Social Media Marketing for Beginners | Mary Ingrassia | Skillshare
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Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Social Media Marketing for Beginners Promo

      0:59

    • 2.

      1 - Marketing Basics

      2:55

    • 3.

      2 - Social Media Platforms

      11:19

    • 4.

      3 - Tips for organically growing your followers

      2:02

    • 5.

      4 - Organic Posting Tips

      2:00

    • 6.

      5 - Creating Organic Posts - The Text

      4:50

    • 7.

      6 - What to post? Post Writing Tips

      5:49

    • 8.

      7 - Creating Organic Posts – The Graphics

      4:13

    • 9.

      8 - Paid Ads

      6:42

    • 10.

      9 - Scheduling Posts

      5:31

    • 11.

      10 - Communication & Conversation

      1:44

    • 12.

      11 - Evaluating your efforts

      3:38

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About This Class

Social Media has become part of daily life for practically everyone. Since the eyes of the world are scrolling through these platforms on a daily basis, that is why marketers are so interested in getting their message across within these platforms.

But how can you leverage it for your business?

Social Media Marketing can help you build brand awareness, improve customer engagement, and ultimately drive sales to your business.

In today’s world, it’s an essential part of your marketing strategy – no matter how big or small your business is.

In my Social Media Marketing for Beginners course, I cover the Basics of the Top Platforms & How You Can Leverage Them For Your Business, Tips for Organic Posting, and How to Effectively Manage your Social Media Pages.

I also discuss Tips for Organically Growing your Pages, Paid Ads on Social Media, Communication Tips to Engage with your Audience in a Positive Way, and How to Evaluate your Analytics on Different Platforms.

So if you're just getting started on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest or even TikTok, and want to learn strategies on how to build your pages, this course can help you get started on your social media marketing journey!

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Mary Ingrassia

Promote Yourself, Engage Your Audience

Teacher

I have a B.F.A in Computer Graphics, and have been working as a Freelance Graphic Designer & Video Producer for over 9 years. I am a Top Rated Super Seller on Fiverr & a Certified Ambassador for both Fiverr & PowToon. I've have created thousands of Whiteboard & Explainer animations. I am passionate about being creative, and I hope to pass on my experience & knowledge to you!

