Too many businesses go into social media marketing on an ad hoc basis. They know they should do something about social media, but don't really understand what they should do. Some firms just give access to the company's social accounts to some junior staff members – merely because they are young, so should know all about social media.
However, we are well past a social strategy of post and hope. All businesses need to create a social media marketing strategy and operate the business social accounts in a thoughtful, measured way.
If you don’t, you risk the danger that your competitors will, and as a result, they will gain market traction and exposure over you.
Firms can’t ignore social media, however. According to Ambassador, 71% of consumers who have had a good social media service experience with a brand are likely to recommend it to others. Yet, 96% of the people that discuss brands online do not follow those brands’ owned profiles.
Even if you embrace the wonders of influencer marketing, you still need to operate some social accounts yourself. Often the goal of influencer marketing is to direct visitors to your social sites. You should consider influencer marketing to be merely an extension of your business’ social marketing strategy.
Here are 10 top-notch social media marketing strategies for a business that works really well.
1. Select Relevant and Realistic Social Media Marketing Goals.
One of the most significant problems faced by many businesses engaged in social media is that they have never spent the time to set relevant and realistic social media marketing goals. They know they need to be on social media, but have no idea why they are there.
Of course, your social media marketing goals need to fit into your business planning as a whole. Ideally, you will have set strategic goals for how you want your business to progress. Your social media marketing goals should complement your overarching business goals.
2. Determine Your Most Relevant Metrics
Too many businesses create a social presence and spend time and other resources on using their social accounts, without ever establishing whether they see any success or not.
Unfortunately, social analytics can be a gray area because they are not the same for every business. Once again, your most relevant social metrics will relate to the goals you have set yourself. The Influencer Marketing Hub has written a free e-book to help you here - How to Measure Influencer Marketing ROI.
Don’t be sucked in by easy-to-measure vanity metrics, such as the number of followers someone has. We have previously written about why buying Instagram followers is a really bad idea. The existence of fake followers on any social network means that follower numbers have little value as a metric.
Ideally, you should look at the marketing goals you set above, and determine which metrics will provide you with the answer as to whether you are meeting that goal. For example, if you have a goal that aims to increase your brand awareness, then Post Reach is a relevant statistic. It will tell you how far your content is spreading across social channels.
If your goals are more sales-based, or you want to drive people to take a particular action, then you should take notice of the number of Clicks. Tracking Clicks per campaign will give you a good indication of what drives people to buy or do what you ask of them.
You will often take most interest in the engagements on your posts. This shows how people interact with your content and whether it resounds with them.
3. Decide Who You Want as Your Social Media Audience
One of the most common mistakes made by firms on social media is to think that all followers will be good for them. There is a good reason why pundits deemphasize the metric Follower Numbers and call them vanity metrics. There is little point having somebody as a follower unless he is likely to take an interest in the content you share.
This is probably the biggest problem with buying fake followers. As we wrote in 8 Reasons You Shouldn’t Buy Instagram Followers, fake followers don’t engage with your account. Some aren’t real people at all, merely bots. They certainly won’t make future customers. These people, whether they are real or fake accounts, will not spend any money on your products. They will not refer people to you. They are of no value to you at all.
Look back at those goals you set in Step 1. There is little point having social media followers who can’t help you work towards meeting your goals. In most situations, you want your social media followers to be of a similar type to your intended customers.
For example, if you sell stairlifts to homeowners struggling to remain mobile in their homes, there is little point trying to attract a young social media audience of people who either rent or still live with their parents. Likewise, if you sell makeup and other beauty treatments, there is little point targeting football players and their fans.
This is particularly relevant if you sell products to a geographically distinct market. In that case, you will not want to have many followers from regions and countries where people cannot buy your products.
4. Understand Your Social Media Audience
Not all social media audiences are alike. Different types of people use social media in varying ways. If you’re going to meet your goals, you need to be using the same social media networks as your target audience. Similarly, if you intend to engage in influencer marketing, you need to ensure that you engage influencers whose audience matches your target market.
You might be a middle-aged executive who uses Facebook. However, if you personally don’t match the target market of your business, you can’t automatically assume that your customers will also be spending their time on Facebook. Sure, there may have been 2.27 billion monthly active Facebook users in Q3 2018, but if you target a young demographic, you are far more likely to reach them on Snapchat or Instagram. However, if your business targets people aged 25 to 34, they make 29.7% of Facebook users, and are their most common age demographic.
Look at your social media marketing goals you have previously set. Which social channels will best help you meet those goals?
