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Social media marketing is the new norm with more than 4 billion users. Businesses irrespective of the niche are using social media for quality traffic, rigorous customer engagement, and driving sales.
But is being on social media enough? Of course not!
It is a worrisome concern for marketers to scale rapidly and gain mass visibility when the competition is this stiff.
Despite this, you can be a sensational hit on social media. It has a global penetration rate of 57%.
This means that more than half the world’s population is active on social media! The only catch is you have to leverage these social media platforms to the maximum.
So here we are to help you explore the best social media marketing tips for businesses to bridge the gap and mend the loopholes.
Let’s go!
Social Media Marketing Tips to Skyrocket Your Traffic
Too much to digest? Stay tuned with us as we break down each of these social media tips for you!
If you already think it’s even worth the hassle, then look at these social media statistics.
Did you know that using social media is the number one daily activity among Americans? A US user spends 38 minutes or more on Facebook daily. No wonder 92% of marketers consider it significant to use social media platforms for their businesses.
No wonder 92% of marketers consider it significant to use social media platforms for their businesses.
Social media networks keep growing year after year. So, developing an effective social media strategy is vital. Otherwise, you will lose out on valuable customers and rewarding outcomes.
Let’s begin with the ultimate 15 social media tips to boost your branding and make your life easier.
1. Define Your Goals
Well, what will you aim at if you have no target? You need to know the 5 Whys behind your actions. Your goal will be the driving force of your social media marketing strategy.
So without delaying anymore, grab a paper, and pen down your goals!
But before we jump ahead, here are a few things you must keep in mind while setting goals:
- Be specific
- Set attainable goals
- Make sure that your goals are measurable
2. Learn About Your Target Audience
Now that you have your goal in mind let’s look at the audience. Without the support of your audience, your strategy will be in vain.
Drawing your social media strategy around your audience is a must. Your target audience will help you figure out everything, right from the social media platforms you need to be on to every ounce of content you’ll ever create.
Still wondering why your audience should have all the spotlight?
Here’s the reason.
If you want to create messages that resonate with your audience, you need to know what they care about the most.
(Video) 15 Social Media Tips to Elevate your Marketing Strategy | SocioEarth
It is essential to define their questions, concerns, and problems. For most businesses, one of the biggest challenges is to connect with the right audience. To find your ideal audience, you need to figure out your target demographic and what social networks they use.
3. Select Your Social Media Platforms Wisely
It is not necessary to be available on all social media platforms, but what matters is to create an impact on a few that you are present on. It is probably one of the best tips for social media marketing.
It is not the quantity that matters; it’s the quality that counts! Putting out substandard content will only make things worse for you.
Instead, research and plan your social media presence to align with your goals and appeal to your target audience. Focus on the platforms that are preferred by your targeted demographic.
4. Build a Winning Game Plan for Social Media Marketing
Several research reports suggest that marketers who document their strategy are 538% more likely to succeed, which calls for some real-time action!
After all, penning down a social media marketing strategy is the key to turning your vision into reality.
While you prepare your strategy, consider relevant social media platforms you’ll be posting on. Make sure your posts appeal to your target audience and align with your goals.
Here are a few things to help you out with your social media strategy:
- Make a list of upcoming festivals and special days
- Create a content theme to provide your audience with a unified experience
- Prepare a list of hashtags for different platforms
- Make sure it covers your primary events, features, and campaigns
5. Set Up a Social Media Content Calendar
There is a saying – failing to plan is planning to fail.
No matter what you do, without planning, you will fail in social media marketing! So, use social media content calendars tools to organize and publish all your content timely and efficiently.
Content calendars also help distribute resources effectively, improve team collaboration and give a more in-depth understanding of what works and what doesn’t.
You’ll find ample templates online to prepare your calendar. You can use SocialPilot’s calendar or any other social media scheduling tools to plan your content calendar.
The best thing about it is that it enables you to put up images, set timings for your posts for multiple social media, and much more from a single dashboard.
Just create and update the publishing calendar once a week, set workflows, and accommodate last-minute changes at one go with SocialPilot.
Set your content calendar in motion with SocialPilot.
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6. Use the Art of Storytelling
It’s the stories that sell, not the product! We, humans, connect to stories. It is the emotional attachment that a brand builds with its audience. Stories inspire ideas and encourage interaction.
