SharpSpring Social Overview

Social media is one of the most important marketing channels for your company—and it makes an even bigger impact when it is backed by the power of marketing automation. This article will provide an overview on the social media tools in SharpSpring. Article Contents Understanding Social Media Locating Leads with Social Media Details Social Media Content Strategy Reasons to Use Social Media Features Benefiting from Inbound Marketing Benefiting from Influencer Marketing Frequently Asked Questions			Available with:
			Marketing Automation	✓
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			Users:
			Administrators	✓
			Company Managers	✓
			Marketing Managers	✓
			Sales Managers
			Salespersons
			Jr. Salespersons

Understanding Social Media

SharpSpring provides all of the tools for you to create amazing social posts without having to leave the platform. These social media tools help you drive more traffic, attract more leads, and increase the satisfaction of current customers. With SharpSpring's social media tools, you can:

• Connect your Facebook, Instagram LinkedIn, and Twitter accounts
• Post to Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter
• Create social listening feeds
• Use the Content Calendar to visualize your social media strategy
• Create automation and lead scoring rules based on social interaction

For agencies, you can create higher-value relationships, generate new monthly recurring revenue, and prove your value to clients. Create a landing page with a form, post that to Facebook, and analyze the performance of your posts all in one location. In the end, social media helps you:

• Increase page views on your website
• Generate more sales leads
• Improve customer satisfaction

With social media, you have the ability to improve customer retention by providing a direct line of communication. This allows your current customers to feel comfortable knowing they can reach out to you at any time.

You also have the ability to attract a larger audience and strengthen your conversion rates by providing an additional outlet for visitors to fill out forms. In the end, it is all about inbound traffic, and social media is the perfect channel for improving and enhancing your inbound and outbound marketing efforts. For more information, refer to Supercharge Your Marketing With SharpSpring Social.

Locating Leads with Social Media Details

Social Media Content Strategy

Below is a breakdown of a typical content distribution plan:

• 40% engaging content: Quotes, motivations, and quizzes
• 30% promotional content: Special offers, discounts, and company news
• 20% educational content: Tips, lists, infographics, statistics, and charts
• 10% curated content: Original ideas, thoughts, and brand-specific content

If you are wondering what type of content you should post, SharpSpring recommends taking a step back and looking at your own personal social media feeds. Tune into companies that you have specifically followed because you like their products or brands. Check out their posts and determine whether you would like to follow in their footsteps—or create an entirely new strategy from scratch.

Reasons to Use Social Media Features

There are many reasons to use social media through SharpSpring. Introduce your brand to new audiences by leveraging your current followers' networks:

• Create and track cross-channel campaigns with the same message across multiple networks.
• Tie social media posts to campaigns to track conversions and success.
• Personalize your social nurturing outreach using automation.

More than generating, nurturing, and closing, SharpSpring's social media tools allow you to master attraction and expansion tactics. SharpSpring's social media tools provide you with the means to keep a finger on the pulse of your marketing strategy in a constantly changing and fickle digital world. You can, at a moment's notice, measure partner mentions across multiple channels using the platform's social listening features, or decide on milestones to identify market influences and reach out them.

Benefits can be immediate. SharpSpring itself, for example, has previously posted partner success stories and agency perspectives to LinkedIn. Those partners and agencies have shared or otherwise promoted the co-branded content to their network, increasing SharpSpring's reach organically.

Benefiting from Inbound Marketing

While keeping an eye on a market-at-large, in today's marketing world, focusing on specific groups with a market is key. It is important to develop a close relationship with potential customers. This is where inbound marketing is needed.

Inbound marketing is a way to interest customers in certain goods and services. This is done by way of:

• Branding
• Content marketing
• Utilizing search engines and search algorithms
• Social media marketing

With inbound marketing, you combine a narrow, intimate focus with personal outreach. To obtain this, social media presence is absolutely necessary. Social media allows for a direct line of communication with individuals or a group in general, and it provides a way to understand the current state of your company and its presence in the market.

For individuals, social media presence is about likes, followers, and retweets. When evaluating the impact of social media on a company level, it is about building a brand’s identity; making meaningful connections with contacts; and creating personalized, unique experiences that the audience will remember.

Benefiting from Influencer Marketing

Where inbound marketing deals with directing interest toward a market, influencer marketing does not directly target a specific market. Instead, influencer marketing targets influential people—whether or not they are tied to the market or group—to speak on a good or service.

These influencers can be those individuals who are paragons of their fields, and they can even be the average social media users who see your posts across different channels and share that content to their friends or subscribers. Influential individuals can be an extraordinary asset when marketing. Approaching the right influencers is essential when engaging in this kind of marketing. 

To best utilize influencers, you will have to start by determining the traits of high-profile, influential individuals within a certain field. Often, it is not just what an influencer knows, but rather who they impact, identify with, and otherwise represent. This just does not mean their vocation, education, or the like. You will have to detail some of the more understated aspects of these individuals—aspects like age, family status, and financial status.

As there are multiple spheres of influence within a market, it is imperative that you find and represent as many influencers as possible. Hone in on what the end goals are for these personas. Creating many different personas to better apply to different influencers can only enhance your market opportunities.

From there, you must further refine those personas to more closely resemble different influencers within a field. Consider refining personas even if the differences are subtle or minor—like those individuals who are invested in or develops news and information related to the field, as opposed to those individuals who provide advice on or reviews for products or services in the field. These may seem to be similar in nature, but their audiences are quite different. 

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What are the character limits for social media?
A: Currently, the character limits are as follows:

• Facebook: 63,206
• Instagram: 2200 
• LinkedIn: 1,300
• Twitter: 280

Q: How can content be classified?
A: Metadata is a key component of any digital campaign, social media or otherwise. To better classify and categorize your data, consider attaching relevant metadata tags to your social media content. For more information on metadata and how to apply it, refer to this external documentation.