Before you get started with social media for your business, it’s important to start with a clear marketing plan as part of your social media management campaign. There are new social media marketing companies created every day. It seems like there is a new social media website to figure out every few months!
This post aims to help your business navigate which social media marketing sites to use. We want to guide you through the process so you get set up for success with social media marketing.
What is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing is the process of creating, publishing, and promoting content (links, video, text, images, or audio) across top social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube, to drive the desired outcome (traffic, engagement, or awareness).
See more about digital marketing metrics
Businesses have moved to attract social media users to their events, products, and services. It’s important to consider what your business is doing in the age of social media marketing, and how to leverage it to your benefit. The importance of marketing for business cannot be understated.
Introduction To Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is not going anywhere, at least anytime soon. This post will provide you with social media marketing tips, how to write a social media marketing plan, and practical takeaways. Learn how to help your business grow using a wide array of the best social media management tools for small business.
Long gone are the days when users weren’t already familiar with common platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and Snapchat. Social media has even proven to be a viable and lucrative marketing channel. For both B2B and B2C-oriented businesses across the world.
How Can Businesses Interact With Social Media Users
Your business’s success in social media marketing must have a deep understanding of your customers’ needs. As well as the journey they will take as a customer. Like a well-built website, social media channels can provide your small business with a steady stream of high-quality SEO website traffic. Customer engagement from social media will boost your company’s brand and help you grow.
Social media marketing services will drive new customers to your business, both online and offline. But you’ll need to make sure that you’re producing high-quality content. It should aim to help your potential clients or customers solve the problems they have. On social media, you’re able to answer the questions they’re already asking.
A successful social media management strategy aligns your business goals with current technologies. This will continue to boost your impact on your target audience. You should be reaching out to customers to get instant feedback, respond to customer service requests, and promote events or sales.
Who Is Using Social Media?
So, how many daily social media users are there in the United States today? At least 81% of people age 12 and older are on social media!
For example, Facebook now has over 2.99 billion monthly active users, and their growth doesn’t show any signs of slowing down soon.
Top Social Media Sites
The other top Social Media sites (as of 2023):
- YouTube has 2.68 billion+ monthly active users.
- WeChat has 1.67 billion+ monthly active users.
- Instagram has 2.5 billion+ monthly active users.
- Twitter has 328 million+ monthly active users.
- Snapchat has 750 million+ monthly active users.
- TikTok has 1.67 billion+ monthly active users.
Social Media Users
Here, we illustrate the differences in audience usage across different social media platforms. We’ve compiled some recent statistics about how users engage with different channels online:
Facebook continues to be the most widely used social media platform, with 79% of American internet users.
- Instagram receives the silver medal with 32% of users. Pinterest comes in a close third with 31%, with LinkedIn and Twitter at 29% and 24%.
- 76% of Facebook users visited the site daily during 2016. They report over 1.6 billion daily visitors, compared to 70% of daily usage in 2015.
- 51% of Instagram users access the platform daily, and 35% say they look at the platform several times per day.
- 93% of Pinterest users use the platform to plan or make purchases.
- 59% of Americans with social media accounts think customer service on social media makes it easier to get questions answered and issues resolved.
What Is A Social Media Marketing Strategy?
A social media marketing strategy is what your business needs to build awareness and engagement across social media channels. Consider whether Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram or YouTube is appropriate first. It’s important to customize the approach for each social media channel. This will allow the messaging to impact each targeted audience member more effectively. If you listen to the needs of your happiest customers, you will ensure your social media marketing success. It’s important to publish across many social media channels since social media users usually have more than one social media account. Overwhelmed yet? Take a break and find out why you should hire an agency, like Digital Logic!
We cannot understate the importance of social media marketing for business.
Listening to what your customers say online should also be a huge component of your social media strategy. It’s important to set initial goals and objectives as a starting point to increase your social following. You should also grow your company’s social media engagement to stay relevant.
Determine Your Target Audience on Social Media Platforms
Your social media marketing success might be determined by user engagement, reach, and new business lift. Content needs to target the right audience so they have a connection to the message and feel compelled to engage. You’ll need to first look at who your past customers are, and think about who your ideal customer is, then build content for those targets.
One great way to understand your target audience in a broad social media marketing environment is to consider the mindset of the customers who already buy your company’s products and/or services.
