Leveraging your online marketing strategies with social media can do much more than just elevate your customer base. Over time, you start to develop a sense of branding, after which your audience synonymously sees your product as a brand. That being said, in order to get to that point, you need to follow a set of rules; five of which are listed below and are the ones that absolutely matter!

Listen Carefully

Success in social media marketing is only possible when you listen more and talk less, but when you do talk, talk about what’s important that can add value to your audience’s life. Observe consumer behavior on social media and study the common trends. This is the best way to create content that sparks conversations.

Narrow Your Focus

It’s much better to become a specialist rather than a jack of all trades. Narrow your focus in terms of content and audience, and you will be able to build strong branding rather than attempting all things with all types of people.

Quality Matters

Quality will forever trump quality, and one of the most important metrics of quality is social media shares. The more your content goes viral, the more your audience feels connected with it. Never replace quality with quantity because it’s better to give 1000 people one blog to read that is of good quality than to retain 100 people with 50 blogs of poor quality.

Patience Matter Just As Much

Social media marketing success won’t happen overnight and even if it does, there will be times where activity is slow. Relax and retain your patience and commitment for the long term, in order to achieve your desired results.

Create/Add Value

If most of your social media marketing activity is to promote your products and services, then where is the branding aspect going? You’re not adding any value for your offerings unless you start creating relationships online that can lead to referrals and word-of-mouth marketing. By adding value, you can turn your offerings into a brand and that brand into a lucrative business.

By: Chance Madson
Read more at: http://socialbarrel.com/the-five-rules-of-social-media-marketing-that-matter/98711/