See full profile

Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Social Media Marketing for Beginners Promo: Looking to learn social media marketing, social media can help you build brand awareness, improve customer engagement, and ultimately drive sales to your business. In today's world, it's an essential part of your marketing strategy, no matter how big or small your businesses. In this course, I covered the basics of the top platforms and how you can leverage them for your business, tips, for organic posting and how to effectively manage your social media pages. I also discussed tips for organically growing nor pages paid ads on social media. Communication tips to engage with your audience in a positive way, and how to evaluate your analytics on different platforms to measure your success. So if you're just getting started on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, or even tiktok, and want to learn strategies on how to build your pages. This course can help you get started on your social media marketing journey. 2. 1 - Marketing Basics: Social media has become part of daily life for practically everyone. Since the eyes of the world are scrolling through these platforms on a daily basis. That is why marketers are so interested in getting their messages across within these platforms. This can be accomplished via paid ads and organic posting on a company's own social media page. Paid ads can target specific audiences by age, gender, and location, depending on the platform you are running the ad. While organic posting can be a great outlet to naturally build your brand, organic marketing can often be a cheaper option versus running ads and can help you show up in your audiences feeds more frequently depending on how often you post, allowing people to engage with your posts, share your posts, and help you grow your audience. This course is mostly going to focus on organic marketing. However, I'll also be covering social media ad creation tips as well. So to start with the basics, what is marketing? Marketing involves creating and communicating concepts that have value for your clients. This is opposed to advertising, which is when you directly promote your product or service via paid methods, marketing can be more informational, educational, or entertaining, while advertising is a more straightforward approach to getting the word out on your product or service. Marketing and advertising go hand in hand as they both share the same goal. It's just that their methods of going about reaching that goal are a bit different from each other. Marketing may seem a little more roundabout and advertising being a more direct method, but both can contribute to building your brand and help you reach your audience. Who benefits from Social Media Marketing? Any small, medium, or large sized business can improve their visibility through social media channels. Social media can help build awareness and trust for your brand, improving customer relationships and building trust along the way. Individuals and freelancers can also benefit from having social media pages dedicated to their craft or talent. Page can serve as a way to showcase their work to potential buyers and answer questions from users. Their social media page can pretty much serve as an online portfolio. Plus if they offer a physical product, they can even take orders through some social media pages. I always suggest to companies to create a social media page for their business on multiple platforms, especially all the big and popular ones. If you end up just sticking to one platform, you are losing out on views from the audiences on those other platforms. Cross posting to each platform can help expand your reach. You can also focus on social networks geared toward the age, group and audience you want to target. The next lessons I'll go over how to get started, the basics of each network and their target audiences. 3. 2 - Social Media Platforms: Let's take a look at each of the big social media platforms out there. I'm positive you've heard of most of them, but it's worth delving a little further into each of them to understand which platforms might be right for you to utilize. It's also worth mentioning that these platforms are constantly changing over time and adding new features. So keeping up to date and informed on these updates is a great way to stay on top of what is trending. Keep in mind that on every page you create, make sure to fill out your bio, provide your web address and contact information whenever possible. This way, people visiting your social media page who have questions can easily and quickly find the information they need. See how to contact you and learn more about you. Your website should contain links to each of your social networks. So users can find and follow you on the platforms they use. Creating profiles across multiple social media platforms helps increase your presence online. For example, not everyone who has a Facebook account, has a Twitter account, and vice versa. Cross posting to multiple platforms and just using more platforms in general is an excellent idea to boost your reach. Facebook, it's the biggest of all the social networks a business. It's important to have a Facebook page with your company's info and contact details. You can create organic posts or even run paid ads that target a specific audience on Facebook. Facebook has over 2 billion monthly active users, reaching almost 60% of the world's social networking population. Did you know that it's the third most visited website in the world? Aside from making a Facebook business page, running or joining a Facebook group can also help your business or brand connect and communicate with potential customers. Groups tailored to your niche, or even groups that are local to your area. You will need a Facebook profile to create a Facebook business page. In a later lesson, I will go over how to add other Facebook users as page admins or editors to your page in case you have employees or freelancers you want to add to help manage your page. Instagram. It's owned by Facebook. And because of that, it has the capability to be linked to your Facebook account, which makes cross posting to each platform much easier. As of 2021, it is the second most downloaded app in the world and has over 1 billion active users each month. A basic Instagram posts will be square format, which is something to keep in mind when designing posts graphics. Instagram stories are very short, vertical format videos that can be used to tag products for integrated shopping. If you run a store, they can contain photos and or video and will disappear from your profile and feed after 24 hours unless you add it to your profile as a story highlight. Instagram Reels