Tips on Social Media Marketing
There are a lot of different social media platforms in 2020, with a lot of new comers, lesser known ones and of course the major ones like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. As a business owner, you can market your enterprise on each of these platforms to great success… if you do it right.
Some studies have been carried out, and about 43% of the 330 million monthly users of Twitter, normally check the platform once a day.
As for Facebook, 1.62 billion users visit Facebook daily. These are some staggering numbers. Lets show you how to get your cut of it.
Technology has advanced, and numerous social media users are currently making use of mobile devices to access each of these platforms. Mobile accounts for roughly 65 to 80% of traffic into the platforms. Besides ensuring that people are connected throughout the globe and you can share some cool memes, social media platforms are excellent for marketing purposes.
Businesses can easily reach out to thousands of potential clients through paid advertisements, joining groups and sharing posts.
As a business owner, you may not be conversant with marketing in different social media platforms. In this context, we will look into the best marketing practices on social media. After perusing through the entire article, you will learn more about how to get the most out of your efforts.
- Gathering Data
The current digital era is driven by data. After a business gathers data, it should focus on analyzing it. When a business has enough access to different insights, it will be easy to identify the strengths and weaknesses associated with the use of social media marketing. Fortunately, there are different social listening tools that businesses can utilize as they use social media marketing.
Each of these tools come in handy as you leverage information regardless of whether you are using Facebook marketing or Instagram marketing. In the process, a business can gain a better understanding of its target audience and competitors.
If your main focus is on LinkedIn marketing, you can use tools such as BuzzSumo. The tool will help you keep track of the competitors and the social media channels where they are performing well. Businesses can also make use of Google Alerts to monitor competition.
You will receive notifications about different keywords that can help to enhance the growth of your brand. The social listening tools will help you understand how your competition is engaging the followers. Also, you will learn more about the content they are using. By ensuring you have an in-depth understanding of the preferences of your target audience, you can come up with posts that will enhance the progressive growth of your brand.
When using BuzzSumo, you can easily identify the number of times your content has been shared. By understanding the preferences of your audience, you can come up with social media posts that will help to attract a larger client base.
Finally, you can also use Sprout Social; this social listening tool usually reports on the performance of your social channels. The main focus is on finding the posts that have the most engagement. Also, you will manage to maximize the impact of the marketing on social media.
- Choose Social Media Channels that Will Work for You
After understanding the preferences and needs of your audience and those of the competitors, you can decide on the social media channels that you should opt for. Such a task is easy, and it should not take a considerable amount of time. Also, it is advisable to take into account the target audience. In this section, the main focus is on social media demographics for social media channels such as Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.
As a business owner, you can support the insights that you have gathered using the demographics that you have gathered about your audience. When using the Sprout Social tool, you will be able to gather different forms of data, including the age, gender, and location of your social followers; this data will enable you to give an insight into the personas of the audience that you are currently engaging with.
The Facebook Audience Insight tool will enable a business to gain access to valuable data based on the people that are connected to the business page. You can also gain access to data about everyone on Facebook. You will learn more about the education level, relationship status, job title, and other categories of information regarding your target audience.
There is also Twitter audience analytics that helps a business to analyze the followers or all the Twitter users at large. Such tools enable businesses to learn more about the interests of prospective clients.
After ensuring that you have accumulated enough data, you can go ahead and consider different factors before you can go ahead and choose the specific channel whereby you will engage in marketing on social media. The staff resources are among the factors that you should consider during the social media channel selection process.
The resources come in handy as you determine the number of hours that are available for different activities, including social media engagement. If only one team is available, you should go ahead and establish a brand presence on one platform since it will be unrealistic to have a presence of different social media channels.
The type of organization and industry also matters. Always consider some of these factors before you decide to use social media marketing. The best example to use in this case is a construction firm that mainly deals with the sale of construction materials.
Such a company should focus on investing in a business to business platform. In short, the company should invest in LinkedIn marketing since the platform has a good reputation when it comes to connecting businesses and different professionals.
For a fashion company, it is advisable to either focus on Pinterest or Instagram marketing. Facebook marketing is also advisable since the fashion company can easily showcase their products on each of these platforms. Instagram and Facebook are more visual, and that is why they suffice in the case of a fashion firm.
The most suitable approach is to start small when engaging in social media marketing. Your efforts as a business owner will pay off eventually. You can start by managing two social media channels. Gauge their performance and the amount of effort required. You can then opt to market your business on other social media platforms in a bid to increase your outreach.
- Coming up with a content calendar
The content being posted on social media platforms should be well crafted. The manner in which the content is crafted acts as a determinant of whether it will flourish or not. The content mainly enhances engagement. Also, the content can allow you to acquire new followers, and in the process, your brand will be impacted positively.
Social listening will help you understand the content topics. Also, you can easily understand the content formats that align with your target audience. After deciding what you will post, the next step is determining the time you will post the content that you have crafted.
It is advisable to come up with a content calendar. The calendar will guide you on when you should publish content. If you have a content calendar, you should at least update it once in two months. There are people who update their content calendar quarterly. You can use an Excel sheet. Some of the headings that you can use include: content format, keywords, social media channels, description, and call to action.
The content calendar ensures that you have a detailed posting strategy, and you can easily plan for significant campaigns and seasonal events. If you have a content calendar, you can make use of a tool known as Buffer. The tool comes in handy when you want to schedule your social media posts across different social media channels. Buffer will help to shorten the links while increasing social media engagement.
Final Thoughts
Businesses can also opt for paid advertising. Such a technique will help to boost the social content that you have distributed on different platforms organically. In such an instance, you will have a strict budget. The main advantage is that the brand will promote itself.
You will also manage to ensure that the relevant audience is notified about the products and services offered by your business. To ensure that paid marketing pays off, you must first decide on who your target audience is. You may be torn between acquiring new followers or re-targeting the followers who may be aware of the existence of your brand.
