What activities are involved in social media marketing?

Five essential social media activities:

Listen to what your target audience is talking about: Like most marketers, you probably monitor your company’s social feed for brand related mentions.

While that’s a start, it’s not enough to generate real customer insights. You also need to have your ears turned to the social conversations that your customers are having on a daily basis.

Curate third-party content that’s relevant to your buyers: It’s a good way to show that it’s not all about you and to build trust with your prospects. You’ll also be hard pressed to create enough quality content to feed your social media machine, especially if you’re in the early stages of your social media activities.

Publish and share compelling brand content: Now that you’re listening in on the right conversations and building trust with curated content, it’s time to grab attention with your brand content.

Engage prospects, customers, and influencers: The challenge with social media engagement is to make it scalable. After all, you can’t engage with everyone that shares and comments on your social content.

So use buyer personas as a road map to decide whom to engage and when to get your sales or customer success teams involved. But don’t forget influencers since they already hold sway over the folks you’re trying to reach and engage.

Track and measure social media progress: Smart marketers track their progress. So it’s no surprise that smart social marketers do too. And the specific goals you measure your social media activities against the need to reflect the stage of social media your company is in.