How to create a social media strategy for your Envato Market brand

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Originally published at: https://community.envato.com/how-to-create-a-social-media-strategy-for-your-envato-market-brand/

Social media used to be simple. Create a Facebook page, sign up for Twitter, and start posting. It was new, it wasn’t too noisy, and it was totally, 100% free.

Those days are long gone. If you want to get any value out of promoting your business via social media you can’t just jump in unprepared. You need to think about where your time is best spent based on the results you want. Should you even be starting with social media? You need to think about what’s going to be right for you.

What do you want?

Okay, first thing's first: What do you want? Obviously more money. Who doesn’t? Let’s take that as a given and look at the broader goals that all (hopefully) lead to this ultimate aim.

There are a number of straightforward objectives that can either directly or indirectly help you drive sales and grow your business. I’d argue that these five should be among the first anyone getting started should think about:

  • Selling your stuff via social (an obvious first goal)
  • Increasing traffic to your item pages
  • Getting people talking about you (for the right reasons)
  • Building a strong follower base
  • Standing out for great service & support
A good social media strategy will have two or three of these goals, but don’t try and do everything all at once. Any channel you’re using for marketing purposes will give you greater benefit if you pinpoint two or three essential benchmarks and focus your attention on these. This will make it much easier to measure what’s working, what’s not, and make corrections as required.

It’s also important to remember that bit back in the first paragraph of this post; social media was free. As social platforms move towards monetization, your results are going to be more modest and your growth slower without paid activity. Social media marketing can still work if you don’t spend, but it’s going to be more work and require you to stand out in an extremely noisy space without paying to be seen in people’s feeds.

It’s often good to allocate a small amount of spending to get started, however make sure you do your research first. Every social media platform will have advertising guides designed to help you make the most of targeting and the different ad units offered.

What are you going to measure?

Working out whether it’s all paying off can be one of the trickiest elements of social media marketing. Sure, you can track how much traffic is coming directly from your social accounts and converting to sales, but what if your primary goal is brand awareness or customer service?

You may be using measurements that you can automatically match up to your social activity immediately (item sales for example), but others are going to be a bit more social media specific. In social media circles we love talking about engagement. Being able to interact and engage with content is at the core of social media marketing, and measuring this engagement can tell you a lot about your progress towards your goals if done right. Trying to improve support? Look at positive versus negative interactions and whether you’re increasing the former and reducing the latter. Want people talking about you? Measure how many people comment on, reply to, share or retweet your content.

Choosing the right tool to measure your performance

There are a lot of incredibly powerful social media monitoring tools around, tools that make social media geeks like me swoon. Unfortunately, many of these tend to have a hefty price tag and a reasonably steep learning curve.

Luckily there’s a much simpler (and cheaper) option. Most social media platforms will have their own analytics dashboards built in, and for the most part they’re very solid tools for measuring your social media performance. Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, YouTube Creator Dashboard; these are all bundled with each platform and will give you solid information on everything from audience interests to a full breakdown of how people interact with your accounts.

If you’ve already picked what you’re measuring, you’ll be able to simply pull out most of the data you need from these built-in analytics tools. At times getting the data you need may require a bit of manual tweaking, and this can be a bit more labor intensive. In some cases it may be a manual search; your brand name combined with keywords like “great” and “wonderful” can give you a basic starting point to measure positive feedback on a platform.

Managing your social accounts

If you’re managing one or two accounts, you may just choose to use the platform’s own app or desktop site, however there are a number of free and low-cost tools around that can help consolidate your accounts into a single and easily manageable platform as well as providing you with a few more analytics tools. These include tools like Tweetdeck, Hootsuite & Buffer. Many of these have a trial period even if you decide to go for their paid subscriptions, so once you’ve established your accounts it’s worth trying them out. These will allow you to schedule content, set up streams to monitor keywords or specific accounts & mentions, and in some cases even provide recommendations on when to post and what content your audience will like.

