Getting the most out of your social marketing and being confident about your strategy can feel like trying to levitate your x-wing fighter out of a Dagobah swamp while standing on your head. With so many factors to consider, one wrong choice can mean the difference between a return on your investment and pile of wasted time. So, in honor of the newest Star Wars movie, and to help you get started on your journey, we present you with seven tips to becoming a social media Jedi master. Clear your mind and harness the full force of your social media marketing.
1. Have consistent branding across all your social media channels.
The last thing you want to do to a potential customer visiting your website or social properties is to confuse them and make them feel they’re in the wrong place. If you don’t currently have a branding document or guidelines for how your business should look online, chances are your website and social properties look visually disconnected. Every social platform offers different levels of customization, but they all allow you to brand your page in some way. Start by developing a basic document that outlines your logo, specific colors, and images to be used on your website. Then, carry consistent elements of that branding across all your online assets. Not only will this will make it much easier when customizing your social media channels but it will give your visitors that reassuring feeling that they are in the right place.
2. Use a website-centric model.
Social media is great for establishing an audience and building trust, authority, and influence. However, most of the time, the return on your marketing investment will come after your followers visit your website. Adopting a website-centric strategy means making it your primary goal to get people to your website. Limit your dead end posts (posts without links to more information) and sharing other people’s content. Instead, create original, high-quality content on your website and then share the information with links back to the additional content on your social media to drive visitors to your website. See how we have done that here. If you found this post from one of our social media posts you’ve experienced this in action.
3. Measure your marketing with social analytics
Social media campaigns require the same measuring and tracking as your other marketing strategies in order to determine the value of your effort. Having an analytics program to track social media traffic on your website is a necessity. Likes, shares, comments, and reTweets are all forms of awareness and engagement that are important metrics to know but are not measured through your website. 
On a basic level, using a URL shortener service like Bitly (https://bitly.com/) or Google’s free URL shortener (https://goo.gl/), can give you information about clicks on your social posts. For more detailed information such as shares and likes you’ll need a more robust and extensive service like Sprout Social (http://sproutsocial.com/) but, with more features comes greater expense.
Our Social Snap command center service is not only affordable, offering both a free and a pro version ($19.95/mo), but, one of the major benefits is that it includes analytics to measure clicks and gives you insights such as most successful post, best day and time of day to post.
4. Share images and video to increase engagement.
The fact is – photos, images and videos get more likes, shares, and overall engagement than just plain text posts on social media. Statistics shows that Tweets with images received 18% more clicks than without (Source). In 2014, the amount of videos shown in people’s news feeds increased by 3.6 times and, globally the number of videos posted per person has grown 75% year-over-year (Source). 
(Image Source)
5. Get comfortable with one social channel at a time.
The list of social platforms grows every day. With sites like; Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Google+, Tumblr, Pinterest, Disqus, Instagram, Vine and dozens of others, social media marketing can be time-consuming and overwhelming if you try to take on too much at once. If you are just starting out, pick one of the top three (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) that best fits your business and focus on that until you feel comfortable enough to branch out to others. Attempting to post on seventeen different social accounts every day, is a poor use of time and more frustrating than translating for Jabba the Hutt (unless you’re a protocol droid of course).
6. Include hashtags to increase engagement.
The use of hashtags has exploded over the last two years and has grown from a Twitter feature to a strategy used by top social media platforms such as Google+, Facebook, Instagram and more. Including hashtags into your social posts is a good strategy for increasing engagement because post hashtags get nearly two times more engagement than posts without. (Source) #socialmediajedi
7. Use a tool to manage your social marketing.
Let’s face it you’re not going to bring down the Death Star with an Ewok crossbow. So, why would you want to manage your social media marketing with just a pad of paper or a spreadsheet? Using a tool to manage campaigns is what the pros do to improve productivity and get the most out of their marketing. In 2014, nearly 60% of professional social media marketers said they used tools to schedule their posts and manage their campaigns. (Source) Using the right tool that allows you to create posts in batches and schedule them to publish in the future is a proven productivity hack that will save you loads of time. Also, tools allow you to publish to social channels from one dashboard saving you the time of logging in to each account manually to do your posting.
Our online social media management tool will make you more productive because it allows you to create and schedule posts, do research on related topics, and also create and add images all within your control panel. It also has a built in analytics feature so you can track and measure the effectiveness of your social posts. Set up your account today and try it for free. Click here to create your account.
We hope these tips help you on your way to becoming a Jedi Master of social media marketing. Keep in mind that it will take time, patience and practice before you are comfortable and begin to see the fruits of your labor.
Done correctly, the return on investment can be sizable. If you need help posting engaging promotional content to your website, consider using our done-for-you service. Our team of experienced social media experts will learn about your business and then regularly post promotional content on appropriate social media platforms to boost awareness, traffic, and sales.