If your business lacks a social media presence, you’re missing out on a huge audience to market your business and build your brand. On the other hand, it’s a waste of time to get on social media without understanding the strengths and weaknesses of each platform and how to do social media well. Today we’re going to take a look at what you need to know to succeed at social media marketing.
Top 10 tips to Succeed at Social Media Marketing
- Know your social media platforms. Understand what each platform brings to the table and choose the right platform(s) to reach your target audience. Here are the top four to consider:
Facebook:
For businesses, Facebook is best suited to:
- Get information out to a casual audience
- Share interesting content that increases followers and encourages engagement
- Paid ads and boosted posts
Target:
Facebook is an ideal platform for business-to-consumer businesses with a target audience over the age of 30.
Instagram:
For businesses, Instagram is an ideal platform to:
Target:
Instagram is dominated by a younger audience: 25-34-year-olds represent the largest advertising audience on Instagram, followed closely by the 18-24-year-old age group. Overall, 71% of U.S. adults between the ages of 18-29 are Instagram users.
Twitter:
For businesses, Twitter is an ideal platform to:
- Promote your industry knowledge
- Share relevant research
- Interact with other industry leaders
- Share videos (video watching on Twitter was up 62% from 2019 to 2020)
- Build your brand by showing some personality – gifs are fun
Target:
Twitter users skew male (70% of users) and young (almost 30% are between the ages of 25-34 years old).
LinkedIn:
For businesses, LinkedIn is ideal for:
- Building credibility by sharing knowledge
- Creating a meaningful network
- Getting and sharing insider expertise from other industry experts
Target:
With LinkedIn, you're targeting a quality audience in a professional context. It’s a business-to-business platform.
- Tailor your posts to each platform. Now that we understand what each platform brings to the table, it’s not hard to see why we should tailor our posts for different platforms. You will have better luck growing your audience and your brand when your posts are made to work with each platform’s style and audience.
- Use images and videos to your advantage. While twitter is largely focused on words, most social media platforms are visual mediums. Be sure to draw your customers in with quality images and videos that will make them want to read your content and respond to your posts.
- Create engaging content – follow the cocktail party rule. Social media interactions should be fun, engaging, educating or motivating. The whole point is that you want people to interact with your post and then take an action that benefits your business or organization such as following your page, sharing your post on their news feed, showing up to your sale or watching your live feed. Talk less about yourself and more about what interests your audience. The cocktail party rule says that for every five things you ask or say about the people you are trying to engage, you may insert one thing about your company.
- Keep your posts concise and limit hashtags. When it comes to words and hashtags, less is more on social media. Do not be tempted to write a full paragraph followed by 30 hashtags for each post. That is a sure way to lose your audience; studies have shown that engagement drops on Instagram posts that have too many hashtags. A couple of concise sentences and one to three hashtags (including your main business hashtag) is generally going to be your best bet.
- Interact with your audience. The best way to increase engagement and trust with your brand is to interact with your audience. Like and follow businesses that do the same for you and participate in conversations they are trying to have with their audience. Essentially, you want to check in on their social media posts and engage with them in whatever way makes sense. You can like, love, laugh, comment or share.
- Get your entire team participating in social media efforts. Make it clear that it is a part of each employee’s job to engage with the company’s social media posts, whether that be liking, commenting or sharing them. Ask certain employees such as sales people or managers to share approved posts about your business on their own social media platforms.
- Identify the right timing and frequency for your social media posts. There are general guidelines for recommended time of day and frequency of social media posts that can be used to get you started. For most businesses, three to five posts per week is ideal; regular but not overkill. Because your brand and audience are not the same as every other business, it’s still a good idea to experiment with different times of day and posting frequencies to get a feel for the schedule that gets the most interaction from your audience.
- Include social media links on your other channels. Once your social media accounts are set up, you should include links to them on your website and in any email marketing communication. Require all employees to include links to your social media accounts in their employee signatures.
- Boost posts to get in front of a wider audience. The best way to grow your social media following quickly is to boost your posts. Facebook, especially, makes this easy. The best part is that you can choose your budget and audience to suit your needs and you will get an estimated daily engagement prediction before you click submit.
Hire a Digital Marketing Agency
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Over the years, we’ve worked with lots of clients who need help with web engineering and digital marketing tasks but don’t have in-house staff. Finding freelancers can be a nightmare and cause a lot of problems when promising delivery of service. Whether you’re interested in web design or digital marketing only or more; we’re ready to help you get started!