Create Ideal Customer Personas
Developing model “personas” which fit a few different types of customer segments that have common needs or a common demographic.
This will help you translate company messaging when it comes to reaching your target audience online. Social media marketing allows you to target individuals based on their purchasing habits or demographics.
This can enable you to send a very specific message to each audience. Or post a unique sales offer to the audience that’s most likely to respond to your ad.
It might be a video testimonial of an ideal customer or a sharp, clean design that catches your target audience’s eye. With social media marketing, you’ll be able to adjust your ads to target those that do respond positively.
Track Customers on Social Media Platforms
If you want to build a target audience that will keep coming back to buy your products and services, a great idea is to invite customers to like, follow, and share your social media profiles, or to join a group that provides exclusive membership benefits and direct sales opportunities.
How Social Media Marketing Can Help Business
Social media marketing helps to get the word out to your consumer’s favorite devices, where your brand can build trust and value.
Social media is a place where people go to find the things that they enjoy.
Use a targeted approach to your social media messaging. Connect with them to influence sales much easier than with cold calling or other methods. You can even get responses from your customers through social media in the form of feedback or direct messages.
Feedback is essential to figuring out what makes your audience “tick.” You’ll be able to create a better experience for them when engaging with your brand online. With the two-way communication that social media provides, it also offers a great opportunity to step up your customer service and provide instant gratification to your target audience.
How to Get Your Message Out With Social Media Marketing
Why would it matter how good your content is if no one actually sees it? An essential but often overlooked element of creating a successful digital media marketing campaign is the amplification of the content that you produce on your website or other online properties. It’s important to approach social media marketing campaigns with a mix of earned media and paid media marketing tactics. This can ensure the best fit for both the company’s and the audience’s needs. Integrate all the options you have to make the most impact.Social Media Content Strategy
The content you produce for social media must be relevant to your target audience and valuable to them to make a lasting impression and drive sales. How a brand distributes its content to potential customers is crucial to reaching the right audiences, in the right places, and in the right ways. As with any other content marketing strategy, after you create the content, it’s important to push it everywhere you can. Our approach to social media marketing amplification includes strategy, content, plus paid advertising. This provides ample opportunities for your target audience to engage with your social media marketing campaign.Social Media Analytics
Social media marketing analytics act as proof of performance. Without measurement, it would be impossible to understand what’s working, what’s not, and how to change your approach and optimize the conversion rate on ads to achieve better results. You need to understand the metrics your business will need for social media platforms and be able to review these results on a regular basis. Using the data you collect, you can determine what worked and where future opportunities lie. Then determine suggestions on how to improve the campaign in later messaging.
Measure Your Social Marketing Performance
Having an understanding of the correct KPIs (key performance indicators) and tracking them. This could be follower count, engagement rate, campaign clicks, or signups. It’s important that you start social media marketing by setting benchmarks and goals for reach and engagement.
Learn how your target audience responds to your messaging. Then you’ll be able to optimize the posts and ads to achieve the highest engagement rate at the lowest cost. Drop unnecessary targeting to users who are not likely to buy your products and services. Then, increase the personalization that’s available through these channels. This will enhance your brand’s reputation online.
How To Build A Social Media Community
There are many ways to build your own online community so they will engage with you and promote your content for free. The first step is creating great content that is worthy of a share from your target audience.
Figure out what types of content your audience already engages with online. This can be a good indicator of how you should craft your own social media marketing campaign. After you develop some amazing content, then attach an incentive like a discount, giveaway, or freebie for liking, sharing, or commenting. This way, your content will be seen by friends of your target audience. They are more likely to trust them for any recommendations.
Social media contests can also engage many types of audience members. This can build participation within your online community. Your social media contests can be stand-alone, or part of your larger content marketing strategy. This is a great way to find user-generated content that will enhance your brand’s image and reputation for other new potential customers.
What Types Of Content Should You Post on Social Media?
Stuck here? Turns out, you’re not alone.
Some business owners believe that they can achieve some positive results for their business by sharing status updates on their profile pages. While this idea holds some truth, there may be far better ways to leverage these social media platforms to get your message across to more people.
Increasing the number of page likes for you will not provide social media marketing success. You’ve still got to provide something of value to your fans and followers.
It’s important to focus on nurturing your social media audience’s engagement to make it stronger, larger, and more valuable.
What Do Social Media Users Like?
