Social media platforms offer users many different ways to share their messages, photos and updates with the world. Marketing professionals see these as great tools to increase their brand awareness and generate new leads for their companies. But with new platforms seeming to pop up every other month, marketers are finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with all the posts, promotions and interaction on a regular basis.

A cycle begins to occur: companies create a Facebook or Twitter page and incessantly post about their services or products with hopes to jumpstart the number of followers and likes. They eventually hit a wall and their traffic and engagement starts to flat line – and so they jump onto the newest platform, hoping that customers will view them as trendier or digitally savvy. Without proper planning, the same behavior will go into the new platform, and the same marketers will plateau with their efforts.

To help you avoid this vicious cycle, here are three tactics to improve your social media marketing.

• Determine which platform to use, and stick with it – Not all social media platforms cater to every business’s customer base. If you are a B2B company, you might have more success through LinkedIn rather than spending on Facebook advertising. If your business model is B2C, you may have more success creating videos for Vine and Instagram.
• Always develop new and original content – In one of our previous blogs, we talked about the dwindling attention span of the modern internet consumer. Marketers are continually faced with this challenge and the only remedy is to adjust along with the customer. It’s important to create original and new content that is specific to what makes your business unique. Did your team recently volunteer at a charity event? Write a blog about it and share it on social media. This adds character to your business and better connects you to your audience.
• Monitor your efforts – The hours and effort companies put into social media marketing can add up and could either make or break the marketing budget’s bottom line. The only way to see the ROI is through close monitoring and measuring. Companies that provide free service such as HootSuite, Klout, and Social Mention give users important analytics on the effectiveness of their social media campaigns. Having this information justifies a campaign’s existence and allows you to identify and discard what doesn’t work.

Social media is very fluid and it’s easy to lose direction in the current sea of options. Being consistent, adjusting to your customer’s attention span and fulfilling their needs will give you a great  edge over the competition.

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