According to Statista, the number of social media users is projected to reach 3.78 billion in 2021. To put it into perspective, that’s more than half the population of the earth on social media networks discussing their interests, hobbies, lives, and what makes them tick.
It’s as if people are willingly handing you the information you need to sell more of your products and services to them. This is why social media marketing has to be a part of your marketing arsenal.
If you’re thinking of doing some social media marketing for your business, but have no idea of what to do or where to start, this post will provide you with some great social media marketing strategies that you can implement today.
Carefully Choose Your Platform
There are people who claim that social media marketing is dead and unsuitable for small businesses. If you believe that, then we have some “miracle snake oil” to sell to you ;). What is true, however, is that some platforms work best for certain business types.
For instance, social media platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter are great for certain service-type businesses, B2B companies, agency-type businesses, consulting, and enterprise software companies.
Tiktok on the other hand seems to be a meld of everything as B2B companies, contractors and even eCommerce businesses are seeing good results from the platform.
The point is that some platforms you need to figure out the best platform for your business first. You want a platform that has your target audience, is receptive to your marketing, and whose members actually appreciate good offers.
Have a Strategy for Every Platform
After choosing your platform(s), the second step is figuring out the best strategy for each platform. For example, Twitter love highly informative, entertaining threads, and lots of engagement in the comment section.
LinkedIn prefers more business-like content types like blogs, infographics, videos, and pictures. Facebook loves entertaining videos way more these days. Of course, you can still create text-based posts, but you’ll most likely get better results from short 1-5 minute videos.
Youtube is great for videos, but those videos have got to be entertaining and informative, otherwise, people will bounce or dislike the videos. If enough people do this, the algorithm will “punish” you by pushing your video down the rankings, and promoting more relevant videos.
The point is to study what works on the platforms you’ve chosen. Just look at the types of content getting a lot of love and replicate it.
Pay Attention to Trends
Trends are great massive periodic traffic surges. If you’re able to get on a trend early enough and ride it to the peak, you’ll not only siphon a ton of traffic to your target webpage, you’ll attract a ton of followers and subscribers who like your content.
A great way to do this is to track industry-related news items and recent happenings. The good news is that there are many tools out there that are dedicated to tracking, identifying, and monitoring trends. All you have to do is set up trend alerts for keywords related to your brand tools like Google Alerts, Buzzsumo, Hootsuite, and many more.
Track and Measure Your Outcomes
Photo by Myriam Jessier on Unsplash
One of the best ways to measure growth is by tracking your certain key parameters. It’s not enough to assume that recent spikes in revenue are due to your social media efforts.
Truth is until you can quantify these results, you’ll be flailing in the dark. So get yourself a precision-driven social media tracker tool. These help you track, manage and analyze all your social media campaigns, posts and other activities.
This will help you sell more efficiently as you’ll have more data on the posts or campaigns with the best performances –so, you can just replicate the campaigns and scale.
Although most social media platforms provide some sort of analytics report, these reports are hardly comprehensive or enough for you to deduce the necessary metrics.
Vary Your Content Formats
Even after settling on the platforms you want to use, you still need to test various content formats. For example, if you’re using Facebook, try long posts, short posts, short 30 second to 1 minute videos, 2+ minute videos, as well as images.
Try the various content formats to see the best performing ones. Once you identify the content formats that best resonate with your audience, stick to those formats.
Use Storytelling to Your Advantage
We may live in the 21st century, but that doesn’t negate our needs for a good yarn. Whether you’re young or not-so-young, you’ll agree that every loves a good, relatable story. This is because good stories are not only captivating, but they are relatable.
So use more stories in your social media marketing posts, comments, or campaigns. Campaigns with good stories tend to get a lot more views and engagements on all social media platforms. Plus, they tend to convert a lot better too.
Create a Personable Brand
Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash
The great thing about this tip is, very few businesses make the effort to be personable or seen as human. Small business brands that are able to do this often develop a high trust and likability factor –which often translates to increased revenue.
This is pretty easy to do. Just attach a face to your brand. It could be your face, a partner’s or an employee’s –although the latter is quite risky. But, let them know that your business is run by real people.
Other examples include celebrating local or national holidays or festivals and posting the pictures and/or videos. You could also sponsor local events… there’s really no limit to what you can do here.
The reality is people like personable social media brands. So build one that’s interesting. Settle on a character or theme –could be quirky, fun, satire, informal… whatever works. Monitor and track audience reactions to decide on the tone that works for your audience, prospects, and customers.
Concluding Thoughts
Even though social media marketing can seem like a highly demanding activity, remember that it’s like an investment. Done correctly, it’ll keep yielding returns for years.
Also, remember to take advantage of use each platform’s catchphrases, and narrow down the targeting for paid ad campaigns (always target by specific demographics). Good luck in your marketing efforts.
