Posted by You probably don’t need any explanation telling you how powerful or extensive social media is. Apart from any other trend, social media is the fastest-growing one. Be it sharing personal updates to their friends or families, or growing community or marketing through social media, everything seems to grow every day in the world of social media.
One small example for showing you how powerful it is: Statista says that in 2021, just the advertising revenue of Facebook is expected to reach 39.4 billion dollars. Awestruck, are you? Well, this is data from only one platform. If we want to keep count of these numbers, we’ll probably end up in trouble. Period.
Dexterity of social media
Whether it is a messaging app like telegram or a photo-sharing app like Instagram that doesn’t matter. People use social media apps every day. No matter if they post something or not, one thing that they all do in common is, check, check and check again. This must have been quite familiar to you, as every one of us are inside this black hole, without finding ways to come out of it. And that’s how brands or businesses are leveraging it as a marketing medium.
If you aren’t one of those brands, you have only two roads to travel. Either success or failure. It may seem a little dramatic, though, but it is the bare truth as we live in the ‘digital era .’ It is evident as daylight. So, if you want to start marketing via social media or you want to improvise your strategies, then read on, as I’ll be presenting you the essential techniques that will help you run your business efficiently through social media marketing.
Firstly, much social media marketing has been mistaken, and that’s they don’t end up having good results. So, let’s learn what it is precisely.
Social media marketing is not just the process of gaining website traffic, as Wikipedia suggests. Instead, it is about creating content exclusively in the context of every social media platform. That is how you can gain user engagement and sharing, which is, by the way, a positive result.
Let’s get into the crux of the blog now.
Know your audience
Before you let yourself set all the strategies, you must know about your audience. It will help you in gaining insight into what they want to see. Looking at it, you can create content that they will most likely like, comment and share. It would be best to learn things like age, location, average income, interests, etc. If you know about them well, then targeting and engaging them on social media will be a mere cakewalk.
Instead of making assumptions, you should go for social media analytics. They will give you a complete report of your followers, their residential area, and how they interact with your brand on social media. It will surely give you insights, as you can change the preferences according to the data.
Improve your marketing goals
Anyone can easily track the number of followers, likes, etc., but the real talk is to keep track of the things like engagement, conversion rates, and click-through. Every network follows different uses. You can’t create one typical picture or a meme for your brand, share it on all the platforms, and wait for years to gain good traction. You will get a next to nothing result.
Instead, if it is LinkedIn, you should check the click-throughs; for Instagram, it is the number of Story views, and if you advertise on the Facebook app, cost-per-click is the right success metric. These are the prominent features of the app used by people. So going on the same path will give you an optimal result.
Learn your competitors
As we said earlier, many businesses have been using social media for promotion and marketing. The chances are enormous that your competitors are one of them. It means that you can learn from them—a lot. If you feel like a deer caught in headlights, you can look at your competition and learn the gain and pain points that they have.
You can conclude what users are expecting from your industry and what is not provided from learning them. It will help you spot opportunities. You can reign supreme over the areas that they have left behind or devoid of their presence.
Carry out a social media audit
Social media and the usage of it can never be the same. So periodic checking of your efforts should be carried on. Look for various dimensions like: ‘what are the strategies that are working and what are not, ‘who are the users engaging with your contents,’ ‘which is the platform your target audience uses’ etc. Looking at the answers, you will have a perfect layout of what strategies you should use.
Improve profiles
As we saw earlier, every social media platform serves different uses. Looking for a one-stop solution will not work here, because almost everyone uses all the platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter regularly. Posting similar content to every forum will bore the users, thereby failing to increase the engagement rate. Therefore, according to your business, define distinct strategies for each.
For example, if your business is something relating to entertainment or beauty, you can promote the products on platforms like Instagram or Facebook. Use Twitter for customer support and LinkedIn for sharing the company culture.
Once you are done with planning, you can start creating a profile or improving your strategy’s existing profile.
Boost engagement
If you are running out of any ideas to keep up the social media platforms’ work, you could always go for inspiration from many brands. Brands are acquiring many people’s attention, as they are providing the best customer service that, in reality, it is hard to find. By offering them fast services and solutions to their queries, they stand their ground. Apart from just creating accounts and posting content, it is more crucial to let people know that they are essential to you.
Say, for instance, if you keep posting that you offer the best services, etc and fail to do the same, users will not so much as turn their attention to you. So, consistency is the key here.
Also, you can strike up a Q&A session or polls for a better conversion rate regarding what they want from you and deliver the same to them.
Schedule the content-sharing
Just like how sharing content is essential, sharing them at the correct hour of the day is also crucial. Create a social media calendar and plan the contents differently according to each channel. It might be a daily posting or a weekly schedule. Following it is crucial to keep things on track.
For social media campaigns, you might set a time of day for posting on every platform. Millions use every medium at different times of the day. So use all the data and publish your content appropriately to get better traffic.
Sign-off
There’s also a new audio-based social media app like Clubhouse, that you can use as the social media platform for trying out new strategies. After implementing all of them carefully, use the data to re-evaluate the strategy frequently. Improve, and again evaluate till you get the bull’s eye!