or similar, they are also short form video posts. However, rails do not disappear from your profile and feed after 24 hours like stories do. Instead, they are visible within a dedicated real section on your profile. Instagram tends to have a younger audience, which is something to keep in mind if that is what your target audiences. There was also the capability to create an interactive story ad, where you create a poll that users can answer by tapping on one of the buttons. This is a great way to entice your audience to engage, and can also give you some helpful insight. To gain access to analytics, you will need to make sure your Instagram account is set up as a business account. Once it's set up as a business account, it's best to connect your Facebook business page with your Instagram business account. This will make it much easier for cross posting and scheduling posts later on. Twitter is geared more towards short and quick text, but you can add images or video to your tweets as well. Creating multiple posts throughout the day is not an uncommon occurrence with a Twitter account with over 180 million daily active users. Twitter is a well-known platform worldwide. It actually has more male users, with 70% of Twitter users being male. This is also a statistic to take into account depending on what you're selling. Engagement with other Twitter accounts can help with growing your own Twitter account. Retweeting can help build up content on your own Twitter page and commenting on other users. Popular tweets can increase your visibility. Since even comments on tweets can get likes and retweets themselves. Once you are signed up and have your account up and running for a bit, you can take a look at analytics under the More section to see a snapshot on how your accounts and tweets are performing. Linkedin. If your company or use specializes in business-to-business sales, It's a no brainer to create a LinkedIn for your company or yourself. As a freelancer myself who does mainly worked for small businesses. I have met and worked with other freelancers on LinkedIn and even found some work on there as well. I highly recommend it for people who want to build professional relationships or connect with coworkers and companies. My advice is to fully fill out each section on your page and fill out your contact information. Treat your LinkedIn profile like a resume. Companies are looking at these more and more during their hiring process. If you run a company, you can make a LinkedIn company page that other users can follow and employees can be linked to it as well. You can create posts on both personal pages and company pages. And like other platforms, you can view analytics of your pages and posts to see how your posts are performing. How many visitors you've received, new followers, post impressions and clicks, you've gotten YouTube. You might not initially think of YouTube as a social media network, but with its ability to allow people to subscribe the channels and interact with creators through commenting and likes. It does qualify as one. It's used by almost 70% of people in the United States. With such a huge audience, it is very much worth your time to think about how you could integrate YouTube into your marketing efforts. Between uploading recorded videos and the ability for live streaming. Youtube is a powerhouse for hosting all kinds of video content. Youtube is the second most visited website in the world, right after its parent company Google. It's a great place to showcase tutorials and how-to videos, behind the scenes footage, product on boxing and reviews, and whatever else you can think of. Gaming channels and video games. Streaming content has boomed with exercise and fitness related videos also being a popular topic. Plus, if you have a video ad for your company, running it on YouTube could be a great option for you since it gives you visibility on the platform itself. Plus the ability to embed the video on other websites. Tiktok. Here's the newer, extremely popular video sharing social media platform. It's mostly dominated by a younger audience, Generation Z specifically, and the millennial audience as well. It's fast-paced, allows for people to like and comment on videos. And many big brands are now using Tiktok ads which appear in feeds to reach this huge audience. The way that a lot of businesses are running these ads are clever to making them more humorous and lighthearted to fit with the tone of the platform, which also helps them blend into users feeds. Small businesses and individuals can leverage Tiktok as a means to advertise their products and services as well. With how-to videos, Q and a session videos, behind the scenes footage, product showcases, and more. Once your account is set up, switching it to a free business account gives you access to their business suite. You can view analytics and performance and get access to their commercial use music library, which helps avoid copyright issues with song usage. Pinterest, it's a great platform for showcasing products and services you offer. If you run an Etsy shop, it's a great idea to get your stuff on Pinterest to. Because of its unique visual search engine, users can easily find relevant content. Setting up a free Pinterest business account allows you to run ads, monitor, analytics, and get your products in front of shoppers to easily convert them into a buyer by linking your products posted on Pinterest directly to your own store. The audience here is primarily female, with eight out of ten users being mothers. Whatsapp. Here's another one that isn't typically considered a social media platform, but maybe helpful for your business. Millions of people use it every month for sending messages, photos, videos, documents and more. It's the most popular mobile messaging app in the world. And what's at business was created for small business owners to help connect with customers. It may be worth looking into if you want to widen your availability to clients and customers. Niche platforms. There are also social media platforms and apps that exist for specific topics as well. For example, letterbox for movies next door, for local tips, Deviant Art for artists. Behance, the social network from Adobe for creative professionals to showcase their work. Switch for streamers, which was originally dedicated to video games, but has now opened up for different topics like music and so on. Blogs. As opposed to your website, which will typically be a bit static with the most relevant information pertaining to your company. A blog is more dynamic, can be updated frequently and is a bit more informal. You can use excerpts from blog articles in a social media post. And ultimately, a blog can help with search engine optimization. All