If you’ve started a small business, you might be aware that social media marketing is a great way to spread the word about the product or service you’re selling. You might also know that it’s extremely effective way to engage with your prospective clients and get positive word-of-mouth coverage about your fledgling company. However, you might not know what you need to do to get those results.

That’s understandable. Every social media platform has its own strengths and weaknesses—not to mention best practices for the type of content to post and how often to post it—and trying to figure out what to post where can be a bit confusing. However, there are some principles that will help get you started—and some local social media marketing companies that might be able to help.

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Social Media Marketing Principles to Keep in Mind

The first thing to keep in mind about social media marketing is to figure out the goals you want to achieve beforehand. For instance, you can show people interacting with your product, collect positive reviews, engage with your customers or promote a certain image for your company. Way too many companies get on social media because it’s popular, and as a result they waste a lot of time making posts that don’t carry over to sales.

Once you know the goals you’d like to achieve, select the social media platforms that will work best for you. Facebook, for instance, is a good place to post updates about what’s going on in your company, while Instagram is better for images that showcase your product and your company culture. No matter what platforms you choose, do some research beforehand to figure out what content works best for each of them.

Finally, come up with a posting schedule based on the best practices of each social media platform in question. While you should probably only post one or two images on Instagram each day so your followers have time to appreciate your posts, you’ll want to post a lot more often on Twitter because of the sheer amount of posts users have to sort through.

Rochester Social Media Companies

Of course, there’s an easier way to effectively market your company on social media. Just hire a social media marketing company to help you. Rochester is home to several companies, including:

• MLT Group—This company will help you craft a social media strategy. It also offers services for regularly posting on your social media accounts, as well as monitoring services that will help you create content that’s responsive to your customers’ needs.
• Hello Media—Hello Media is a full-service social marketing agency that will put together a content strategy for your company, create the content as well as manage your social media presence and monitor your presence. They also offer social media courses to help you understand how to do your own social media marketing.
• Curve—Curve offers help with many aspects of marketing, including social media campaigns. They’ll work with you to plan out what you’d like your campaigns to achieve, then create the content and monitor the performance of the social media posts to make sure the campaign is achieving the goals it should.

Invest in Social Media Marketing With First Alliance Credit Union

Social media can be an effective marketing tool for any small business, but before you create your social media accounts you should think about why you’re using social media to promote your company. Once you know that, you can start thinking about the platforms you’ll want to use and the type of content you’ll want to create. If you need help with this, you can always outsource your social media marketing to a firm that specializes in it.

While First Alliance Credit Union can’t help you market your business on social media, it can help you get the funding to hire a marketing firm to help with your social media efforts. You can get a business loan, a business credit card, or just get a business account in which to put the money you’ll need to hire some social media marketers.

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