Social media is a thoroughly confusing thing, and with over a hundred platforms, choosing the ones your business is most likely to succeed on might be a real headache. However, there’s also a bright side here – social media marketing can and does work wonders to spread your brand’s awareness, gain new customers, and engage with your audiences. And the key to that is to choose the right platform – one that actually has the people who might be interested in your products or services and works well with your brand’s values.
So, you definitely do not need to be on all the social media platforms out there, and we’ve made a short guide that might help you discern where you should start with your social media marketing strategy.
Define Your Goals On Social Media
Going into social media as a part of your marketing strategy without clear goals will probably bear no tangible results. To define your goals, you could simply start by answering a couple of questions:
- Is your goal to grow brand awareness?
- Gather event attendees?
- Boost customer communication?
Answering such questions to yourself should be able to help distill your goals, upon which you can start building your social media marketing strategy. Make those goals realistic, and the chances are very high that you’ll reach them. They also hold you accountable while making your budgeting clearly defined.
Know Your Platforms
Each social media platform differs from another, and it is only given that the audiences vary, too. So knowing the platforms and what audiences expect from them might make your planning that much easier.
Here are a couple of examples of the most widely used platforms by businesses:
Facebook – is the largest social media network, with around 3 billion monthly users. Its followers mostly use the platform to connect with their family and friends, share photos, and create events. Keeping that in mind, be sure that your Facebook posts aren’t too obviously an endorsement of your product since this kind of material tends to be overlooked on the platform.
Twitter – a place for news and live updates. However, it is also a great way for consumers to reach the brands they are following quickly and uncomplicatedly. There’s one drawback here, though – you have to make do with just 280 characters per tweet, so keep your posts short and sweet. Using relevant hashtags might also help reach your customers, especially on this platform.
LinkedIn – a network for professionals and businesses. It’s both a networking site and a place to learn something new, so sharing your blog posts might be a good idea. Typically used for B2B communication, LinkedIn is invaluable in driving traffic, establishing yourself as an authority in your field of expertise, and, of course, looking for employees.
Instagram – is a platform that’s all about visual communication. Be sure that the content you post there is visually pleasing or eye-catching. Enhance it by using relevant hashtags and enticing your followers to engage with your posts. Don’t forget to use Instagram’s Stories – one-third of the most-watched Stories come from business accounts, so not a thing to be missed.
YouTube – a video platform that’s re-living its golden years again. In fact, video content itself is re-living its golden years as people expect to see more and more of it in their feeds. So naturally, businesses are stepping into the trends by publishing their vlogs and bits of interesting content on the platform. Use YouTube for instructional videos, how-to’s, tips and tricks, and even corporate videos.
Get To Know Your Audience
Determine who’s interested in your business – simply put, your target audience. Now, figure out where they like to hang out, and only then make your choice for your main social media platform for your marketing strategy.
Next, think about what content they would appreciate. Creating something that resonates with all might seem like a good idea, but targeting the specific group of people that are interested in your products or services will always bring better engagement and conversions.
Lastly, diversify your content on each social media platform. If one thing works for Facebook, it won’t necessarily work in aesthetics-driven Instagram. However, be sure to stick to your brand’s tone and values even in these different pieces of content.
Research Your Competitors
Now, before actually starting your campaign, it might be a good idea to research what your competitors are doing with their social media accounts. Among many other insights these competitive analyses provide are things like:
- What platforms do they use;
- What’s working/not working;
- Audience’s engagement on each channel.
Of course, you shouldn’t do things the same as your competitor does, especially knowing that audiences appreciate a brand’s own voice and uniqueness. However, it is still very useful to see what others are doing to make informed decisions of your own.
Measure And Adjust Strategy
Analyzing your content’s performance is the key to figuring out what really works with your audiences. We recommend doing it each month to keep current with the situation. Once you identify the posts or pieces of content that seemed to conquer your followers, spend some time thinking about exactly why they worked so well. Once that’s clear, try to emulate that success without obviously repeating yourself. We know it sounds a bit tedious, but it’s nevertheless a very important part of social media marketing.
Think About your Available Resources
Managing social media accounts is way more demanding than you’d think at first glance. So, if you have just one person with a couple of spare hours in the week to manage your social media, limit yourself to just a couple of platforms and less-but-steady posting. Otherwise, you might start hot but fizzle out in the long run with just an occasional post or two in a month. And that won’t do any good for audience engagement and brand awareness, obviously.
It’s a whole other story if you have a person who’s dedicated to managing social platforms day-in-day-out. Then you can try conquering various platforms with tailor-made content for each. However, bear in mind that quality still wins over quantity each time.
Social media is the perfect place to show your business’s ‘human’ side – your values, personality, and beliefs. Don’t be afraid to experiment with it, as the audiences always appreciate fresh ideas and authenticity. Yet, undoubtedly, no business can thrive without it, so choose what’s right for you, aim for achievable goals, and off you go conquering social media!
