The use of social media is one of the most popular online activities in the world. In 2019, there were over 3.48 billion active social media users. To put this into perspective, these number of users amount to about 58 percent of the entire world’s population.
Social media is an enormous tool that when efficiently optimized can generate traffic, leads, and sales for any business irrespective of your industry. The problem is that learning how to use social media to efficiently build a brand can be difficult especially when you are just starting out.
In this article, we would be looking at the best social media marketing tips that can help you optimize your marketing campaign. Before we go into the article fully, let’s see some interesting statistics and why you should implement social media in your marketing strategy.
Interesting Social Media Marketing Statistics
- Each individual would spend an average of 2 hours and 22 minutes on social media and messaging daily. (Globalwebindex)
- In the past year, an additional 366 million people joined social media. This number is increasing at a fast rate daily. (Hootsuite)
- 74% of the users on Facebook check it daily. (Pew Research Center)
- Reports show that most people are likely to remember what they saw on Twitter vs general internet browsing. (Twitter)
- 53% of users say that they would buy a product that they are seeing for the first time on Twitter. (WebFX)
- Instagram has a whopping 1 billion users, and 500 million of them would visit the platform daily. (Instagram)
- 80% of the leads generated from B2B business comes from LinkedIn. (LinkedIn)
- 46% of the traffic that goes to company websites comes from LinkedIn. (LinkedIn)
We have seen the power and reach of social media when it comes to marketing, now let’s see why social media should be part of your marketing strategy before going into the social media marketing tips.
Why Social Media Should Be Part of Your Marketing Strategy
The customers are on social media: I mentioned earlier in this article that there are over 3.48 billion social media users. With the amount of consumers that are on social media daily, it is a great way to reach potential customers.
If you are active on these platforms and use them daily, it can be very efficient in helping you grow your brand.
Posting on social media helps build brand recognition: Social media is a great way to increase your brand’s visibility and recognition. Social media offers your business unique ways to reach out and engage with customers. By building a brand personality, voice, and regularly uploading valuable content to social media platforms, it becomes easier for new customers to find you. You even become more accessible to old customers.
You might have an amazing product but no one knows about your company. With social media, you can build up sufficient hype that makes your brand easily recognizable.
Marketing on social media is cost-effective: Unlike most of your marketing efforts, social media offers a ton of benefits without killing your budget. Most of your effort would be invested in creating value and engaging with your customers. Just investing a few hours each week on social media can create significant results.
Even advertising on social media is cheaper. Reports show that CPM (Cost per thousand impressions) on social media can be as low as $2.50. This is 3X less expensive than advertising through traditional media.
No matter how small your budget is, advertising on social media can have a significant impact on your bottom line.
Social media helps improve your ranking in the SERPs: Your social media presence is one of the factors that determine how high you rank on search engines. Brands that have a healthy search presence is seen by the Google algorithm as trustworthy, valuable, and credible. Although these factors change regularly, it is safe to say that being active on social media can help improve your site’s presence on search engines and generate more traffic.
Search engines use some social media factors to determine ranking. Some of these factors include the amount of links to social content and social signals like shares and likes.
We have seen some social media statistics and reasons why social media should be a crucial part of your marketing strategy. Now let’s look at 10 social media marketing tips that you need to know in 2020.
Identify Your Goals & Objectives
When starting any marketing campaign, the first and most crucial step is identifying your goals and objectives. If you want to be successful with social media, it is important you start with a solid strategy and objective.
Without concrete goals or objectives, it would be difficult for you to determine when your social marketing campaign is successful. When you have goals, you would know whether to continue with the tactics you’ve implemented or scrap them off and go back to the drawing table.
When setting goals or objectives, make use of these rules:
Set SMART goals: SMART goals are specific factors that your goals must meet for it to be efficient and powerful. This is the meaning of the SMART acronym:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Time-bound
Set specific goals
Your social media marketing goals need to be clearly defined. It must be specific and attend to a particular problem or customer need. Vague or generalized goals would be difficult to analyze or test. When your goals are set towards solving a particular issue, it would be easy for you to analyze if you are on the right track or not.
Your goals should be measurable
When creating marketing goals, include precise figures and data that you would measure to know if you are successful or not. For instance, if your goal is to increase the amount of visitors to a landing page, you should measure the amount of clicks, landing page interactions, social shares, etc. Without a way to measure your goals, you would not know if you are successful or not.
Set goals you can achieve
It is important that you set goals that are attainable depending on the resources available to you. Also, note that you shouldn’t set goals that are too easy. It is important that you set goals are realistic but also challenging.
Set relevant goals
The social media goals that you set should be relevant to the brand’s objectives and customer needs.
Set time-bound goals
You need to have a deadline for your goals. You need to have a timeline for achieving the various steps of your marketing campaign. This would help keep you on the right track and ensure that you get a high return on investment (ROI).
Map Out Your Target Audience
For your social media marketing campaign to be successful, it is important that you are targeting the right audience.
You need to understand who your target audience is because that is the only way you can meet their needs and answer their questions. No matter how great your content is, your social media marketing strategy would not work if you are not targeting the right audience.
For example, a fitness brand should create social media content for an audience that is interested in getting fit and healthy. If the fitness brand decides to start a campaign that is related to politics, while they might be creating great political content, they would not generate any actionable leads. The social media user that is interested in politics might not be interested in getting fit or healthy.
Your social media posts might generate a ton of engagement, but you may not generate leads or sales because you are creating content for the wrong audience.
You can use these tips to understand your target audience on social media better:
Survey your audience to have a better understanding of who they are, their pain points, and the solutions they are looking for in a brand. You could ask questions like this – what is your favorite social media platform?, Do you read blogs regularly?, What kind of content format do you like seeing?, Who do you follow on social media? etc.