the texts and keywords in your articles is searchable and can help boost awareness. Some of the more popular blogging platforms are medium, Tumblr, and even LinkedIn can host your blog articles, which is great if you already have an audience built up on their link tree is a free social media reference landing page. It describes itself as the only link you'll ever need, which is so true. With your link tree link, you can host links to all your different content, your social media pages, storefronts, blogs, whatever you want. As a freelancer who does work on Fiverr and also teaches online classes. I use linked tree to host links to my fiver page, my portfolio, and the online classes I teach on different platforms. I love the convenience of it and I use it as the link in my social media pages. This way, users are able to see everything I offer in one spot when they visited. Rather than trying to link four or five different sites and running out of space within my social media bios. If you are like me and do a few different things, I highly recommend setting up a link tree to use for your social media bio link. 4. 3 - Tips for organically growing your followers: One important thing to understand is that building your social media page takes time. It doesn't happen overnight. Consistency with frequent organic posting is helpful. But alone it may not be enough to grow your page. Here are some tips for organically growing your page network and or followers. Start off by inviting friends and family to like and follow your page. Follow other accounts based on their location, interests, and hashtags, and if they fit your target audience, this brings awareness of your page to these accounts and may result in them following you back. Engaging with other users by liking, commenting, and responding to their posts helps with visibility. Since you will show up in the comments section publicly. Hold contests on your accounts to encourage people to like and follow you and reshare your posts. Experiment with different contests types, but always follow each platforms rules regarding contests. Use hashtags to help with searchability, especially on Instagram. Use at mentions and tag other users. Encourage your audience to tag people they know on a post to if it's relevant. Interaction and collaboration between brands is also something that can help build your following. It's a form of cross-promotion, a win-win for you and the brand or account you are collaborating with. Retweets, mentions, responding to other brands, posts, and tagging other relevant accounts. Influencers. You can reach out to popular people or accounts and offer to give them a free sample of your product in exchange for a review online. This can result in more eyes on your product and brand and a more authentic look to it as well. Make sure they tag your social media pages or website in their post. So users can easily navigate to your page if they want to learn more. 5. 4 - Organic Posting Tips: Once you have your pages set up and you are ready to create your posts, first and foremost, you will want to have a clear goal in mind for your page. Do you want to get more sales, drive more traffic to your website, direct people to contact you, inform people about a cause and spread information, and so on. Once you have a goal in mind that can serve as you're driving force behind the post content on your page. You don't always need to have every post be a hard and direct cell. But you will want to consider if what you are posting as furthering or contributing to your goal. Targeting your audience, understanding who your target audience is comprised of, either by age, gender, location, and so on will also greatly help you with your post content. Who is your target audience and where do they live? What kind of budget do they have? What are their interests? You may already have this information depending on your business and analytics you have on your website already. Be aware of a customer's journey. This can help you give them the right information that could lead to a sale. Here's the step-by-step customer journey in a nutshell, awareness, learning about the existence of a product or brand, which can be achieved through social media, ads, word of mouth, etc. Interest. This is when your potential customer might start researching your product or brand and search for reviews. Desire limited time coupon or sale can lead to the feeling of urgency and desire to purchase, conversion where they become a buyer. And finally, advocacy, which is when a previous by our promotes your product or recommend it to others. People can jump a stage or go back throughout the journey. It's helpful to put yourself in your customers shoes to see how the process flows when it comes to your own product or service. 6. 5 - Creating Organic Posts - The Text: Creating organic posts, the text post length. Bite-sized posts are going to perform better than a long essay. People don't want to spend a lot of time reading on social media. They want to read something or see something quick and then keep scrolling. Remember, attention spans are short. Hashtags. Hashtags can be used across most social media platforms and we'll help you with searchability, getting you in front of the people looking for your specific content. In June 2014, the word hashtag was actually added to the dictionary. A word or phrase with a hash symbol in front of it, used on social media websites and apps, so that you can search for all messages with the same subject. If you're wondering what hashtags to use, the answer is that it can vary a little from post to post. You should always use hashtags that relate to your business and or post topic. You should avoid using hashtags that have nothing to do with your post content. Because this does not help sites like Instagram show your posts to the right audience. You can use industry hashtags which encompasses a broader or more general hashtag relating to your business or type of work. For example, let's say you're a dog groomer in New Jersey. The industry hashtags you can use are things like dogs, dogs, dog groomer, pet grooming, etc. These relate to your topic and business and are good to use. But since they are widely used hashtags, they can be a bit more competitive. The second tier of hashtags you can use or more specific niche hashtags that can be a little less competitive than industry ones because they are less used using the dog groomer account example again, niche hashtags may incorporate your location. For example, hashtag dog rumors of New Jersey. Finally, the last tier of hashtags you can use or even further narrowed down. This would be posts specific hashtags. This means hashtags that correlate directly to your post. For example, maybe