Here’s a perfect example of Airbnb that will make you go all emotional. A super cool animation that is executed perfectly. Check out how they convey their message.
But this is not the only way to tell a story. There are simpler ways too, to move your audience. Share successive posts to build excitement and relate the whole story from the beginning to the end.
Here’s an example of a Nike tweet thread to hook their audience right.
7. Humanize Your Brand
As much as all the digital innovations have made it easier to communicate, it is the emotion that we miss out on.
By the term ‘humanize your brand,’ we mean to go beyond the glass tops of these digital screens. Show your audience what goes in your office, introduce them to your employees, and show the people behind your brand.
Remember that brand stories are not ads or sales pitches. They help the audience connect to your brand. Your stories tell them what you stand for, and they display your culture as well as your values.
For instance, share your plans for Friday and the fun team-building activities. Let employees take over your social media for once and connect with the audience.
Take a look at how SE Ranking does it on their Facebook page.
8. Use Emoticons
Well, there is a reason there are emoticons. Emojis serve the purpose of conveying emotion by depicting facial expressions.
Apt use of emotions is extremely important to convey the desired tone and emotion behind the message. The glitch with written texts is that, if not formatted correctly, they can be easily misinterpreted. Here’s a small example.
- You are an idiot! 😆
- You are an idiot! 😡
The above phrases consist of the same words but with different emojis and convey separate messages.
It is the emoticons that get the readers more excited about your content. So, next time you write, feel free to play around and include these.
9. Let the Tools Empower Your Strategy
Social media tools are going to be your savior. Imagine being on 8 different platforms and posting manually on each of them 3 times a day.
Damn, what a nightmare! All you’ll possibly do is publish hastily without any real productivity.
Instead, how about we leave the monotonous work for the tools? Yup! That is possible.
Try to automate as much of the activity as possible. For example, schedule your social media updates ahead of time.
Use social media scheduling tools like SocialPilot to auto-post your updates to all your social accounts, then evaluate the results with their analytics.
So, the whole point of using tools is to plan ahead of time. Plan, create, and schedule posts on your content calendar. Scheduling tools have an inbuilt content calendar that makes it easier to keep an eye on your posts.
Schedule your pins, tweets, posts, hashtags, and social media mentions all in one go for the month. Such an approach will save you time, helping you be more productive and focused on the overall strategy.
Try SocialPilot for free and boost your Social Media Marketing efforts
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10. Embrace Your Mistakes
We are all humans, and we make mistakes. This is especially important to accept in the fast-growing world of social media. Instead of being ignorant of your mistakes, accept and apologize for the same. Work on them and tell your customers about them. They’ll love to hear that you worked on your mistakes to provide them with better services.
Don’t delete the post if you’ve made a grammar mistake or missed a comma. Probably, people liked your post, and they will notice your continuous re-posting.
Concerned about bigger mistakes?
For example, a product error or accidentally charging a customer’s credit card twice. Immediately respond in such scenarios. Publish a post from your social media accounts telling how you handled the error.
For instance, Pamela Vaughan from HubSpot regulated her baby bump error. Instead of her personal Twitter account, she accidentally published a picture of her growing pregnant belly on HubSpot’s Twitter account, which had over 340,000 followers.
She didn’t get bogged down and created an excellent blog post about her 15 minutes of shame on Twitter that got a lot of shares and comments.
Interesting read: Social Media Statistics To Improve Your Marketing Strategies
11. Optimize Your Post Frequency
Every audience uses various social networks at different times of the day. To connect with them, you need to know what type of content interests them, who is the potential purchaser of your services or products, and what age group is more accessible to sell.
But this is followed by another set of questions:
- How often should you post per day?
- What type of content should you post?
- What is the ideal number of posts per day?
These are some of the most common questions that any social media marketer is expected to answer.
Honestly, there is no ideal answer. Your answers come with your analysis, experience, and tests of what works for you and what doesn’t.
Start with finding out the right time to post. It is essential for your social media marketing strategy to work in your favor. It is important to publish high-quality content and find the ideal posting frequency for integrating a successful marketing strategy.
We found many studies, and each one showed a different social media timing with the recommended number of posts for each network. Here’s the average timing and frequency.