Pro Tip: Use Google Form of Type Forms to easily run these surveys.
Understand your audience demographics: Use audience demographics to have a better insight on who your audience is. These are some factors that should be included in the demographics: age, gender, job, location, income level, marital status, education level, ethnic background, etc.
Increase engagement with users: Increasing engagement with social media users would help you understand your audience better. One of the ways you can increase engagement is by responding to comments or questions on all your social media platforms.
When you know your target audience better, you would be able to create content that suits their needs.
Determine The Platforms Suitable for Your Objectives
Depending on your goals and objectives, different platforms would be suitable for your business. For you to get optimal results from your social marketing efforts you need to use the platforms your target audience spend most of their time.
Pro tip: If you cannot explain why or how a social media channel helps you achieve your goals and objectives, there is a good chance that you should not be using it. The purpose of your social media channel is to help you achieve your marketing goals.
Objective: If you want to build brand awareness
For this kind of objective, you would have to use a social media platform with a large following. You should avoid any platform that is niche-based. A good way to build awareness is by making use of paid promotion. Facebook advertising platform is a great way to create awareness for your brand.
Objective: You want to generate more leads
If you want to generate leads, LinkedIn is the best platform for this. LinkedIn offers much more features and advanced filters for social media lead generation than Facebook or Twitter.
Your social media platform of choice plays a very important role, so you need to ensure you choose the one that is best optimized to meet your needs.
Deliver Valuable Content Consistently
This is one of the social media marketing tips that is a no brainer. One of the best ways to increase engagement and grow your brand on social media is by consistently delivering value to social media users.
It is important that all the content you upload is relevant, interesting, and offer value to your customers. This is why you need to know your target audience. When you understand your audience, you would be able to create valuable content that meets their needs and offer them value.
Use Video to Increase Engagement
Video content is very important in boosting your social media marketing campaign. Recent statistics show that 82% of consumer traffic in 2021 would come from video content.
If you aren’t already using video in your marketing strategy, you should start now. There are a ton of video formats you can implement to increase engagement and market reach. These are some of the most engaging video content types you should try out:
Vlogs: A vlog is a video blog or video log. It a form of blog for which the medium is video. Vlogs are a very popular category on YouTube.
Interviews: Creating interviews are a great way to show your audience what you have to offer them. Interview also helps you to build more credibility in front of your audience when you associate yourself with other experts that have positive authority.
Tutorials: With tutorials, you can build your online reputation and credibility. For example, a health brand can create tutorials on exercises you can perform at home that can keep you fit.
Animation: If you have a complex product or service that is difficult to explain, animations are a great way to educate your audience. You can make use of whiteboard animations, they are cost-effective and easy to set up.
Live streaming: Brands are now using live streaming to connect with their audience easily. Live streams works similarly to the breaking news versions of Traditional TV. The reason why live streaming works so well is because FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). Live videos work very well in building anticipation and increasing engagement.
Work With Influencers
Nearly 40% of social media users say that they have made a purchase because of a direct result from a tweet of an influencer. Working with influencers can help boost your marketing campaign and get your content in front of a much wider audience.
You don’t need a huge budget before you can work with influencers. They are micro-influencers who have a few hundreds to thousands of loyal followers who regularly engage with their content. You can use a tool like BuzzSumo to research influencers depending on their popularity, reach, and your campaign objectives.
Pro Tip: When reaching out to influencers, prepare to answer the “what’s in it for me” questions. When you have something special that you can offer to the influencer, it urges them to want to work with you.
Invest In The Right Tools
To optimally make use of social media, it is important that you invest in the right tools. Using tools to automate the social media process would help you save time and get things done faster.
You cannot afford to spend more time than you should on social media. These are some tools you can use to automate the social media process:
For creating social media graphics: You can use Stencil to easily create social media graphics on the fly. All you need to do is pick a background, add some texts and you are good to go. It also comes with over 2,200,000+ stock photos.
You can use PostPlanner to easily schedule social media posts. Sprout social also helps you to connect all the major social media platforms into one easy to use interface.
Join Communities
Most social media networks are very large so it can be difficult to efficiently reach your target audience. Joining smaller communities would make it easier for you to reach an audience of people that really requires your services within your industry.
Look for communities within the social media platform where your audience is most active in. Join these groups and start delivering value and participating actively. Some of these communities include Facebook Groups, LinkedIn Groups or Twitter Chats.
Keep An Eye On The Latest Trends & Changes
Once you know your target audience and have defined your brand’s messaging, tone, and objectives, it is important that you keep up with the latest trends and changes happening in your niche or industry.
For you to increase engagement with social media users and increase your brand’s popularity you have post the trending things occurring on the platform. If you notice that a particular topic is rising in popularity or trending, you should upload content on this topic to increase your engagement and reach. You can also use a tool like Feedly to know the topics that are trending at the moment.
Perform In-depth Analysis of Your Results
This is the last of the social media marketing tips in this article. After using all the strategies mentioned in this article, it is important that you regularly monitor and analyze your results. Tracking and measuring your results would help you understand when you are doing things right.
When measuring, these are some of the metrics you should track:
- Your Facebook engagement and reach
- The amount of retweets, mentions, and impressions you get on Twitter
- For LinkedIn, you should check the amount of clicks, interactions, and impressions
- Amount of views, likes, and shares on Instagram and YouTube.
You should make sure you track these metrics daily so you would know when you need to make changes to your marketing strategy.
Conclusion,
If properly optimized, social media is a great tool to increase traffic, generate leads, drive sales and improve the recognition of any business. Use the social media marketing tips mentioned in this article to get started.
Leave a Reply