We have already covered a couple of social media marketing topics in our previous blogs. In our “Social media marketing FAQs” blog you learnt about ins and outs of social media, content marketing, and content strategy. In addition, you learnt more about social networks, effective content, measuring, and optimisation. You also learnt about paid social media and who in your company should manage social. We also previously gave you a social media checklist for free. Today, we’ll discuss different social media platforms and give tips for them.
You might already remember that social network marketing means using social media platforms to connect with your audience. Your company’s goal for can be for example to build your brand, increase sales, or to drive website traffic. Social network marketing involves publishing great content on your social media profiles, listening to and engaging your followers, analysing your results, and running social media advertisements.
The major social network marketing platforms at the moment are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. There are also a range of social media management tools that help businesses to get the most out of the social media platforms.
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Marketing using social media
Here are few of the most popular social media platforms for companies.
If your company has a Facebook business page it is easier for people to discover and interact with your brand online. Creating a Facebook business page isn’t very difficult. You likely already have all the photos, text, and ideas you need to build your Facebook business page. Just take the time to sit down and work through a few simple steps to get your page up and running.
To make your Facebook account look professional, first you need to get the profile information optimised. Before that it might be harder to grasp your audience’s attention and stand out from competition.
After the profile information and imagery have been optimised, you can move onto posting. Posting needs to be current and regular. It is good to utilize different kind of content, so it won’t be one-sided. All the content should be of good quality and typify your company.
It is not effective just to have a nice Facebook account if you don’t have any visitors. Thus, you would like to get likes from your target audience. These you can achieve though campaigns or organically. However, you should get likes from your target audience. Otherwise your time and money in Facebook might be wasted.
Instagram is a popular platform of marketing using social media. Marketing at Instagram at its simplest consists of product photos, but it’s not a strategy that should be taken lightly! A combination of great photography and an action-oriented caption can definitely help you find success with Instagram marketing. A solid, consistent brand strategy for Instagram is to periodically post photos of your products with some additional information in the caption. In each caption, try highlighting the product’s selling points, mention its price and direct people to where they can get it.
Though product photos are great, one way to make them feel more relatable to your followers is by showing your products in action. Showing someone using your product makes it easier for your followers to relate to the photo, putting them in the mindset of “I could be this person”. It also serves the second purpose of showing people the various situations in which your product can be used – which might even swing a follower’s purchase decision for the better.
Tips for Instagram
To make your Instagram content look versatile, here are some examples you can use:
- share customer testimonials, stories, and reviews
- run Instagram ads to a landing page or product page
- repost user-generated content
- make a contest
- use local/product-related hashtags
- comment on local/relevant photos
- create a branded hashtag
- collaborate with other brands
- partner with an influencer (you can read more about influencer marketing from our blog)
Twitter is a powerful social networking tool. And many people also use Twitter as a search engine you can typically find the latest information about virtually any topic. This also includes updates from the companies and businesses you care about.
A Twitter marketing strategy is a plan centred around creating, publishing, and distributing content for your buyer personas, audience, and followers through the social media platform. The goal of this type of strategy is to attract new followers and leads, boost conversions, improve brand recognition, and increase sales.
How to use Twitter for business, here are few tips for you:
- customise and brand your profile
- create Twitter lists
- host a Twitter chat
- advertise on Twitter
- drive traffic to your website
- use Twitter moments
- get verified on Twitter
- focus on building your follower count
LinkedIn is also a platform for marketing using social media. Unlike most social networks, Linkedin is a professional networking site. LinkedIn focuses on professional networking and career development. You can use LinkedIn to display your resume, search for jobs, and enhance your professional reputation by posting updates and interacting with other people. Companies can also use LinkedIn for marketing purposes.
Marketing using social media in LinkedIn
Here are few tips how a company can use LinkedIn for marketing:
- create an effective LinkedIn page
- define your audience and goals
- optimise your page for search
- grow your page followers
- publish engaging content on your company page
- use rich media to increase engagement
- highlight your best content
- make LinkedIn ad campaigns
- get advanced with analytics
YouTube
YouTube has more than 50 million content creators making videos regularly, so your own content has to stand out. The majority of YouTube viewers are not huge fans of advertising, so marketers have to think carefully about how you’re going to raise awareness about your brand while keeping viewers entertained.
Tips for YouTube
- After creating a YouTube channel for business, open a brand account on Google. When you create your YouTube channel using a regular Google account, only one person—the Google Account holder—can log into that channel. By creating your YouTube channel using a brand account, multiple authorized Google Accounts can log in simultaneously.
- Learn about your audience. Your YouTube channel for business gives you access to the analytics tab, which contains a ton of stats related to your channel. Look here for quantitative insights on your channel and your audience’s behaviour, including your view counts, average watch time, revenues generated and interaction rate across videos.
- Research your competition. Competitive analysis is essential if you want to pull ahead of other businesses in your niche on YouTube. Fortunately, a lot of the information you need to identify potential opportunities is readily available on their channels.
- Optimise your videos for SEO to get views. Your YouTube videos need to be optimised for search if you want to get the most value out of them. Pick the right title (with the right keywords), write a compelling video description, add hashtags to your video description and ask viewers to subscribe.
- Fix your channel to attract followers. After you’ve optimised your videos, you’ll need to optimise your YouTube channel itself. By providing a consistent experience across your channel, you’ll be able to bring in more views, and more importantly, convert those views into regular subscribers (at least fill out your YouTube profile and organize your videos into playlists)
- Make YouTube advertisements
- Try working with an influencer
Post themes in marketing using social media
If you do social network marketing, it is recommended to include as wide variety of themes to the posts as possible, without going too much off topic. The content should be highly relevant yet variable. It produces the best reach and engagement.
With good content you stand out from your competitors. To small companies even high-quality and considered content is usually enough. Remember to interact with your followers and reply to any messages. This makes you look professional. At some of the platforms you can ask your customers to give testimonials, so you can gain more trust.
Make content that somehow helps your audience. A good content solves people’s problems. You should make sure your target audience sees your posts. That means finding out where your prospected customers hang out and use these channels
Contests are a good way to activate your audience and gives your account more traffic. It is however important that the contest is interesting and has some kind of a target. Make sure your content isn’t only about your company or how good your products/services are. This doesn’t interest people. Remember to use different type of content and information.
Frequency of posting and post format
It’s recommended to post a minimum of once a week, however, it’s not endorsed to post more than 4 times a week on a regular basis (unless it’s a contest time or if we have unusually large amount of highly relevant content).
If you have limited resources to create more advanced content types, e.g. video or rich media, it’s recommended to post image and text. It’s always more effective to include an image to the post, as long as the image looks professional and is relevant to the topic (and your company and industry of course). Additionally, all posts should include a link to your website (or to another source website). All posts should contain from 2-10 most relevant hashtags with the most followers/posts.
If you do marketing using social media, it is important to make goals and measure your results. Your goal can be for example visibility, sales or making your own community.
If you are interested in marketing using social media, contact us already today!