In the last one decade or so, social media marketing has played a crucial role in helping fortify the online marketing efforts of your brand and in creating a stronger brand recall for your business. After all, it presents you with a second-to-none opportunity of getting up-close with your target audience utilizing the social channels. So, here are a few fundamental laws of social media, following which can help you make the most out of the this opportunity and make the social media of your business highly effective: It won’t only help you cater to the content needs of your target audience better but will make them stay on your pages longer, bringing your brand more social attention, fortifying your brand value.

The 10 laws of social media marketing

As the name suggests, social media marketing is about being social and managing your relationships with your customer-base, your potential target audience and in general, with the online world. So, the laws we need to follow for social media are more like the ones we need to follow, in order to engage in, maintain and strengthen the social relationships.

1. The Law of Listening

The best way to contribute valuable content to your audience is by listening to them and joining their conversation to understand what is important for them. This gives you an opportunity to explore what excites them and what their pain-points are. Going by this understanding, your social media channels can engage them more effectively with content that matters to them rather than creating noise or clutter for them.

2. The Law of Focus

The law of focus advises you to build specialisation in a certain area than attempting to be a jack-of-all-trades. It is always better to be ‘something for someone’ over being ‘anything for everyone’. So, depicting a specialised or niche expertise on your social media while targeting a specific audience always works better than representing a collection of broad-ranged content for the general audience. So, focus a specific area, design specialised campaigns targeting a specific audience and watch your social media get meaningful traction.

3. The Law of Quality or Value

As you begin to follow the law of focus, you get naturally induced to the law of ‘quality over quantity’ as well. According to this law, it is preferred to have fewer – more meaningful connections over having numerous connections who are not actively interested in your brand and its content. By adding value to your content for your engaged audience, you keep your focus intact and strongly bond with your engaged audience however small. This is what creates the basic difference between ‘attracting traffic’ and ‘getting sales conversions through social media’.

4. The Law of Compounding

By keeping your content focused on your key areas and including the elements of information and entertainment into your social media posts, you make your content interesting and engaging for your audience. The law of compounding states that the more engaging your audience finds your content, the more they are likely to follow it, share it with their audience and talk about it in their social circles.

5. The Law of Patience

As you work hard on polishing the social media of your brand by implementing all the laws mentioned so far, it is also important to understand that no matter how hard you try, your social media efforts do not begin to pay off overnight. This is what the law of patience states. Just the way the social relationships are all hard-work and patience, the same goes with your brand’s social media marketing as well. So, as you toil to make your social media presence effective, have patience and have lots of it.

6. The Law of Accessibility

Social media is not just about posting your content but it requires you to be interactive and accessible to your audience. According to this law, you need to actively take part in conversations with your audience, be responsive and interactive with your audience. Just the way in real life relationships , conversations matter for strengthening them, so is the case with your social media where conversations play a key role in keeping your social media presence effective.

7. The law of Influence

According to the law of influence, it pays to spend time online to find relevant influencers in your market who have a large focused audience that coincides with your target audience and who would like to associate with you and talk about your brand in t heir social circles. It would be a smart step to connect with them and work on building relationships with them according to this law. This can prove to be an effective way to accelerate your social media and put it in front of a large focused and new audience, once they begin to talk about your brand.

8. The law of value

According to the law of value, rather than spending most of your time online participating in conversations to promote selling of your offerings, it is important for you to work on adding value to your content. Once the right set of influencers find your content of value, they will naturally talk about it in their circles and attract positive and free word-of-mouth for your brand. Adding value to your content and associating with the relevant industry influencers is the key here.

9. The Law of Acknowledgement

According to the law of acknowledgement, you should always acknowledge and never ignore any individual who reaches out to you online, just the way you would, had they approached you in person. Social media works precisely like relationships and anything that helps build relationships is also important for building effective social media. You cannot simply ignore your audience and expect them to acknowledge your brand and not ignore its posts, it is as simple as that.

10. The law of Reciprocity

Following this last but equally important law means that you must dedicate a part of your online time in sharing and talking about the content posted by the other pages. This is because you cannot expect them to share your content and posts when you do not do the same for their content.

These laws may seem to be so simple that you might sometimes simply forget to implement them on a day-to-day basis, but it is only wise to follow these to make your social media as effective as you expect it to be. The key to building a memorable social media, at the heart of all these laws is that your audience is not just the numbers or statistics that you need to maintain. They are real people and maintaining your social media is more like maintaining real-life relationships.