the dog rumor from New Jersey just posted a picture of a recent client who needed grooming for their poodle. In this case, they can use hashtag poodle, and hashtag poodle grooming on that post. Using a combination of industry, niche and posts specific hashtags is the best course of action to help with search engine optimization within social media, especially on Instagram, there are websites that can help you use better and more relevant hashtags to get more likes and views based on algorithm data. My current favorite one is best-Hashtags.com. There are paid ones out there as well that go more in depth. War can keep up with the latest trends. When creating a post. If you start to type a hashtag on Twitter or in the meta Business Suite, you will be able to see some data on how popular that hashtag is and once that include that word and are relevant. I've used this method to discover more popular hashtags to use in posts. There is a limit on how many hashtags you can use in some platforms. On Twitter, it comes down to how long your tweet text is, of course. And on Instagram the limit is 30 in regular posts and ten in story posts. Tone, match the language and wording of the platform you are on, for the audience you're targeting, and for the goal of your brand. For example, LinkedIn is a more professional and business tone. Twitter is fast-paced and casual, acting like a stream of thoughts or nuggets of information that pop up in your head throughout the day. You can create a personality or brand voice with the use of text and images. For example, you may have seen how sassy and funny the Wendy's Twitter account is. If you are selling some fun type of gadget, you can be lighthearted and enthusiastic. If you are promoting a non-profit, you might take on a more serious and respectful tone. It all comes down to who you are and what your goals are and where you're posting. Incorporate a call to action. Some posts can feature a call to action to direct your audience on the action they should take next. For example, learn more, Shop Now, etc. Make sure to provide the link to the appropriate product or website you are referencing. Emojis can help get attention and give them more lighthearted feeling to posts. But don't overdo it. You can use emojis from within the social platform you are posting on. There are a few websites you can search for and copy and paste emojis from like emoji PDS.org. 7. 6 - What to post? Post Writing Tips: If you are experiencing writer's block with your social media page, first take a look at your well-performing competitors pages. This can help you get insight into the type of content that is popular when it comes to the text, images, and even hashtags. Little research can go a long way. Your general goal for posts on social media should be to educate, inspire, or entertain your audience. These three categories can help guide you if you get stumped on what new posts to create. Posting valuable content, you can introduce or give updates about your business. Talk about new services or products you offer. Give background history on your origin story or company values, or post reviews or testimonials from clients or buyers. You can post about educational tips, tutorials, facts, or thoughtful and inspirational content. Behind the scenes footage is also very popular. It gives viewers a peek behind the curtain and can help them form a connection to your business. It can come in the form of an office tour or even interviews with employees. When designing and writing posts, try to be eye-catching and commanding. Using actionable and straightforward terms and addressing the audience directly can grab attention. Evoke emotion by telling a story. You can write a story style post to help your customer or read or see themselves within the narrative and identify more with your brand. For example, a success story about how a buyer used your products to solve a problem they had. Capitalize on trends. You'll likely know what is trending based on the news of the day or week, you can build off of trending topics to write your posts, even if they don't directly relate to your business. Pop culture and popular memes can also be a source for post content. You can create quick meme images with texts, with templates from IMG flip.com slash meme templates. You can also write posts surrounding a general trending topic like Motivation Monday, throwback, Thursday, etc. Take a look at US DOT trend-calendar.com to see what the most search for topics on Twitter and Google are by day. Trends.google.com can also give you more of a deep dive on what topics are trending and where when planning future posts for a week or month ahead, obviously you can't know what is going to be trending in the future. But you can take a look at a calendar to see important dates coming up to inspire your content. Consider making a post celebrating a major holiday. Or in Google, you can search for social media calendar with the month and year you are planning for. And a few sites will let you know some of the lesser known holiday is coming up. You may find something relevant to your business, like national dentists stay if you run a dental office or world Teacher's Day, if you're an education. Repurpose content, you can post quotes or snippets from existing materials like any blogs you've written, articles, podcasts you've recorded, or other popular material. Repurposing older but valuable content on your social media pages can give you more coverage. Because your audience may have missed this content when you initially debuted or have not known about it in the first place because it was on a different platform. You can showcase it in new ways and formats. For example, by creating a quote style image or a short video clip. Ask questions. Once you have a bit more of a following, you can ask questions to try and promote engagement and commenting. Some social media platforms allow you to create interactive polls like on Twitter. You can make them lighthearted or silly, or actually try and get some valuable insight from people if you would like opinions from the public about your brand or products. For example, if you're an energy drink company and you want opinions about which new flavors people would be more interested in. People love voicing their opinions and appreciate feeling listened to. Questions can lead to comments from other users, which is great for engagement and starting a conversation. Make sure to reply to comments from other users to create a positive interaction between your brand and the commenter that other users can see as well. Post at the right times. Weekdays are more popular than the weekends. People are usually out or busy on a weekend. So they are not necessarily scrolling through social