Social media marketing is a must if you run any kind of business online. While newspaper, radio and television advertising still exist, there is no substitute for the organic growth that social media marketing can bring you. You do this by finding your existing clients online and then expanding your customer base from there. Keep reading into the following paragraphs for five fundamentals of social media marketing that keep things steady for you and your business.

You need to have a blog to focus as the center of your social media marketing efforts and profiles. Alert readers and followers on all platforms when you update your blog through tweets and posts. At the very least, these are great backlinks from trusted sources that can help boost your blog and central website in the search engine rankings. In your blog content, do not get too spammy or hyped on selling your product or service. Focus instead on the problems served or solved by what you offer, not actually what you offer. Potential buyers want to know what answer your product or service provides them.

If your fan base is global, consider that your followers are spread across very divergent timezones. That said, updating all your statuses at the same exact time every day might get completely missed by followers on the other side of the continent or world. Scheduling Facebook updates is not always a good idea, but you can make use of something like Buffer or HootSuite to randomize the updates to varying times for maximum exposure.

Run an actual social marketing media campaign. Study on how to do this. Get everyone involved. Plan on goals and expectations. Make them specific and measurable. Identify approaches to accomplish them and then put them into play. Mark down how well it works, and then you can learn what you can do again next time and what ideas just do not pan out.

In between campaigns, try to dedicate a half an hour per work day to your social media marketing efforts. Your followers will start dropping you if they are cleaning up their pages and see a Like to you when you have not posted in weeks or months. Stay on their radar to keep your fan base count up between campaigns. At the very least, continuous engagement reminds people about your business. Keep reading comments and responding to those who post so that you can keep your finger on the pulse of the niche you serve.

Consider the average educational level of the users of various platforms. You can target highly educated users at LinkedIn, where almost 40% of the platform members have graduate degrees. Keep things more casual on Facebook, where half of users at least started college, but a quarter only finished high school.

Keep these five fundamentals in mind in your social media marketing efforts, and you can find success in keeping customers and finding new ones. Try each of these to maximize your results for the efforts and resources that you put in.