Social Media for Beginners in 7 Steps

Social Media for Beginners in 7 Steps | www.cheekymonkeymedia.ca
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Social Media for Beginners
in 7 Steps
By Elizabeth Cook
Cheeky Monkey Media Presents

Step 1.
Develop Personas

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Develop Personas
What is a persona? A persona is a fictional character that represents your
brand’s real customers (current and potential). Generally your brand will have
more than one persona - Cheeky Monkey has two. These personas essentially
group your different customer segments into very specific characters - their
needs, wants, hobbies, desires, goals, challenges, demographic information,
preferences, and more. You can even name them to make it more fun and real.

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Develop Personas
How to develop personas - Developing personas is not difficult, but it does
take time to conduct the research. Interviewing current customers is a great
place to start - for a list of questions to ask, Buffer has a great beginners guide
to personas that goes into great detail. Other research tools include Google
Analytics, your sales, customer service team, and social media surveys and
insights.
How do personas relate to social media? The developed personas should be
the basis of your social media marketing strategy. After developing your
personas you will know what platforms your audience spends their time on
and what sorts of information they are looking for. Your goal should be to give
your target markets exactly what they want, where they want it, and when they
want it. Social media marketing is a fantastic way to do this, resulting in brand
awareness, trust, engagement, and sales.
*My opinion on persona’s - Persona’s are underrated and underutilized by
organizations. There is SO much valuable information that can be gained by
just asking your customers about themselves. My most favorite companies
are customer-centric. Medium is my favorite example, they are always asking
for feedback, consumer opinions, and continuously grow to make their
community more happy.

Step 2.
Go Where Your Personas Are

Go Where Your
Personas Are
What platforms should you be on? You
should be on the social media platforms
that your audience spends the majority of
their time on - here are some stats on social
media that may come in handy when
determining which platforms you decide to
use. You will have discovered this
information from the persona research you
conducted. Don’t waste your time and
resources on platforms that your target
audience has no interest in. Seriously, if you
try to do it all there will be little ROI on your
efforts, and it will take up an unnecessary
amount of time.
Twitter 82%
Pinterest 50%
Tumblr 68%
Facebook 90%
7,850
Followers
15,850
Likes
85
Re-Pins

Go Where Your Personas Are
Include all necessary brand information
Don’t take shortcuts when filling out company information on your selected
social media platforms. Kissmetrics wrote a post on the 10 elements of a
successful social media profile . The elements include - company name, a
username, profile pic, company link, bio, interests, background, and privacy
settings. Ensuring all of your information is included on your profile will
encourage engagement from your audience. For a more detailed look into each
element I recommend reading the post I linked to above.
Inject your platforms with your brand’s personality
People engage with people. Your audience wants to feel something. Don’t be
boring, be authentically entertaining. Develop a personality through your social
media accounts that represents the type of organization you are. Because
social media marketing is so competitive, it is necessary that you are able to
stand out amongst the crowd. Developing a personality will cause your
audience to connect with your brand emotionally - a huge step towards a sale.

Step 3.
Create Content

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Create Content With Purpose
One of the biggest challenges when it comes to
creating original content for your brand is
coming up with what to write about. A great
place to start is to refer back to what types of
challenges your personas face.
● Generate content that makes your
customer’s lives easier by overcoming their
challenges.
● Research for them, write for them, and invest
time into them. Give, give, give, keep giving
until you get.

Create a Variety of Content
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Business 5 Star
15m 1,520 post 95 pro
Andrey Marcus
Business Development
Business 5 Star
Often when I think of content marketing I
default to blogging. Blogging is indeed one
sort of content, but it is only scratching the
surface. In order to appeal to the masses,
you should be producing multiple types of
content. Quicksprout wrote a great post on
15 types of content that your brand can
utilize to drive traffic . A quick summary of
these 15 content types are as follows -
infographics, memes, videos, guides, book
reviews, opinion posts, product reviews,
how-tos, lists, link pages, Ebooks, case
studies, podcasts, interviews, and original
data. There are an abundance of content
types, so play with them. Determine what
resonates with your customers, and
continuously mix it up

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Create Evergreen Content
The best types of content can be recycled and
repurposed. Evergreen content is content that
doesn’t go out of style, can be used long down
the road, and can be pushed multiple times for a
solid ROI. For tips on producing evergreen
content, check out this article from Uberflip.
*My Opinion on “Content” - “Content marketing”
has become this widely used term for
something that has always existed in marketing.
Everything about marketing is “content” - a radio
ad, a billboard, a blog post, a press release,
everything… I am guilty of using the phrase
because it seems to resonate with people, but I
think as marketers we should not forget that
this new phase isn’t new, it is the basis of what
marketing always has been. Samuel Scott wrote
this awesomely controversial post that touches
on this point - Everything the Tech World Says
About Marketing Is Wrong . Do yourself a favor
and read it.

Step 4.
Share, Share, Share, Repeat

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Share Content From External Sources - This one is big… Don’t push
internal content only. Your audience will be able to see right through your
blatant self promotion. If you come across an outstanding, helpful, relevant
post that your audience would appreciate, then share it! Do this often.
Balance out your internal content with content produced by other
organizations. If anything will build trust between you and your audience,
it’s showing them that you are looking out for them and in constant search
of ways to overcome the challenges they face.

