Social media marketing is a must for all businesses, but it is more than just creating pages one time and never looking back. Social media in order to drive business requires daily attention. Are you prepared for that? If not, you need to find someone in your organization that can take care of it for you. Here are the top 9 tips to get the most out of your social media marketing:

1. Integration – Use your various social channels to promote each other so that you are sharing information and generating more followers. Always fill out your social links whenever the option is available so that there are multiple links to all your channels.
2. Never Buy Followers – These fake accounts are not going to help you in the long run. Grow your followers through hard work and customer help.
3. Social Buttons – Add social buttons to your website and blog pages. These should have both follow us buttons to your channels and share content buttons for them to share your content on their social media channels.
4. Facebook Ads – Try out some of the various options for Facebook advertising. You can promote posts, or sponsored stories and ads. You can test each out to see what will work best for you. They can be very low cost and allow you to control your budget, who you want to see it, and how long you want to run it. The metrics are constantly being updated so you can make changes as needed. You can build likes and engagement for your page as well as sending visitors who click on your ads to your website or special landing pages.
5. Twitter Ads – Consider trying promoted accounts and promoted tweets. They are inexpensive and easy to set up. These can help you boost your engagement and followers. Promoted trends are also good, but they are on the more expensive side.
6. Software – Use software to help you manage your social accounts. There are many out there such as Hootsuite or Buffer. This will allow you to pre-schedule posts and monitor mentions and other interactions. This can really free up your time.
7. LinkedIn Updates – Make sure that you are taking full advantage of your LinkedIn company page by making updates to it. You can see the number of impressions and clicks. You can also see the percentage of engagement for each of your updates. Make sure to take a look at your company page, add anything that is missing for a complete profile.
8. LinkedIn Ads – These are more expensive than other ads, but you have a huge audience of professionals to target very specifically. If you are looking for customers in a specific industry this can be a great option for you.
9. Measure – You need to know what is working and what needs to change. You can use features in each social channel to gauge how you are doing, or you can try Google Analytics to measure how much traffic social media send to your website.

One word of caution, social media is constantly changing. Make sure you stay on top of any new ad options so that you can take advantage of them. Social media can help drive engagement, leads and customers. Are you ready to get started?