3 Tips that can help new social media marketers: If you're going at it alone.

When you are starting out, social media can seem overwhelming- there’s so many different platforms, so much content and everything seems different. Here are 3 things that helped me out when I got started.

1. Get a mentor. Whether this is a person you know and admire who has succeeded in social media or someone you do not know but can consume their information online, get a mentor. I have a mentor inside the ag advertising community but I also found a mentor that I have never met. I started watching a lot of YouTube videos and came across Gary Vaynerchuk. He is an entrepreneur and has a digital agency that services fortune 500 companies. He has built himself as a brand and expert in digital and social media. He is an author and motivator. I love his attitude which is focused on not making excuses and just putting the work in. I continue to read his books, watch his talks and listen to his podcasts as well as monitor what he does on social media because he is so successful and I think he provides a lot of value to his audience. This is one of the main lessons I was able to learn from watching him talk: provide value to your audience. Don’t try to sell, sell, sell, or just promote sales. Give your customers something they want like solving a problem in their community. For example, instead of posting about a blowout sale, perhaps share a “how to” blog post you wrote about a problem that faces your business industry. For example, grain storage is an issue for the agriculture community I am in, so I wrote this blog post. 

2. Snoop others pages. Another thing I did was dive deep into what other brands were doing on social. I looked at products I personally follow, products that I buy, and looked at what they were doing on social. I looked at our competitors to get a grasp of what others in the industry were doing. And I decided whether they were succeeding or failing, and I drew out what I wanted to ditch and what I wanted to mimic.

3.Keep Learning. Never stop learning about the new digital trends. Take online classes, Facebook offers BluePrint, free courses to help you grow your knowledge of running Facebook and Instagram ads, listen to webinars, attend digital marketing conferences, talk to others in the industry. Absorb as much knowledge as you can because its ever changing. What worked for you last year might not work this year. Things that are working right this second like video streaming, mobile video and live video might change tomorrow (which it probably won't, video is by far the most consumed content and is projected to stay throughout 2018) but the point is, keep up to date and don’t get stuck in doing the same thing and forget to learn about what is coming up the line.