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Recycle Your Content - Social media is a raging river of status updates,
posts, picture, etc. There is no way every one of your posts will be seen by
every one of your followers. So, recycle them! You can share a single piece
of content multiple times on the same platform. You don’t want to overdo
it, so use your own judgement, but it is common for a single blog post to be
pushed multiple times per week through Twitter, or multiple times per
month through Facebook. This circles back to evergreen content. If there is
a great article from a year ago hiding in the dark history of your blog, bring
it back to life by sharing it! Buffer wrote a great post on the case for
reposting content , give ‘er a read for some further convincing.

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Repurpose Your Content, Then Share It - A single piece of content can
multiply. Say you write a statistically rich post - the post itself is great, but
what if you turned it into an infographic, created a meme from one of the
stats, and then hosted a podcast on the significance of the stats? That one
post gave life to three others, saving you the energy of creating a whole
new idea to build upon. If you are ever stuck trying to generate a whole new
concept, repurposing an old piece of content is a great place to gain some
traction. WordStream gives some fantastic examples of ways to repurpose
your content to amplify its effects - definitely worth a glance if you are ever
feeling stuck.
*My opinion on sharing content - The value of sharing content from
external sources is huge. It indicates that you are in-the-loop, on top of
trends, and appreciative of your rivals. It will pay off because those same
competitors will start sharing your content, strengthening your relationship
with them and amplifying your audience.

Step 5.
Engage #NeverForget

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Always Respond and
Engage Back
There is nothing worse than tweeting your
favorite influencer and never getting a response
back. It makes you feel silly and ultimately
diminishes the trust that was there before. As a
brand you must stay grateful for your audience
and the time they take to interact with you via
social media. This means following people
back, giving a quick thanks for liking your posts,
sharing some of their posts, and engaging in
conversation with them. Not only does it make
that person feel closer to your brand, but it’s
awesome for PR and word-of-mouth marketing.
The time invested will pay off in the end.

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Engage with Influencers
Influencers are people in your industry who
others pay attention to, trust, and seek advice
from. They have a huge amount of power in
regards to, you guessed it, influencing their
followers. It can be tough, but engaging with
influencers can be hugely beneficial to your
brand. If you are able to connect with them on a
personal level, or provide some sort of value to
them you have a good chance of getting a
ReTweet, a share, or even a conversation with
said influencer. They have the ability to take you
from unknown to widely known. Again, this is
not an easy feat, but definitely one worth
investing some time into. Tools like BuzzSumo
can help you target influencers in your industry
to engage with. My biggest piece of advice in
regards to this tactic is to stay genuine and
authentic. Engage with people you truly look up
to.
*My opinion on engagement - This is the most
important piece of the puzzle. Building
connections with your followers and influencers
is huge. I believe that digital marketing has lost
sight of the importance of human-to-human
connection. Stop paying so much attention to
how many followers you get each day and start
spending time building authentic relationships.Elon Musk - Photo by Steve Jurvetson

Step 6.
Measure and Test

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Choose What To Measure
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Choosing what to measure your social media success by is crazy
important. It is really up to you and your organizational objectives, but
common metrics include - followers, shares, likes, and impressions. While
these basic metrics are good to start with, I like to dive a little deeper. For
Cheeky Monkey, I like to track what sort of content is receiving the highest
engagement (likes, shares, etc), how many people actually click on links
(use Bitly or something for easy tracking), which types of content social
media platforms push to a high volume of people, and conversations
started. Your goals can get as granular or broad as you want, but without
measuring something you will never know if you are improving. Here is an
awesome guide diving into measuring your social media ROI - I HIGHLY
recommend reading it, or finding a similar article to give you guidance.

Test Everything
Okay, so you have a post that goes viral, what do you do next? Well, first figure
out what about that post your audience enjoyed and then test your findings by
creating content similar to it. Assumptions are nothing without proof. You
must test your hypothesis if you want to be certain you are on the right path.
Test everything. Test out different types of content - video, infographics,
webinars, and ask your audience which kind they prefered. Test which ways to
best engage with influencers. Test what time of the day your posts receive the
most love. There are no shortages of things to test out when it comes to social
media. Make it a little game and have fun with it. Ultimately you’ll figure out
what works best for your audience and what doesn’t work at all.
*My opinion on measuring and testing - While measuring and testing your
efforts is incredibly important, don’t get too caught up in the numbers. I
recommend making micro-goals that influence your overall objective. Focusing
only on the end objective (social media leading to an actual sale) will be
extremely frustrating and you will struggle to stay motivated. Your little goals,
if set correctly, will bring you success.

Step 7.
Stay Consistent

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Find a Routine and Stick With It
Don’t have time to post 8 times on Twitter, 4 times on FaceBook, and 2 times
on LinkedIn every day? That’s okay, there are solutions. You could either - NOT
be that involved, or automate some of the postings. In my opinion the most
important thing is to remain consistent. Your followers will grow to expect
certain behavior. That consistent behavior will create trust between you and
them. Don’t break that trust. If you want to be a reliable source for information,
then create reasonable expectations for yourself that will enable you to do so.
There are days when I have to pump out blog posts and can’t interrupt my
workflow to post up on Twitter, so at the beginning of the day I put some posts
in a Sprout Social que and let the tool do the work for me. No harm, no foul -
simply consistency for the Cheeky Monkey followers.
*My opinion on staying consistent - The influencers I look to for material are
always pumping out new content. I know that each week they will have
created something new and of value to me. I rely on them and rarely go in
search of new sources. People like Neil Patel , Amy Porterfield , and Rand
Fishkin are crazy consistent and incredibly successful - be like them (WAY
easier said than done).
I hope these tips help you get your social media strategy up and running. If you
have any tips/tricks that I have forgotten let me know - there is always room
for improvement.

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Social Media for Beginners in 7 Steps

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