Top Social Media Marketing Tips for your Marketing Strategy

Social media platforms have become the preferred method of entertainment and communication for the majority of consumers around the world. Social media allows consumers to keep up to date with friends and family, breaking news, product launches and trends. More and more consumers are joining social media everyday; this has led to social media marketing becoming an important strategy for brands and marketers.

However, due to the competitive nature of social media marketing, it can be difficult for brands to make their mark on the social world. However, we have pulled together key social media marketing tips to consider when building your marketing strategy.

What is social media marketing?

Social media marketing is the process of using social media platforms to connect with audiences to build brand awareness, increase sales and drive traffic to your website. It involves creating and publishing content to your brand’s social media profiles, engaging with followers, analysing specific social media metrics and running paid social ads. 

The key social media marketing channels vary as platform popularity fluctuates. At present, the most popular social media channels brands focus on are Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Twitch and Snapchat.

Each platform allows access to a different type of audience, meaning not every platform will work well for your business. Most platforms come with their own Business and analytics tools, so it’s quick and easy to find which platforms work best for your brand and target your audience the most directly. 

Within social media marketing, there are five key pillars you need to focus on to ensure you are creating an optimised and effective social media strategy. These are: strategy, planning and publishing, listening and engagement, analytics and reporting, and advertising. 

But what do these mean for your business?

1. Strategy

Before you begin posting to any social media channels, you need to cement your social media strategy. The first step is to think about your goals and how social media can help you achieve them. 

Businesses use social media for different purposes. Some use it to increase brand awareness, others for community building or driving traffic to their website and sales. Social media is a useful tool for building engagement, creating a community and active as a customer service channel. 

When strategizing, you need to consider which platforms you want to focus on. There are plenty of platforms to pick from, but you need to choose platforms that your audience is active on. It’s better to be on fewer platforms but create high quality content than be on all and have your quality and engagement suffer. 

When deciding which platforms you want to be on, it can be helpful to decide the type of content you want to share with your audience. While ultimately you need to share content your audience will be interested and engaged with, you still have creative freedom. Do you want to share images, videos or blogs? Is your content entertaining or educational? 

To help answer these questions, you can create a marketing persona. Similar to a customer profile, your marketing persona is the personification of your brand online. It shows your brand voice, values, colours and more. Your marketing persona will develop over time as you start to receive more engagement and feedback from your audience.

2. Planning and Publishing

Planning and publishing is where you create and schedule your content to go live on your social channels. One of the best ways to build a strong online presence is by posting high-quality content consistently. 

It’s important to plan out the type of content you want to publish and when it should be published. To do this, you should create a content calendar. This helps you keep track of the topics covered, products promoted, type of content posted and dates. Constantly monitoring your content publishing means you can post a variety of content, keeping your audience engaged and entertained. 

In addition, having a content calendar allows you to consistently post at a time your audience is most active. Using a calendar can help you note down exactly when you posted high-performing content, the topics that are most popular and the type of content that performs best. 

There are countless social media scheduling tools available that can automatically publish your content at a preferred time. Not only does this save you time, but ensures you are reaching your audience when they are most active on social media.

3. Listening and Engagement

As your social media following grows, so will conversations about your brand. Users will organically comment on your content, create their own content and tag you and even message you directly. 

Monitoring organic conversations about your brand (that don’t directly involve you) is a great way to find out what people really think of your business. Social listening will help you further improve things that work well, correct content that doesn’t engage your audience and can even help you solve customer issues before they escalate. 

Using your social media notifications will only give you a small slice of the engagement and conversations about your business online. A top social media tip for 2021 is to use a social listening and engagement tool that aggregates your mentions and messages, including posts that don’t tag your brand’s social account.

Analysing and Reporting

Your social media strategy doesn’t finish once you’ve posted content and engaged with your audience. You need to know how well your social media content is performing and if it is improving.

Social media platforms already provide social media metrics and statistics that are important to understand, analyse and improve on. These metrics can tell you who, when and how your content is engaged with. For complete social media optimisation, you should analyse and act accordingly to the social media statistics you have found.

Advertising

Although not necessarily something you need to plan from the get-go, advertising is beneficial once you have more funds to budget towards social media marketing. Social media ads allow you to reach wider audiences than those who follow you. 

Social media advertising platforms are effective tools that allow you to specifically target consumers you want to display your ads to. These ads are so impactful because they are targeted to specific demographics, interests and behaviors.

Social media marketing best practices

The benefits of social media marketing can be endless… if it’s done correctly. You now have an outline of things to consider when creating a social media marketing strategy, but we’ve also provided some key social media marketing ideas for you to incorporate.

Leverage influencers

Influencer marketing is an incredibly powerful social media marketing strategy. Influencers can boost the ROI of your marketing efforts and drive reach and engagement. Influencers can also improve brand image and build trust with audiences, amplify your content to reach new audiences and drive traffic to your website, alongside new conversations.

Use hashtags

Hashtags can introduce your brand to new and hyper-relevant audiences. Platforms have begun offering users the chance to follow specific hashtags, meaning content using those hashtags appear on their feeds natively even if they don’t follow the account. 

Hashtags you use should still be relevant to your business, and they shouldn’t be overused. Overuse hashtags and you risk looking like spam. When deciding which hashtags to use, consider: how popular is the hashtag? How many competitors are using it? Is it relevant to your niche?

Be consistent

For today’s consumers, it’s out of sight, out of mind. This means you need to be consistently active on social media in order to stay relevant. 

Consistency gives your audiences something to look forward to; they know when to expect your content. Posting on specific days at specific times is a tried-and-true way to build a loyal follower base. 

In addition, consistency helps algorithms favour accounts that post regularly and are active.

Consider social commerce

Many social media platforms have begun implementing social commerce capabilities. Instagram and TikTok already offer users in-app shopping experiences. As consumers become more exposed to social commerce, they are more likely to make use of it. 

Social commerce makes the buying journey exceptionally seamless and easy. A user simply browses a brand’s social media page, clicks through to the in-app shop and makes a purchase. No additional hassle of new landing pages, just an easy click-through process.

Actively interact with your audience

Social media users want authentic interactions with the brands they follow. Consistently posting high-quality content isn’t enough, you need to talk to your followers directly by answering questions or responding to comments and replies. 

If you have noticed users having an organic conversation about your brand, jump on in! This adds additional value to your followers, increasing the chances of more organic conversations. Users want to connect with a brand that has similar values to them, so by joining in conversations you increase the transparency and trust between brand and user.

Final thoughts

The social media landscape is constantly changing. As new platforms emerge and existing platforms update and provide new features, brands have to consistently shift their social media marketing strategies to keep up. 

Businesses of all sizes can make social media marketing work for them. By following these social media marketing tips, you can build a loyal following and community, generate leads and sales and boost brand awareness.

FAQ’s

What is social media marketing?

Social media marketing is the process of using social media platforms to connect with audiences to build brand awareness, increase sales and drive traffic to your website. It involves creating and publishing content to your brand’s social media profiles, engaging with followers, analysing specific social media metrics and running paid social ads. 

Why is social media marketing important?

Social media is one of the most important aspects of digital marketing. It connects brands with millions of consumers worldwide. Brands can build communities, create brand awareness, boost leads and sales and provide customer service. 

Consumers are looking to social media more and more to research brands. A brand having a social media presence can be the deciding purchasing factor for many consumers.

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