The Complete Social Media Marketing Guide for Beginners

In this article I’ll share my complete social media marketing guide for beginners.

Most businesses don’t “get” social media.

As users of social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter we all understand what they’re about. We share moments, keep in touch with friends and stay connected to the world around us. But for the most part, we use it as escapism.

Social media is the perfect distraction.

It’s a way to numb ourselves.

However, understanding social media from a marketing perspective is a whole other thing. The truth is, almost everyone is using social media in the wrong way when it comes to marketing.

Bad Social Media Marketing: A One Way Channel to Dump Your Stuff

Let’s start by talking about what bad social media marketing looks like.

Most businesses use social media to “dump” stuff.

Instead of interacting with followers and creating great content that’s worth consuming, they post a barrage of products, discounts and irrelevant content – or worse – boring company news.

This comes from the misconception that social media is a one way communication channel.

What bad social media marketing looks like:

• Accumulate followers
• Treat them like an abstract number
• Put yourself and your agenda first
• Shove irrelevant content down their throats
• Constantly try to promote and sell stuff

Yes, I’ve been guilty of it, too.

That’s what most businesses are doing.

You aren’t even treating your followers as real human beings anymore. Worse, you put yourself first and them second. And you relentlessly push your agenda onto your followers without ever taking a step back, stopping and contemplating what they might want.

You fail to build a relationship with your followers and eventually they stop paying attention.

Social media isn’t a one way channel to post product links, discounts and company news to your newsfeed. You have to stop screaming at people and start listening instead.

Good Social Media Marketing: Listening, Interacting and Delivering

The key to my social media marketing guide?

Social media is a two way communication channel to engage with your followers.

You have to learn to pay attention to what your followers actually want. You have to listen to them. And in the context of social media, listening means consuming and responding to your followers content. This is how you build relationships online. That’s how you get others to care and listen to you. By listening to your followers you’ll automatically learn what they want.

And then you can start creating relevant content for them. (Hint: It probably doesn’t include company news, product links, pictures of your office or random cat videos that went viral)

What good social media marketing looks like:

• Create great and relevant content (interesting, entertaining, beautiful, funny, helpful etc.)
• Read every single comment
• Respond to every comment
• Actually care about your followers
• Treat them as human beings
• Listen and create even better content
• Sell something occasionally

That’s good social media marketing.

All social media marketing is content marketing.

That’s why creating relevant and share-worthy content needs to be at the heart of your social media marketing strategy. The rest is all about listening, engaging and sharing love.

Your Social Media Marketing Guide for the Next Year: Create Relevant Daily Content and Interact

That’s what I want you to do for the next year.

I promise you it will transform your business and help you sell more stuff than anything else you’ve done before. The return on investment will be huge because you’re building a brand.

Nothing builds a brand faster than great social media marketing.

Let’s talk about each individual step of my social media marketing guide.

1) Create Relevant Daily Content On the Social Media Platform With the Most Leverage

Creating daily content trumps everything.

I want you to think of yourself as a content publisher first from now on. And almost all content publishers post at least one piece of content per day. Many of the big authority sites, online magazines and newspapers post more than one piece of content per day. Sure, some people prefer creating content once or twice a week.

The argument is always “quality over quantity”.

But if you’re starting out with social media marketing you have to put quantity over quality. I’m not saying you should create bad content. You should create good content on a daily basis.

I’ve talked about how I grew multiple YouTube channels to 20,000 subscribers.

In the post I recommended publishing videos daily for at least one year before switching to a less frequent upload schedule. And I believe the same applies to all social media marketing.

One more thing.

Only focus on one social media platform at first.

Pick the social media platform that you gives you the most leverage.

For example, if you’re a photographer, Instagram is perfect. If you’re an artist and like drawing stuff, Snapchat is great. If you’re a coach, expert or affiliate marketer, YouTube can work great. If you’re an author or writer, Facebook, Twitter or Medium might do the trick. Find out which platform is the best match for the type of content you produce. And then stick to publishing on that platform daily for at least one year. It just beats the hell out of anything else.

When I started my personal YouTube channel, I posted daily videos for one year straight.

Currently, I’m publishing daily articles on this blog and uploading daily videos to my other YouTube channel. I’m not superhuman and it’s not rocket science. If I can do this, so can you.

2) Respond to Every Single Comment

I’ve explained the first step in my social media marketing guide. Once you’ve established a routine of publishing daily content (for example pictures if you’re a photographer, jokes if you’re a comedian, tutorials if you’re a coach, reviews if you’re an affiliate marketer etc.), the next step is to engage with every single comment your content receives in order to build relationships.

This is where your one way communication strategy turns into two way communication.

It’s the time to listen, care and connect.

If you have zero followers and nobody is engaging, keep posting daily content.

Once you start having 2-5 followers, engage with them like your life depends on it. These are your most important followers. They’re your core fans and you have to treat them accordingly.

Ask them what content they would like to see.

Thank them for being there and consuming your content every day. Talk to them, learn as much as you can about them and keep producing relevant content for them. Eventually these 2-5 followers will turn into 20-500 and eventually thousands, tens of thousands or more. But all of this will only happen if you produce great content and engage with your followers.

These are the two most important things.

3) Sell Something Occasionally

The first two steps allow you to build an audience that knows, likes and trusts you.

Once that’s the case, selling is easy.

People like to do business with people or companies they know, like and trust. And since you’ve already taken care of that by publishing great content and engaging with your followers, you can pop in a promotion, sale, discount or link to your product every once in a while.

Tim Ferris does this by publishing valuable free content 99% of the time.

Then once a year he writes a blog post selling a $10,000 per person event with 200 spots.

All he needs is one blog post to sell out all available spots. That means he makes $2,000,000 in a day. And it’s because the trust is already there. He understands social media marketing.

You don’t have to be that extreme.

But keep a ratio of at least 3:1.

Gary Vaynherchuk is big on this ratio and calls this strategy jab, jab, jab, right hook.

That means you should publish three pieces of relevant content for every sales pitch you make. A general rule is to always make sure you create more value than you ask for in return.

If you use this social media marketing guide religiously for the next year, I promise your business will not be the same. Sure, it requires a lot of hard work and creativity. But that’s what good social media marketing is all about. And not that s*#t you’ve been doing so far.

Let me know in the comments if you enjoyed this social media marketing guide?