reason they do not get the desired positive result is quite simple.

Good as it is to adopt social media tools as marketing strategies, there is the need for entrepreneurs to be aware of the limitations of each of the social media platforms they intend to adopt for marketing their business.

Twitter, obviously, is a good social media marketing tool, but it has its strong points as well as limitations when it comes to application as a marketing tool.

Some of the strong points of adopting Twitter are as follows:

1. Simple to use. It is very simple to carry out. All you need to do is to send out Tweets on updates in your business to your customers, hence, you do not need to be an expert in technology to Tweet.

2. It is also important for you to note that you can receive feedback, sometimes, instantaneously, from your customers. This is because your posted Tweets are published instantly for your customers to view, read and respond to immediately.

3. With Twitter, it is easy for you to make more friends and prospective customers outside your circle of friends and established customers because, as you Tweet, your Tweets gets re- Tweeted.

4. What you need for Twitter social media marketing is to know your target customer base and concentrate your promotion efforts on them. You do not really need to know their email addresses.

There are, however, some limitations of using Twitter as a social media marketing tool. These include the following:

1. Twitter, by its nature, generates millions if Tweets a day and allows a user to follow a large number of people, hence, there is always the possibility of your Tweets getting lost or buried beneath other incoming Tweets to your customers or followers, and this will defeat the essence of you Tweeting in the first place.

2. Another limitation of using Twitter as a social media marketing tool is that videos cannot be uploaded to Twitter, hence, if you are into products that require videos to be viewed to attract a prospective customer, you cannot upload it to your Twitter handle. You can, however, add the link to such videos on your Tweet and hope it gets clicked on.

3. Tweet content on Twitter is limited to 140 characters and sometimes it is impossible to express the attributes of s product, service or brand in just 140 characters. This is also a limitation of using Twitter as s social media marketing tool.

As using Twitter has its own advantages and limitations as shown above, so does using other social media marketing platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Youtube, etc. In order to have an effective and sustainable social media marketing strategy online, each entrepreneur should find out what works with the use of each and what doesn't as well as device a social media marketing mix that works from the array of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.

CFA is the Founder, www.techsmart.ng and Co-producer/Presenter,Tech Trends on Channels Television