media. When creating a post in metta Business Suite, it will sometimes recommend a certain time of day that it thinks your post would perform the best based on data it has collected about your audience. Create a content calendar to keep organized or storyboard your content. Take a look at my calendar template to get an idea of how you can create your own to work with. I use an Excel file to plan out a month. I can type in the date at the top and have the calendar days autofill to the dates I want it to. I write the post text content first and typically send that to my clients for approval. Once your written text content is approved by your team or whoever you are working with. You can move on to creating your post graphics that go along with the post-test. Then send that off for approval as well if needed before posting or scheduling those posts. The most important thing is consistency. Try and post as much as possible to reinforce your brand or message, reach more people and to help you show up in social media feeds more frequently. 8. 7 - Creating Organic Posts – The Graphics: When it comes to creating the graphics or videos for your posts, first, you'll need the right tools for the job. You can create posts graphics and graphic design programs like Canva and Adobe Creative Cloud express, formerly known as Adobe Spark, which each have free versions with limitations and paid versions that give access to more features and images. Both of these programs are browser-based and have a ton of templates for social media and designs. Even have some limited animation functionality. If you have access to and knowledge of Adobe Photoshop, that is, of course, another great and more advanced tool to use for creating graphics. However, Pixlr and photo P are amazing light versions of Photoshop that are free and browser-based, found at pixlr.com and photo p.com. My digital design for non designers course goes into more detail about graphic design for beginners. And I also covered the basics of how to use graphics programs like these to create designs. There are also many free mobile apps that allow you to edit your photos, like Photoshop Express, Polish photo editor, picks art photo editor and image, which allows you to add animations and effects to still images. With more open source and free graphic programs being created and technology improving over time. It's given people even more freedom of choice on which program they can use to get their graphical work done without breaking the bank. You don't have to include video in your posts. But it can help to vary the content and might increase interest, especially if you are showing off a product. Short videos are more popular due to our short attention spans. In fact, it's best to try and capture interests within the first five seconds of your video. If you want to have any hope of people sticking around to watch the rest of the video. And if you need to create videos, there are a lot of free mobile apps to create videos with footage you've recorded. For example, in Shot Video Maker is a popular one which offers things like transition effects, text overlays, slow motion, collage design and more. For PC, Adobe Premiere is a more advanced video editing program, but has a bit of a learning curve. There are some cheaper and free alternatives to Adobe Premiere as well, like Camtasia and feel Mora. And there's also DaVinci Resolve, which has a free version as well. Pao tune is an easier to use program that has animation effects and the ability to import video files. Use footage you've recorded via webcam or on your screen with their pow2 and capture feature. And they also have thousands of stock footage clips you can use within the program. I also teach a class about how to make videos with Pao tune, which goes over the basics and more advanced features. Tiktok and Instagram Reels both have their own built-in video recording software with editing capabilities plus tons of filters and effects you can use. Each social media platform has different size formats that work for their platform. However, sticking with a square format for regular post graphics is my recommendation. If you plan on cross posting two different platforms, square format currently works well on Facebook, instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn without any cropping issues, keeping your posts in a square size ensures that you don't have to constantly be resizing your images to work properly on each platform. Be mindful about what platform you are planning to upload to and their size guidelines and any other rules they might have. Tiktok and Instagram Reels and stories are video formats. And since they target mobile viewers, vertical nine by 16 aspect ratio size is what they utilize. Youtube currently favors horizontal format for videos. This 16 by nine aspect ratio. Pinterest has more of a focus on vertical sized images catering to a mobile viewing. Sprout Social has a page that tries to stay as up-to-date as possible with the image size guidelines for each social media platform. They also offer a video size guideline as well. 9. 8 - Paid Ads: Paid ads on social media networks, our database and can help you target a specific audience, build your network and increase your reach. Because they offered a guaranteed display, you can draw attention to your page or business by having your ad shown to the right people. Social media networks use data and algorithms to target people who have a higher likelihood of interacting with your brand. You can control when and where an ad is shown during a specified time and only within certain locations. Plus they can look like organic posts. They appear in feeds so they blend in with the rest of a person's social media feed as they are scrolling through posts, turn an organic posts into an ad. This is called a boosted post, and it is possible on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. You can direct people to an external link, your website or product link. There are many types of ad formats available on each platform. And the process for setting up the ad can be a little similar from network to network. Each platform also has their own analytics for your ads as well. I'll go over the basics of the types of paid ads available on the main platforms. For example, on Facebook, you can have an image, add a video ad, a Carousel ad, which is when multiple images are displayed within a single ad image, each with its own link, which is great for showing different images of the same product. Or a collection ad which displays multiple items from your product catalog, customized in a dynamic way for each individual looking at the ad. Instagram also offers single image ads, video ads or carousel ads. There are also Instagram story ads