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The times have changed. There's more to social media marketing than posting a couple of times daily on Facebook and Twitter. Developing your brand, engaging your customers, and growing revenue take time and effort. You'll often discover that, like with any inventive marketing strategy, you'll need to move away from standard social media platforms—and constantly seek better ways to reach your target audience.
Many platforms used to specialize in one purpose, such as social networking or picture sharing, but that has evolved since the early days of social media. Most well-known social networks now provide live streaming, augmented reality, purchasing, social audio, and other features.
This article is a step-by-step guide to understanding successful social media marketing strategies and how to make brands more appealing to their target customers. As you thumb through, you'd also understand the different ways you can employ to either increase your page's number of followers or create your own social media marketing strategy.
Or, are you struggling to meet your social media goals and would love to try a more successful social media strategy? Read on!
When establishing your social media marketing plan, you should be aware of the following terminology:
The posts you share on respective social media networks are referred to as content. It may be a Facebook status update, an Instagram video, a Tweet, or something else entirely. Content comes in a number of different forms, and you must adjust it to each platform.
Context, however, is arguably more crucial than content. For example, you could have a brilliant joke, but if you bury it in a 3,000-word blog article, it's unlikely that anybody will read it. However, on Twitter, the same joke as a tweet might crush it. Additionally, anyone may join in the fun.
Even the CIA understands the potential of utilizing social media to generate good buzz, as seen by the most retweeted, funniest Tweets ever. Likewise, the opposite is also true. It's unlikely that you'll be able to fit your entire blog article into a single tweet, so make a good call to action with some relevant hashtags instead.
By now, you're surely aware that hashtags are a widely used method for adding metadata to practically all social media platforms.
Hashtags are used on social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. Their sole aim is to identify your content's topic or classify it as part of current trends. They make it simple for users to find your content, increasing the likelihood that they will share it.
The social media world's currency thrives through shared content. It's great when people engage and connect with your content. When they share it, however, it is the moment to celebrate.
One of the many important aims of corporate social media marketing strategies is to provoke significant brand awareness. This can be done by leveraging existing customer audiences to share creative content.
The more social media users share your material, the more real people get aware of it and patronize you. Shares are the most effective way for people to get involved with your brand image.
However, you must be tactical to ensure more effective social media marketing through content sharing. For example, employing a crafty caption over well-documented video content could help boost content social engagement.
BuzzSumo is a fantastic social media tool for calculating share counts and total content effects.
In other words, posting content (high-quality content) in a creative way or with relatable visuals is a helpful way to boost content sharing.
This broad phrase refers to how people respond to the content you create. It can be a like, a reaction, a comment, or a share. All of these are beneficial, but each comes with a unique opportunity that gives your posts the much attention it derives.
Shared content helps you reach new customers, increase conversion rate and build community engagement. Engagements provide insight into how well your social media content resonates with your target market.
In addition, significant or rapid engagement spurs user-generated content for your brand or social media profiles. For instance, Apple's "Shot on iPhone" marketing campaign since 2015 has provided heavy user-generated content for the company. This is equally an effective social media marketing strategy that yields heavy engagement.
Hootsuite Analytics and Google Analytics are some of the best tools for tracking social media posts and important metrics. You must note that increased community engagement makes your business more trustworthy and personable. Further, these tools provide the valuable information that large or small business owners need to boost their business growth.
Note that your social channels may have different engagement rates per every original content you post. Hence, you might need to select a distinct social marketing strategy for your different platforms. This could accurately boost your content response rate on specific business platforms.
The higher the response rate, the higher your chances of getting more potential customers. In addition, you must know your audience and create valuable content that can be easily understood and shared.
Consequently, employing the same selected strategy you use for your Facebook page on your Twitter account may not always meet your set goals. That said, knowing when to publish and what type of content to publish could vary on various social media apps.
Apart from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube channels, and Instagram, social media marketing can take a variety of forms, including:
Don't limit yourself to huge sites with a large readership if you're serious about expanding your brand. Look for new, more innovative methods to engage with prospects and build leads, despite the fact that they're a great place to start.
Examples: Clubhouse, Twitter Spaces, Spotify
Used for: Listening to live conversations on specific topics.
How your business can use them: During COVID-19 lockdowns, new social audio platforms (like Clubhouse) and formats (like Twitter Spaces) developed since individuals were at home with more time to participate in live discussions. The major benefit of audio, social media platforms, and formats is the high level of attention and interaction that opt-in listeners are likely to provide.
Lively, engaging discussions may help you establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry while also introducing your company or products to audiences that are already engaged in themes relating to your speciality (otherwise, they wouldn't be tuning in).
Here are some thought starters for using audio and social media platforms:
Examples: YouTube, TikTok, Instagram Stories and Reels, Facebook Watch
Used for: Watching videos in short and long formats.
How your business can use them: Still-life photographs can't capture attention, drive brand recognition, or bring items to life as effectively as video social media platforms can. Any video material you distribute should be intended to entertain, educate, and/or inspire your viewers. Videos designed just for the purpose of selling will not engage viewers.