Keeping it going: monitor, tweak, and don’t get discouraged when things don’t work

Facebook, Twitter, whatever; social media platforms never stop changing, so neither should your social media marketing. The steps above will help you set up the foundation for getting the most out of social accounts, but to maintain this it’s important to regularly review what you’re doing and what changes are happening in the social media environment more broadly.

There are any number of resources to keep up to date with major platform changes that may require a strategy rethink. Subscribe to updates for businesses from Facebook, Twitter et al and have a weekly browse through social media news websites like the Social Times, Mashable’s social media section and Social Media Today. As major changes are announced, factor this into your ongoing strategy.

Finally, some things might just not work. Don’t be afraid to reduce how much time you invest in a particular platform - or even exit it entirely - if it isn’t working for you. Divert your attention to what is working. If you’re a designer and people are interacting with you on Behance or Pinterest, there’s no rule that says you have to also stay on Facebook and Twitter just because everyone else is there. Play to your strengths, stick to your goals and you’re much more likely to succeed.

The Envato Community Newsletter 2
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Do good and quality product, then all will be well!

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It definitely helps. :wink:

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Hi Carl,
thank you for the interesting article,
please tell what type of Facebook account would you advise to link with VideoHive -
FB profile or FB page?

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Hi @rgba_design

If you’re using Facebook to promote items for a business, definitely page for a couple of reasons. The biggest is that it’s a violation of Facebook’s terms to use a profile for anything other than yourself or to promote a business. There’s a decent chance that it could get your account shut down, and trying to get Facebook to reactivate an account/remove a ban is a huge pain.

As well as that, you’ll get a lot more insights with a page than you will with a profile. You can see what people are interested in, see how many people saw and interacted with stuff you post, and even set up “Pages to watch” and keep an eye on what other video producers are doing on Facebook and what their top posts are.

As far as getting seen in the News Feed with Facebook’s infamous algorithm - mix up the content with videos, links to interesting video-related content (maybe an Envato Tuts+ tutorial for example ;)), and links to your own items. Videos uploaded directly to Facebook perform better than embedded from another platform (and autoplay), but make sure you factor in that Facebook audiences are most likely to be watching on mobile and with sound off.

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Hi @CarlJackson
thank you a lot for your explanation!
I have one more question about your article - you said Social media was free… What strategy would you advise for paid promotion with limited budget on FB or Twitter ?

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@CarlJackson

Do you see Instagram as a viable means for a music composer to promote their Audiojungle music? The only people I was able to attract were other musicians. Not exactly paying customers. The same applies for my Twitter account.

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That could be a full-length article in itself :wink: But some good starting points:

  • Before you spend anything, make sure you’re really clear on what you want to achieve. Both Facebook and Twitter have a whole bunch of different ad options that suit different purposes. If you want to get people purchasing your items, you might go for a standard link or even a carousel on Facebook and measure any increase in sales. If you want as many people as possible to see your work, you might choose a video ad instead and measure views & audience retention.
  • Make sure you target your ads. For example, target people who buy online, are interested in video production or After Effects, and desktop only because you know people are more likely to do their video production on desktop. If your targeting’s good your ads will be deemed more relevant and cost less per click/view.
  • If you’re spending money to promote content you’ll be posting anyway, don’t spend straight away. Wait and see which content is working best, then spend money on only the stuff that’s working.

There’s a handy guide that Hootsuite published which goes into more detail, might be another good resource to start with.

Instagram, not really. Videos generally play silently, it’s almost entirely mobile based (so people aren’t generally going to be looking at purchasing music for a project) and unless you’re doing paid advertising there’s no call to action.

Twitter’s more likely to succeed, but suffers from some of the same problems (videos on silent, mobile-first). It’s better than Insta though as you can link off to content and a number of music services (e.g. Soundcloud) will embed as Twitter cards so people can play your tracks in-app.

Music’s definitely a harder one though from a social perspective. You’re probably going to have more luck on a platform like Tumblr which allows for embedding of audio (either direct upload or via third party hosts like Soundcloud), is more split between mobile & desktop usage and is still geared towards discovering new content through topics and hashtags. Make sure if you do try this you also use relevant hashtags - not just #music but things like #acoustic or #blues, tags that ensure people searching for particular genres are likely to find them. Think outside music as well; #filmmaking will get your track in front of the exact people who’ll be looking for soundtracks to their video work.