To be successful at doing this, you need to have a solid understanding of your customer base. If you have ever established personas for your ideal customers, now is the time to dust them off. What do your customers look like, and how do they spend their time on the internet?The better you can understand the demographics and psychographics of your target market, the better you will be at reaching them on your social channels.
5. Select the Right Social Media Networks for Your Audience
Some people worry about how they are going to find the time and energy to operate accounts on every social network. In most cases, you don’t need to. You simply need to find the right social networks for your business. You want to discover the social networks where your intended audience spends their time.
You may have to carry out some research first to discover where your intended audience hangs out. This shouldn't be too difficult, particularly if you know your customers. If you don’t already understand this, you could survey them, asking them for their preferred social accounts.
You could start with your audience's most preferred network and then widen to include others where a sufficiently large number operates active social accounts. You generally wouldn't need to go further than three to five social networks, however.
We are taking a reasonably broad definition of social networks here. Obviously, you include well-known ones like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter in your considerations. You could also look at video platforms like YouTube and TikTok if your target audience uses them in large numbers. In some cases, live streaming apps like Twitch or Mixer might be suitable for your audience, too.
Pew Research has collected valuable data on the use of different online platforms by demographic groups (for US adults) that may be of value to you in deciding the best social media networks for your audience.
6. Investigate How Your Competitors Approach Social Media
Most firms don’t operate in isolation. You will usually have competitors who will also run a social strategy. You will definitely need to know what they are doing. What is their focus? Whom are they targeting? What key phrases are they trying to dominate?
You can quickly conduct a competitor analysis to help you better understand their strengths and weaknesses. This should give you a better understanding of what potential customers expect from businesses in your industry.
You might spot your competitors’ weak social areas and be able to exploit the gaps. For instance, one of your competitors might be influential on Twitter, but have a weak Facebook presence, despite your target market using that network. In that case, it may pay you to put more resources into Facebook rather than competing head to head on Twitter.
You could use a tool like Buzzsumo to spy on your competitors and discover their most successful social pieces of content. Once you know what types of content resound for them on which social networks, you can produce and share similar, but better, material.
7. Plan the Types of Content You Intend to Share
Of course, to be successful on social media, you will need high-quality content to share. One of the biggest mistakes that businesses do is to share excessive promotional material. Remember, social networks are designed to be social – they were never intended to be a marketplace for you to sell your products.
Therefore, you need to balance the content you share socially, to be a mixture of informative and entertaining items, with a small percentage of promotional material added in. You will also need to like and share other peoples’ content.
This is probably the most significant reason that most influencers gain that status. They know their audience well and create the perfect content to interest their followers. As a brand, you need to do the same.
If you have previously determined your goals and discovered what works (and what doesn’t) for your competition, you should have a reasonable idea of the type of content that will resonate with your target audience. There is little point creating content for other types of people who will never help you meet your goals.
8. Create Suitable Content to Share with Your Followers
There are four questions you should ask yourself when creating content:
- What is the optimal character count per social media channel?
- What is the number of hashtags for messages on each social channel?
- Should I be using emoji in my social media messages?
- What is the best content type for each channel?
Don't forget the importance of images and videos. Visual content is more than 40 times more likely to be shared on social media than other types of content. Instagram has rapidly grown in importance over the last few years, and it has a significant visual focus. Top brands on Instagram report a per-follower engagement rate of 4.21%. That is 58 times higher than on Facebook and 120 times higher than on Twitter.
Each year, video content appears to increase in popularity, too. According to YouTube, mobile video consumption grows by 100% every year. 64% of customers say they are more likely to buy a product online after watching a video about it.
9. Engage with Your Audiences
People don’t just go onto social networks to read, look at, or watch content. They go online to interact with other people and to be social. Successful businesses do not just broadcast to their social audiences. They engage with them too.
This is why you should not attempt to cover every social network unless you have a very diverse target market and an army of personnel dedicated to this task. By focusing your attention on the social networks your target market frequents, you can use your resources efficiently.
Some firms have found it very useful to create custom hashtags. Not only can these encourage discussions and sharing, but they also make it easier for you to search for posts that reference your business.
Ideally, you should respond to all social mentions of your business and demonstrate that customer care is a priority for you.
10. Consider Paid Promotion to Boost Your Audiences
Most social networks allow you to buy some form of paid ads. Most will enable you to demographically target your ads, making them only visible to your preferred target audience.
Paid promotions allow you to reach relevant audiences to whom you don't currently connect. You can use advertisements to build brand recognition, promote particular posts/videos, or even to sell products.
