Social Media Marketing

Don’t wait for people to find your brand—go find them! The best social strategy connects you to your target audience and builds brand affinity and loyalty.

Before you dive into all available social media platforms and publish something, let’s take a step back and think about your social media strategy. Ask yourself:

• What are your business goals?
• Why are you on social media?
• How can social media help you achieve your business goals?

There are many reasons why businesses use social media. Some use it to increase their brand awareness, others use it for driving website traffic and sales as well as a customer support channel for customers. So, what is your reason for being on social media? Once you figure that out, then ask yourself which social media platforms are your target audience at?

There are so many social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, Tiktok, Snapchat and the list goes on. When starting out, it’s better to pick a few platforms that you think your target audience is on than to be on all platforms.

Once you have figured all these out, then ask yourself again what type of content do you want to share? And what type of content will attract your target audience best? Be creative and think beyond random quotes. Share images, gifs, video and anything and everything that you think is relevant and represents your brand. Social media is a great place to create a branding persona.

It is extremely important to have a consistent presence on social media. Close to three billion people (3,000,000,000!) use social media so it is pretty easy to go missing, that’s why be consistent in your contents. By being present on social media platforms, you give your brand an opportunity to be discovered by not just your current customer but also future customers.

Plus, publishing is super simple but what you need to take note is when and what are you publishing. It is best to plan your content ahead of time instead of creating and publishing content spontaneously. Also, to ensure that you are maximizing your reach and likes on social media, publish trendy content that your audience likes, at the right timing and frequency.

There are now a variety of social media scheduling tools that can help you publish your content automatically at your preferred time. This saves you time and allows you to reach your audience when they are most likely to engage with your content.

Unlike any other media platform, social media allows instant communication with your followers. People can comment on your social media posts, tag you in their social media posts, or message you directly. Use this as an opportunity to listen to your audience needs and wants. It is also a great way to fix your flaws too.

However, sometimes people might be talking about your brand on social media without letting you know. So you will want to monitor social media conversations about your brand. If it’s a positive comment, you get a chance to surprise and delight them. Otherwise, you can offer support and correct a situation before it gets worse.

You can manually check all your notifications and reply them across all the social media platforms but this isn’t efficient and you won’t see posts that didn’t tag your business’s social media profile. Instead use a social media listening and engagement tool that aggregates all your social media mentions and messages, including posts that didn’t tag your business’s social media profile.

Now, you have publishing content but don’t you want to know how your social media marketing is performing?  It is crucial to keep tracks of the numbers in terms of :

• Are you reaching more people on social media than last month?
• How many positive mentions do you get a month?
• How many people used your brand’s hashtag on their social media posts?

You can get these analytics within the social media platforms themselves. Facebook, Instagram, Youtube and more provide a general overview of such information. It lets you know how many people viewed your page today, how many likes you’ve gotten and more. If you want to get more in-depth analytics information or to easily compare across social media platforms, you can use the wide range of social media analytics tools available.

One important aspect of social media marketing is social media advertising. Apart from creating posts, you can also create ads on social media. In fact, social media ads allow you to reach a wider audience than any other advertising channels. You don’t just reach those who are following you with social media ads, you can even attract new potential buyers.

Social media advertising platforms are so powerful and targetted that you can specify exactly who to display your ads to. You can create target audiences based on their demographics, interests, behaviours, and more. When you are running many social media advertising campaigns at once, you do proper planning that including making bulk changes, automate processes, and optimize your ads