Here are some interesting recent statistics to highlight some of the trends in social media content consumption and engagement:
- 100 million hours of video content are watched on Facebook daily.
- Tweets with images receive 18% more clicks than tweets without images.
- On LinkedIn, 98% of posts with images receive more comments and posts with links have a 200% higher engagement rate.
- Instagram earns $595 million in mobile ad revenue per year.
- YouTube and even YouTube on mobile alone reach more 18-34 and 18-49 year-olds than any cable network in the U.S.
- Pinterest drives 25% of all retail website referral traffic.
- Blogging continues to grow, with over 409 million people viewing more than 23.6 billion pages each month on WordPress alone.
Professional Social Media Marketing vs. DIY Social Media Marketing
As you can tell, there are many reasons to start using social media marketing to promote your business. There are also many specific ways to use each platform that takes time and experience to learn. You can do this by doing it yourself or working with a team of digital marketing service professionals.
If you go with the option of working with professionals, you can leverage years of experience driving traffic through social media. This can help you achieve your goals on the platforms that your potential customers are already using. Professional services can also improve metrics while reducing the risk of error.
It doesn’t have to cost a fortune to “boost” your presence on social media if done correctly, and it can become one of the most engaging and profitable channels to reach out to its target audience.
If you’re interested in working with social media marketing professionals, feel free to reach out to us at Digital Logic. We offer free SEO audit services.
How To Plan and Schedule Posts on Social Media
Sticking to a schedule is already important when it comes to operating your social media strategy. But you’ll have to understand the environment you’re advertising in when it comes to your social media marketing. It may be true that your target audience is shopping for your products or services while during business hours, but did you account for gaps in time zones, or for different work shifts?
Maybe your target customers don’t use social media during the day, and they’re most likely to buy during the evening or late night hours. All this and more can be easily discovered by looking at your website and social media analytics and performance metrics to understand how the ideal customer behaves when it comes to buying online from your company.
Since the internet is “open 24/7,” you’ll have to think about how you spend your online advertising budget. You’ll definitely want to optimize your conversions to avoid unnecessary expenses. But you could advertise to your target audience and get sales at all hours as well. We recommend investing in social media posting services like Kiopi.
How To Schedule A Post On Facebook
To schedule a post on Facebook, navigate to your Facebook business page, then write your post, and add your links. Then, next to the Publish button. There is a drop-down that provides you with three options: Schedule, Backdate, and Save Draft. Select Schedule from the drop-down, as seen below:
Once you select Schedule, you’ll enter the day and time that you’d like the post to be posted. And that’s all you need to do.
Don’t Post on Social Media Too Often
Would every one of your followers want to see 50 posts per day on your social media account? It’s best to understand what types of content are most engaging for your audience and how much they require before making a purchasing decision. This is where targeting your advertisements can become extremely effective.
Social media marketing is still about quality over quantity, including the size of your audience. It is best to have a highly planned and organized schedule of posts or ads which can be relied on when it comes to your metrics, rather than just jumping into space and potentially damaging your brand’s reputation online. The best way to figure out what type of content your audience is most interested in is to test it out.
If you find something that works, don’t be afraid to try it again, or even on a different audience and learn how they respond to it. Keep an eye on your key engagement metrics (likes, comments, shares, retweets, clicks, etc). Over time, you can define the optimal posting schedule for your company’s social media content and your customers will rejoice again and again
How To Deal With Negative Social Media Reviews and Posts
It’s important to protect and promote that positive reputation online since 82% of small business owners are using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, and Snapchat. It’s expected by consumers that your social media presence be engaging and provide value to keep them interested and buying.
The worst thing you can do on social media when responding to a negative review is to be a jerk. If you’re a smart business owner, then you need to deal with negative comments head-on and accept blame if there is blame and do the right thing. And if you’re wrong, then work to fix it by doing the right thing for the client and apologize. It’s easy to overreact and become a keyboard warrior, but it’s not going to help your business’s online presence.
Final Tips For Creating A Successful Social Media Marketing Strategy
- Align digital marketing goals with company goals to solve challenges.
- Extend participation in your organization.
- Focus on the platforms that add value to your brand.
- Create high-quality engaging content.
- Identify new business opportunities.
- Engage your customers instead of ignoring them.
- Analyze your data and improve your efforts over time
Digital Logic is a Shreveport-based company that works with local and national businesses, alike!
We offer a range of digital marketing services.