and Instagram real ads, which are video-based at business.facebook.com. You can create an ad by choosing automated adds, choosing a goal to create an ad from scratch, or choose to boost existing content from your Facebook or Instagram page. In facebook.com slash ads manager, you can create and manage ad campaigns in a more detailed way. You can set your budget and schedule, select audiences to show the ads to and choose placement for your ads. Keeping automatic placements is recommended because it will maximise your budget to show your ads to more people based on where they are most likely to perform best. And you can set the optimization option for Add delivery by landing page views, link clicks, daily, unique reach or impressions. And lastly, you can choose when you get charged based on impression or by click impressions, or when an ad is displayed to a customer. And link effects are when the ad is actually clicked on. On LinkedIn, you can create a news feed ad or a sponsored InMail ad. Ad creation starts by choosing a goal which is called objective and LinkedIn, building your target audience and choosing your ad format. They also have single image ads, video ads and Carousel ads as well as text ads. Finally, you can select your budget and schedule, set up your ad creative, and set up billing. On Twitter. You need to sign up for a twitter ads account at Ads.twitter.com. Your Twitter ads account is linked to the Twitter account. You create it from. Like the other networks, you can create a feed ad that consists of an image, a video, or a carousel. Twitter has a variety of other ad formats and features to take a look at. They also offer pull functionality with an ADS branded hashtags and more. Twitter suggests that using three or more ad formats increases campaign awareness by 20% and purchase intent by 7%. On YouTube, you can create overlay ads that has a small banner of text or image that appears below a YouTube video on computer. There are also skippable and non skippable video ads and bumper video ads, which are short non skippable ads that must be watched before a video can be played. All of these can appear on computer, mobile devices, TVs, and game consoles. On Pinterest, you can promote a pin, create a Carousel ad, a video Pin add and more. You also go through the similar process as other platforms of choosing an advertising goal, selecting your audience to target the right people for your ads and choosing your budget. On tiktok, you guessed it. It has a similar process of choosing your goal, selecting your audience, setting up your budget, and designing your ad. You can boost your existing Tiktok content or create video ads of up to 20 seconds to appear within Tiktok feeds. Tips for designing effective ads. Show people using your product. Share user-generated content with permission. Try different perspectives and layouts of the product. Take a look at a platforms ad copy policies. Most of them do not allow cursing, fake buttons and ads that have deceptive claims, among other things, video should grab attention in the first three seconds. Go for a vertical layout for mobile video ads like for Instagram Stories, reels and Tiktok show different ads in a campaign to different audiences. For example, if you are targeting a younger crowd, show younger people in that version of your ad and older people for ads targeting older users, you should include a call to action in your ad, directing people to your website or product, or instructing them to contact you depending on the goal for your ad. After you run a campaign, view the analytics and results of the campaign to see which ones worked, who and where your targets are and more. This can help you optimize your future ads. Ab testing can help you test variables in your ads to see which is most effective and helping to drive better results. By changing the creative, the audience, delivery and optimization or placement of your ads. You can essentially hold a contest to see which ad is performing better. Facebook has integrated AB testing with an Ads Manager. When creating an AB test, only vary one thing because then your results will have a clearer indication of what was successful. You can then take the winner from your first AB test and run another AB test if you wanted as well. 10. 9 - Scheduling Posts: Scheduling posts. You can schedule posts for both Facebook and Instagram in one place using the free meta Business Suite at business.facebook.com. Here, you can also see direct business messages and respond to them. View comments on your posts, View Post insights and more. The planner section. You can schedule posts by looking at the calendar. You can view by week or by month. Clicking on a day will open up the pop-up window to create your post. You can set the date and time. And Facebook can suggest an optimal posting time to post when your audience is the most active on the network. You can click the check mark to select your connected Instagram account to cross post to both Facebook and Instagram. If you're a part of a Facebook group, you may see the ability to post on those groups as well. You can then enter your text and your photo or video. And finally, schedule your posts. For Twitter. You can schedule directly on twitter.com. First, you can write your tweet text and attach your image or video. Next, instead of clicking tweet, you would click the schedule icon that looks like a calendar and clock. Choose the date and time you want to schedule the tweet. Then click Confirm. Now the tweet button has turned into a schedule button. You can click that to schedule the tweet. If you ever need to look at all your scheduled tweets, clicking the schedule icon, and then clicking scheduled tweets at the bottom will show you a list of all the scheduled tweets you have sorted by time. Here. You can also update a scheduled tweet before it publishes or delete scheduled tweets. Next, I'll briefly talk about third-party social media management websites. One of the most popular ones is HootSuite, but there are tons of others out there as well, like buffer, a Gora, pulse, and post a plan. Some of these platforms offer limited free versions, and they also offer a paid subscription version which you can sign up for and get access to more features and more importantly, can cross post to more platforms easier, all in one place. Each platform varies and pricing and features they offer. For example, LinkedIn has no Integrated Scheduling on its platform. Therefore, you would have to use a third-party site for LinkedIn posts scheduling. From a third-party site, you can schedule images and texts for a post to LinkedIn. However, you can't schedule video to LinkedIn. You can schedule pins on Pinterest website up to two weeks in advance. When creating