This point cannot be over emphasized, as educational content in video formats has proved to be one of the most successful social media marketing campaigns.
Examples: Snapchat, Instagram Stories, Facebook Stories
Used for: Sending ephemeral messages privately and publishing timely, in-the-moment content for all of your followers to view for up to 24 hours.
How your business can use them: Stories and other transitory forms are ideal for delivering current information like announcements, limited-edition products, and live events. Because of the 24-hour time frame, most Stories and Snapchat material feels more authentic and less polished. As a result, firms are able to demonstrate a more human element.
Another good reason why disappearing format may help
Here are some of the best practices that your business can use as disappearing content:
Examples: Reddit, Quora
Used for: Asking and answering questions, networking, and forming communities around a niche and interest-based topic.
How your business can use them: By providing your company's subject-matter expertise and addressing inquiries about your sector, you may be truly useful to your clients. Including information about your company and products in your responses is a plus. However, it shouldn't be your major aim while engaging in discussion forums.
Examples: Pinterest Product Pins, Facebook Shops, Instagram Shops, TikTok, Shopify, Etsy
Used for: Market research and purchasing products from brands directly through social media platforms.
How your business can use them: Utilize built-in mobile-friendly features to allow your audience to buy from you without ever leaving a social media app. You may connect your product catalog to your profile on each app using features like Pinterest Product Pins, Instagram Shops, and TikTok's in-app shopping. Even if your followers dislike buying things on social media or have long buyer journeys, shopping tools may help you tag items, offer more information, and drive traffic to your website.
Some great ways to use shopping social media platforms:
Examples: Twitch, YouTube, Instagram Live Rooms, Facebook Live, TikTok
Used for: Broadcasting live video to many viewers. Live video streams can range from one person showing themselves and what they’re doing on their screen to professionally organized panels with multiple speakers.
How your business can use them: When individuals were locked at home during lockdowns with nothing to do during the pandemic, the popularity of live streaming skyrocketed. However, a worldwide pandemic isn't required to persuade people to watch your live streaming.
Interviewing well-known guests, offering exclusive product launches, and hosting AMA sessions with your business leaders are all examples of methods to create tune-in-worthy streams. Because live streams allow viewers to connect with the hosts in real time, it's critical to keep an eye on and respond to comments during the broadcast.
Examples: LinkedIn, Twitter
Used for: Connecting with professionals in your industry or potential clients.
How your business can use them: Recruiting and hiring talent, creating B2B partnerships, and interacting with people in your industry are all possible uses for business social media sites. Some of the most popular social media platforms, like LinkedIn, are perfect for B2B because they allow businesses to engage with new audiences by meeting them where they network and run a business.
However, LinkedIn isn't the only business-oriented social media platform available. Businesses may also use Twitter to locate relevant topics and contribute meaningful to them.
Examples: Discourse, Slack, Facebook Groups
Used for: Creating communities, with the possibility of requiring registration or other screening measures for new members.
How your business can use them: Private groups may help businesses bring people of their community together to bond over common issues, answer one other's questions, and create a feeling of professional belonging. Your company has the authority to establish rules about self-promotion as the group admin. Many groups (particularly on Facebook) ask members to answer a few questions before joining in order to filter out spammers, but you can utilize these areas to invite them to join your email marketing list.
Examples: Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram, blogs
Used for: Searching for information and finding inspiration for anything from cooking to travel, decorating, shopping, and more.
How your business can use them: The business can curate graphics and material that are targeted to your target audience's tastes and weave in your own items when appropriate. Use collections, playlists, tags, and guides to categorize your content and create themes that meet your audience's interests. Pinterest and YouTube, for example, are well-optimized for search, meaning your postings should include keywords, hashtags, and photos relevant to what your audience searches for.
Most businesses would benefit from having a social media presence, but many business owners do not have the time to do so. What is the solution? Tools for social media!
These tools are an important aspect of digital marketing since they allow users to track the success of their efforts, create and publish content, interact with customers on social media, and so much more.
They come in three main categories: social media management, social advertising, and content creation.
You can also consider investing in a social media game as one of the best ways to enhance social advertising for your content. So, whether you're in the United States or in the UK, as long as a user downloads the game, he or she will definitely see your ad and could be a potential customer.
Regarding social media marketing tools, there's one more factor to consider: people. There's no shame in seeking assistance if you don't have an in-house marketer. Marketing companies are excellent resources for content development, scheduling, planning, and consulting services all around the world.
Social media schedulers make it easier for us to be active and engaged on social media, lightening our burden and allowing us to make a bigger impact. There are a plethora of useful tools available, with new ones appearing on a regular basis. The idea is to choose tools that can aid your marketing efforts and devote time to learning about them.
Don't be scared to expand your toolkit, but don't toss out the old ones simply because something new and shiny has appeared.
1. Biteable - With Biteable, you can easily create engaging, entertaining, and informative short videos to share on social media.