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Wow! A treasure trove of good information! Thank you so much Carl! I’ll definitely check out the links and i’ll keep you posted on any decisions I make especially concerning Social Media advertising. Thanks again

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well we can dream on that this is enough … but this is just a beautiful dream. Besides if this turned out to be true that a good quality of content was enough then the whole thing would work a very different way … (and it would be based on quality rather than volume when at this time this is the complete other way around) and we could not see some very flat things not only getting a good deal of sales when they are really not that good to say the least , but we would not have to deal with them overflowing a wild range of better items which are thus not getting sales enough and no where to be seen … (let’s keep in mind that one of the reasons for the prominent fees that envato is asking for is that they are supposed to bring sone potential custoners to see our items, what else otherwise? it just display our items?) when they have … besides to a wilder extent we can wander how a whole system which is having a quality control and so on is letting so many flat things getting on sale and how some of these poor things they let go daily are making sometimes way better than way more worked out, way more efficient way more attractive items then the concerned flat things … we all know that there is a purchasing base for almost all, but all the same it seems quite crystal clear here that the focus is on number and volume rather than any other thing …

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I do not want these email

where i will go setting on envato

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If you go into your forum preferences you can change the email settings. Hope that helps! :smiley:

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Then edit Done
Thank You KingDog

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creat more friendly android of codecanyon store

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I am very appreciated, that I could found many script all in one place and make my business going smoothly with Great support and Services.

Thanks for all Author that could make the best app for kind of business and fun.

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Thank you so much for advice and useful link @CarlJackson !
What can you tell about Youtube for promoting Videohive items? Can it be useful?
Maybe there are some other SM platforms for promoting video?

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Thank you for the interesting read. I scanned it quickly and hope to come back to it when my eyes are not so tired. This is all I seem to do these days. As a senior citizen who doesn’t learn new things as easily as before, the whole idea of social media makes my head spin. I have been spending hours a day on it with little to no results. Is there just one little thing you could tell me that would help?

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It definitely can be. If you’re not doing paid activity and planning to just try and build your channel’s subscriber base organically, a few tips:

  • YouTube’s owned by Google, so following the best practice guide outlined by Kate in her recent post is a very good start. Tagging with relevant keywords and using short, precise titles and descriptions for your videos are going to make them more discoverable.
  • Think about using your items in interesting ways to demo them. Explainer videos on getting the most from your latest item, how-to recreate effects in other popular videos on YouTube, 5 great awards backgrounds for Oscars season. You’ll get more people subscribing if there’s an entertainment or educational value to your content. As well, content that isn’t strictly commercial is much more likely to be shared.
  • Anything with dialogue, add captions - a lot of people watch video with the sound off, plus it improves accessibility.
  • Talk to people - once you start building your subscriber base, you’re likely to get comments. This is a great chance to build a positive relationship and maybe find out a bit more about the people interested in your content.

Paid, the general tips above plus getting familiar with AdWords. YouTube ads can be quite effective if you put a bit of work into targeting them properly.

Start focused. Pick a platform and read up on business tips for [platform] or [platform] strategy for beginners. There’s a huge number of great articles around. Some good starting points are the publications I mentioned in my post, plus the blogs of social media software providers like Hootsuite or Buffer. Where you start seeing the same recommendations coming up again and again, implement these on your own accounts. Keep on with this for a while and things should start picking up, which is when you can start testing out some of other stuff that you’ve discovered that may not be as universally recommended.

On a related note, some platforms are going to be easier to find info on or get started on. The big ones (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube) are going to have a lot more guides than more industry or niche services like Behance or GitHub. Feel free to let me know which social media services you’re thinking of and I’m happy to see what I can suggest more specifically though.

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I’m more social networks to introduce their products.
But I do not know why I’m still not selling well. !
If you can help me.?

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Hi, am looking for a website designer on here…hopefully am on the right thread.