The What, When and How Of Social Media Marketing Messages – Part 1

Most social media professionals are aware that along with sharing curated content and posts it is also extremely important to share your created content and marketing messages at appropriate levels. Though some mistakenly post only their promotional posts, combining sales messaging content with selfless, relevant and interesting posts your audience will find valuable is an essential part of any social media strategy.

It’s perfectly alright to promote your brand and offers within social media. In fact, if you’re using social media for marketing, that should be one of the reasons you’re there in the first place. The issue becomes when and how often you post promotional messages, not if you do.

Many industry leaders tend to state that an effective ratio of shared/curated content is best at a level of somewhere between 75% to 85% of a marketers posts. The remaining 15% to 25% can be made up of your promotional, sales messages and created content. The idea is that since this is SOCIAL media, the goal is to provide selfless value to your audience, and that is done by sharing content and posts that they find valuable, not just your posts. This practice tends to start conversations with your community members. When this value based process is repeated over time, relationships develop that make people more open to what you actually do.

One of the challenges that social media marketers, brands and agencies have related to their marketing messages is not knowing all of the content and messaging they have available to share. This obstacle is magnified due to the fact that spreadsheets and Word documents are frequently the organizational tools used for this purpose. Not only does this make it extremely inefficient, it also tends to spread out workflow across multiple people, documents and platforms. This unorganized and disjointed process often results in less than optimal results, missed opportunities and an inability to take advantage of legacy content and messaging that could be utilized with improved effect.

These human and time intensive processes are often some of the biggest obstacles social media marketers have to deal with when it comes to consistent messaging and real revenue results within their social media marketing efforts. There are some specific steps to take that will diminish these issues and they all start with ONE.

Do you know what you have to share?

Let’s be specific here. What makes up your “what you have to share”?

Examples of social media marketing, sales and/or promotional posts are things like;

1. Your home page
2. Secondary website pages (About us, location)
3. Individual Product/Service pages
4. Your main blog home page
5. Specific legacy or evergreen blog posts
6. Landing/Signup pages
7. Your other social profiles
8. Specific created graphics and pictures
9. Email newsletter list subscription pages
10. Your text only quotes/sales messages
11. Etc.

What URLs do you have that contain these kinds of posting opportunities?

1. Your Website
2. Your YouTube Channel
3. Your Blog
4. Your Facebook Page
5. Your Facebook Page images
6. Instagram pics

The intent of marketing and promotional messages in your social stream

should be to drive traffic to your offers, content and landing pages in an attempt to either;

1. Increase traffic
2. Convert traffic
3. Drive sales/leads
4. Educate on products/services you offer
5. Branding

As we stated previously, one of the biggest challenges facing social media marketers is efficiently and effectively managing marketing posts. This was one of the reasons that we created the Bundle Post Social Content Management System as an agency. The time-consuming and inefficient methods of managing spreadsheets and Word docs was a nightmare. Something had to change to make it more effective, less time-consuming and require less human resources.

In Part 2 we discuss how to create and manage a repository of sales messages for social media posting and efficiently implement them within your social media management. Click Here for Part 2