2. Buffer - Buffer supports all the major social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Google +.
3. Buzzsumo - Buzzsumo is a research tool that tells you how your content is doing and who’s spreading the word.
4. Missinglttr - Missinglettr helps you automate the process of creating social content by scraping your blog post content and creating a year’s worth of social content.
5. MeetEdgar - A social media management tool that handles both re-sharing your content and optimizing your social traffic, MeetEdgar is your handy automated content manager.
6. Hootsuite - Hootsuite handles multiple social media accounts, bringing them under one login into a single dashboard. The management tool also provides several other features that can help business accounts understand their core audience.
7. Mention - Mention is an extremely comprehensive social listening tool asides from its other different uses.
8. Sumo - Sumo has a whole suite of useful traffic and social media tools that can help improve your marketing strategy and customer service.
9. IFTTT - IFTTT: If This, Then That. This tool lets you set up rules that make running your social media marketing empire much easier.
10. Zapier - Zapier is another tool that encourages automation and does share some similarities with IFTTT. Zapier is a great tool for businesses that want to take their automation to new heights.
11. AdEspresso - AdEspresso, the master of the A/B test, allows real-time analysis of Facebook, Instagram, and Google ads.
12. Bitly - Bitly is a free link shortener, taking lengthy URLs and shrinking them into much smaller ones.
13. Rebrandly - Rebrandly is the most advanced link shortener for creating branded links and custom short URLs.
14. Sprout Social - All-in-one social media management tool Sprout Social provides engagement, publishing, analytics, and team collaboration tools.
15. AddThis - AddThis is widely known for its social share buttons and makes it easy for your readers to share your content on their favorite social media channels.
16. ShareThis - ShareThis allows you to get your content in front of a larger audience and make it easy for your readers to share it on their favorite social media sites with social sharing buttons.
17. Design Wizard - Design Wizard is another tool that’s good for making visual content with a reasonably simple and intuitive interface.
18. Social Status - Social Status is dedicated social media analytics and reporting tool that provides multi-channel dashboards and helps automate your social media reports.
19. Postoplan - Use Postoplan to create content plans and schedule posts. And, if you feel like you’re running out of content ideas, just turn on post suggestions.
The social media world evolves at a quicker rate than any other online environment. It's not simple to keep up with it all. So here are a few trends to keep an eye on this year. These trends are expected to have an influence not just this year but also in the future.
Once upon a time, social media users could simply expand their social media following by posting quality content. They'd get a lot of friend requests, comments, shares, and "likes" within a few months because of their outstanding content. That is no longer the case.
Most social media networks, in fact, are making it more difficult to grow an organic following. It's not an accident. As the capacity of organic superstars to shine diminishes, another factor rises- ad spending. They make it harder for users to expand organically, forcing firms to spend more money on advertising.
Remember that social media platforms are businesses, too, at the end of the day.
Businesses must pay to play as organic reach becomes increasingly challenging. Advertisements account for nearly all of the revenue generated by social media companies. In other words, consumers get to use social media for free because marketers spend a lot of money to reach them. The user is the product, yet you must pay to reach them.
The good news is that the investment is frequently justified. Most social media platforms still have low advertising rates, and since we have so many active social media users, you may reach audiences you wouldn't otherwise be able to reach.
The possibilities become increasingly endless as more entrepreneurs develop social media platforms. As new avenues of communicating, reaching customers, and generating leads emerge, so do inventive techniques.
Take cart abandonment emails, for example. Email was the sole way to send and receive cart abandonment messages. Facebook Messenger and a handful of other messaging platforms are now extremely effective.
Channels are evolving, and marketers' approaches to them are also evolving. Expect the blending of multiple marketing channels to happen much more than it already has new social media sites to establish its footing.
The channels aren't the only ones merging. The social media tools are also combined. As more tools enter the Internet, it gets increasingly crowded for its users. Fortunately, marketing tools all across the Internet are attempting to interface with the advertising powerhouses effortlessly.
Take, for example, MailChimp. Users may generate Facebook and Instagram ads directly from their MailChimp accounts, which is an email marketing program. They may then preview their ads before posting them on the platform of their choice.
Social media has seen several businesses achieving different goals and milestones in less than ten years. Applying a well mapped out strategy and tool is one good idea for keeping your customers’ wants and needs in line.
Great social media do not appear anywhere. It's not simply a few mentions and a tiny bit of evergreen content. Regrettably, there is no magical social media formula. Great social media is like any other marketing strategy: it's meticulously designed, measured, maintained, and built on a solid foundation. You must keep up with the newest trends, tactics, and tools in order to deliver on your strategic goal.
You may utilize various social media tools, whether you're developing a community or analyzing new platforms for your business to join. Some are practically required by different people for any firm, while others only make sense if they fit your niches or use cases. It's a safe assumption that using the discussed social media tools and strategy above will effectively assist your business, regardless of your objectives or aims.
Do you need help with social media marketing? Talk to a growth expert at gardenpatch, today!
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