In the modern world of business ownership, it is important to understand the importance of incorporating social media into the landscape of marketing as a whole. There are many ways to launch a social media marketing strategy and even more ways that you can expand that you may not have considered.
Your social media presence can mean everything for brand recognition, customer trust and loyalty, and word of mouth endorsement. There are valuable advertising channels at your disposal through the use of social media, and potentially even more for brand building.
Social media began as a way to connect the people of the world digitally. With this heightened connectivity came new and unique ways to exploit and utilize this connection. Social media has effectively broken down the barrier between brand and customer, person to person. By shortening connections and broadening reach, products can market directly through a more personal connection. This has really allowed for the local brand loyalty effect, to become a feeling and effect that is more accessible across distances, even globally.
The successful leveraging of social media for business really isn’t as intimidating as it can seem. With a few basic tricks and some understanding, there are some tips you can use consistently and patiently to help maintain a solid forward momentum in building the strength of your social media presence.
Let’s take a brief look at how social media management and integration can be parlayed into successful branding, growth in notoriety, and overall conversion success.
Understand Your Audience
There are a lot of social channels available to a business, and not all will fit or be an efficient part of your social media presence. That being said, with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and even TikTok, the right combination can be found to hit your targeted audience, and expand into new audiences, most efficiently.
So one of the most important first steps to understanding how to use social media effectively, is to understand what your target audiences are, where they are found digitally, and how to best connect and grow with them. B2B brands may find LinkedIn to be the backbone of their social media presence, whereas businesses that target a youth market will likely find success on Snapchat and Instagram. Facebook still holds the largest market for older consumers.
So how can you get to know what your audience is? Google Analytics and other metric breakdowns can give you a look inside at different demographics that are engaging most with your content and where. Social media platform metrics can really give a great insight into the performance of certain content. You can use this data to test out what kind of content engages audiences best on which platforms, and tweek accordingly to fit what will perform best.
Creative thinking is the key to leveraging this demographic information. The same content can be repackaged and repurposed to hit multiple audiences with a little bit of understanding and creativity.
Create Engaging Content And Understand The Channels To Promote it
Products just sell differently on social media. The different feeling of social media has been one of the key elements of difference from traditional ad spaces. More direct and aggressive sales tactics will now often be rejected in favor of discovery-based advertisement. Information, statistics, costs, qualities, and more used to be better selling factors. Quick and direct information has started to shift towards feeling pushy and aggressive. The alternative that has risen to take its place is social media being used to amplify and industrialize word of mouth advertisement.
People want to discover what they like, not be told what they SHOULD like. People feel a needed discovery, even when it’s a friend who turns them on to something. Social media is inherently designed to scatter through word of mouth like a web of chain lightning.
Content engages differently depending on your audience or the platforms most beneficial to you. So keep in mind that the first step is crucial to understanding engagement as well.
One important element to maintaining highly engaging content can be to understand the ratio of attraction to information. Eye catching and attracting first impressions are very important. Creative imagery can say a lot at first glance.
This can even sometimes mean publishing content that isn’t even directly related to selling your brand, but simply promotes values and qualities that align with what your brand represents.
Make Engagement A Priority
Interaction is also so important to how your audience engages your brand. Offer ways for your audience to feel involved. Polls, discussions, giveaways, and more can help your customers feel involved in the process. Don’t underestimate the simple power of effective CTAs.
Social media platforms boast some of the highest daily engagement numbers of any media types that have ever existed. The morning news or daily newspaper has been blown past by checking one’s phone in the morning. With global time zones accounting for the global audience possible across platforms, this means no matter what, the average user’s 2.5 hours a day of social media content consumption will be taking place somewhere at all times of the day. People can always interact with your content, and your brand can always be promoting it.
Like a lot of these tips, engagement is strengthened by increases in information gained by more engagement. So use the information gained by studying how different types and methods of content engage your audiences comparatively.
Utilize Social Media For Excellent Customer Support
Excellent and reliable customer service can make or break a business. This can have such a huge impact on repeat business too. Integrating your customer service system into a social media presence can help customers feel heard and cared for. Messenger systems can offer direct feedback and support. This kind of no nonsense guidance can mean so much in this digital age.
Take Advantage Of Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is perhaps the very best example of how social media has taken word of mouth to the next level. Is influencer marketing a bit of an illusion? Maybe, in the sense that ultimating it is corporatizing interpersonal product recommendation, but when it works, it works. Above all else, there is no question anymore that it works. Whether you sell a complicated tech service that a tech blog can review, or you sell lip gloss and the latest TikTok celebrity can help you become the hottest trend, influencers reach audiences in a direct and efficient manner.
This is, of course, really just the tip of the iceberg. Social media management can be simple to learn and incredibly difficult to fully master. Paid ad spaces also offer a lot that can be taken advantage of, and social media partnerships can offer unique promotional capabilities. As social media continues to evolve, there will always be more and more ways to leverage social media for the success of a brand.