a PIN while logged in. You can select publish at a later date and schedule the date and time to publish. Tiktok has a video scheduler that allows creators and business accounts to schedule posts up to ten days in advance. Logging into your account on tiktok.com through a web browser. You can click on the Cloud icon, edit, and upload your video and post text. Then toggle the schedule button and select a date and time. Finally, click schedule to schedule the post. You can view schedule posts and drafts in the profile view. Adding page admins and editors. If you have employees or freelancers that you want to help manage your social media page without giving them your login details. You are able to do that with Facebook and Instagram. And on LinkedIn. You can assign a page role to a Facebook user, which allows them to have certain controls on your Facebook page and Instagram account if it's connected, depending on which role you select for them. To assign a page role to someone for your Facebook and Instagram page. First go to your Facebook business page while on a computer. Select Settings. Select Page Roles. Type a name or email address in the box, and select the right person from the list when that appears. Then select editor and choose a role from the drop-down menu. Select Add and then enter your password to confirm. To add an admin to your LinkedIn business page. First access your page super admin view. Click the Admin Tools drop-down at the top of the page and select manage admins. Click the page admins or paid admins tab. Click the Add admin button. Type the name of the member, associated employee or advertiser you'd like to add in the search for a member TextField. Click the member's name from the menu that appears, select the correct admin role. Click the Save button. And of course, if you do sign up for a third party social media management website, you could have an employee or freelance or manage your page and schedule posts directly through that website all in one place. 11. 10 - Communication & Conversation: Interaction between you or your business with your audience is important. It can serve as a form of customer support and can help build trust, loyalty, and interest among your followers. Here are some social media communication and conversation tips. Try to respond to direct messages in your inbox and comments on your posts within one day. This shows that you are aware, available and listening. It helps to build a relationship between you and that individual person. They will feel heard and get an answer to their question. For public comments and responses on posts, everyone can see this conversation between you and an individual. Maybe someone else had the same question and now have the answer. War, they can just appreciate that you took the time to respond to an individual. Address people by name. This helps give a personal touch by being more specific. How do you deal with negative comments and criticism? You can publicly acknowledged and apologize for the person's issue or inconvenience. However, you will want to solve this issue in private. Encourage the user to direct message you or email your support team. Or you can take the initiative and message them directly to resolve the issue. Managing multiple networks can be difficult. Third-party social media management sites can be handy to communicate and see messages over multiple networks all in one place. If you don't have a team or someone assigned to responding to your social media messages. Consider implementing a chatbot system or set up auto responses. 12. 11 - Evaluating your efforts: Evaluating your efforts. Over time, you will want to evaluate your analytics and identify your best-performing posts or type of content and try to replicate that success with future content. The wording, the image type, even hashtags could all contribute. You should keep that in mind for future posts. Remember that building your social media page takes time. It doesn't happen overnight. Putting out content on social media doesn't guarantee that everyone is going to see it. But not putting anything out there means no one is going to see anything pertaining to your business on social media. Most platforms have their own analytics and insights that you can view to get a better idea on how your content is performing. Ask yourselves these questions periodically, which is my best-performing content. Is there certain texts resonating with my audience? More videos gaining more views than image posts or vice versa. What style of visual content is performing the best? After posting for awhile, over time, you will start to see more and more data that you can use to analyze and compare. You will want to focus your energy and redirect your efforts to the content that is most successful. Facebook has Audience Insights which can be accessed for your page from business.facebook.com. And in the Insights section, you can see a breakdown of your pages, audience by age and gender, the reach on your Facebook and Instagram pages and more. The information here can help you tailor your content to your specific audience or even help you develop the right audience target for future ads. You can view data on how your individual Facebook posts are doing by visiting your business page while logged in and viewing the data that shows up below your post. To see how Instagram posts are performing, visit Instagram.com while logged into your account. Click on a post and click View insights. You'll be able to see stats like interactions or engagements with your post and discovery, like how many unique accounts were reached with that post. Twitter has an analytics section at analytics.twitter.com. You can see tweet impressions, profile visits, follower account, tweet highlights and more. Or from your Twitter profile, you can see analytics for a specific tweet. By clicking the analytics button. Linkedin has analytics that appear on the business page while you are logged in. Like search appearances, unique visitors, new followers, post impressions and more. And just like the other social media networks, you can view a posts organic performance by clicking View analytics below a post. For Pinterest analytics.pinterest.com can give you data on overall performance. You can see stats on an individual pin by clicking seem more stats on that pin, which will give you a view of performance over time. As you can see, each platform can show you various data and statistics on how your account is performing overall and how individual posts are doing as well. Evaluating your analytics should be something you checked routinely because this information is extremely helpful for you in order to understand what posts and even platforms are most successful for your business.