You’re excited to talk all about your products and services. You think you have the greatest solution on Earth for your customers’ problems—and you likely have a good one. However, you can’t let this excitement distract you from fundamentals that make social media marketing work.

How do you become a leading voice within your niche? It’s not that simple on social media. You can start easily, but attracting a loyal following who can’t wait to hear what you have to say and wants to buy from you takes a ton of work. The success of this lies in these principles:

1. Become the Most Useful Company in Your Niche

Many SMBs want to talk about their products and services. However, when done too much, this kind of marketing falls flat on its face.

Why?

Right or wrong, consumers want to put everything you share to good use. If you feed them cool new information they can use to improve their lives, they’ll trust and like you more. It’s that simple!

At first, aim to share 80% of your content from other websites related to your niche. With 20% of your content coming from you, some of this should be useful while a portion can advertise. If you consistently flip-flop this ratio, your followers will begin to doubt your trustworthiness, stop paying attention to your posts, and unfollow you. Maintain this balanced ratio, and consumers will happily buy from you when they have the need.

Feedly is a great tool you can use to find content your followers would love to read from other sources.

2. Consider Paid Advertising Options

Every social media platform has paid options. In fact, Facebook practically forces you to use their advertising to reach most of your followers. They’ve written their algorithm to display your own posts to as few of your followers as possible. It’s just their business model! All other social media platforms work in a similar way, although not to this extent.

Don’t view paid advertising as a “shortcut” to help grow your audience, which will lead to an unnecessarily high investment. Instead, view this as an opportunity to boost an already-successful strategy.

3. Make the Most Efficient Use of Your Time

Ever wandered around on Twitter? It’s a real mess. Hundreds of tweets, trending topics, direct messages, and constant notifications flitter about. Twitter’s not unique in this regard, however. All social media platforms want you to spend as much time as possible on their network: boosting the chance you’ll click on ads that make them money.

As a result, it’s easy to waste hours on social media each week. Batch your processes to help combat this, performing the same task for several hours one time per week or month (rather than spacing it out more frequently for smaller periods of time).

This will allow you to work more quickly and best utilize social media in the most efficient manner. It also won’t steal valuable time you could use elsewhere in your business.

Yes, Social Media Works. You Just Need Experience and/or Time on Your Side.

You’ve probably heard horror stories about companies that spend all sorts of time on social media but end up with nothing to show for it. Yes, this does happen.

So, invest your own time wisely and/or hire someone you trust to get you real results that benefit your business.