12. Cut Back on the Number of Hashtags
Hashtags are great if you want to organize your social media posts. You can click on a specific hashtag, and all the content for a certain topic becomes visible. Hashtags are identifiers of your brand that help you initiate conversations and engage with your followers.
But you know what?
The more hashtags you use, the less engagement you get. The following chart from LINCHPINSEO gathers the acquired data.
Too many hashtags can annoy people and can scale back your engagement rate. To avoid that, use 2 or 3 targeted hashtags per post on your social media channels and use only relevant, high-volume hashtags you can find using hashtag generator tools.
13. Treat Each Social Channel Uniquely
Many people believe that social media is a useful distribution tool and use the same message on each channel.
But it is not right. If you want to succeed in social media, you should treat each social media platform uniquely and consider its functionalities and features. There are multiple social media tools for agencies that not only help you by scheduling your posts but also let you customize your post for the individual platform.
Gary Vaynerchuk gives single-eyed explanations for his most used social channel differently. Facebook is a great communication tool for his entire community to promote books, web-shows and ask many questions. Twitter is perfect for real-time news and offers one-on-one interactions.
If you follow his Instagram account, you will see a bunch of real and impressive images about his travels and daily life. This platform is a great place to share high-quality visuals.
When it comes to LinkedIn, it includes a more business-oriented audience that is searching for insightful and informative content.
If you want to grow a loyal fanbase, use a creative strategy for each social channel. Take into consideration your follower demographics and share content that appeals most to them.
14. Share Quality Visual Content
Do you leverage visual content while sharing blog posts on your social media platforms? We guess, yes. Visual content is a must to boost your social media engagement.
The Wyzowl study showed that we remember only 20% of what we read and 80% of what we see. The research from Software Advice and Adobe revealed that photos and images are the most powerful social media strategy.
People are more likely to share visual content on social networks. They find visuals attractive as they offer more value and assist in generating more traffic, increasing sales, and taking you to the top. Using visuals should be the main ingredient of your social media marketing strategy. Such visuals can even come in the form interactive documents – you can post a PDF flipbook on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter to engage your readers.
Read: How to create engaging images for Social Media?
15. Dive Deep into Social Media Analytics
Analytics help you understand your audience and learn what generates more traffic. Without these, you can’t make accurate sales forecasts and perfect your products. You can effectively use social media data to drive performance.
Reviewing analytics emphasizes stats like follower growth, page views, number of posts, likes, shares, impressions, clicks, etc.
Social media analytics and reporting by SocialPilot help you keep track of your social media analytics. Use your results and organize monthly meetings with your marketing team to discuss the analytics, reevaluate your strategy, if needed, and make plans for the future.
Its report exporting feature is a great help in sharing the results of your social efforts with team members and clients. Especially, the scheduled report function allows you to share reports automatically via emails on your chosen weekday or the 1st of every month.
Pro Tip Do you want to be ahead of your competitors? Always know what they are doing by using a competitor research tool like SE Ranking SEO Software to see how their ads look like and perform and what keywords they are using.
Bottom Line
An effective social media marketing strategy is an essential part of your overall marketing plan. Using unconventional ways to interact with your audience will allow you to improve your outreach.
Measure the impact of your social media marketing efforts by using social media analytics tools and uncover audience details and how they interact with your business.
Let us know what social media hacks you use the most. Share the ones you are excited to use. Stay tuned to learn more about social media marketing tips to get your brand wheel spinning.
FAQs
What are your best tips for social media marketing? ›
- Create a Strategy. Each platform needs its strategy. ...
- Be Consistent. While posting consistency depends on the platform, posting content regularly is always a good rule of thumb to follow. ...
- Create Engaging & Interesting Content. ...
- Engagement. ...
- Track and Analyze Metrics.
- 1: Audience Knowledge. Social media provides a platform for people to reveal information about themselves that is normally unavailable. ...
- 2: Lead Generation. Facebook (and soon Instagram!) ...
- 3: Web Traffic & SERP. ...
- 4: Customer Engagement & Interaction. ...
- 5: Brand Awareness & Authority.
- Educate your audience. ...
- Choose stories > promotion. ...
- Produce diversified content types. ...
- Try micro-influencer marketing. ...
- Capitalize on customer loyalty. ...
- Use virtual and augmented reality. ...
- Embrace video and live streaming. ...
- Leverage privacy and exclusivity.
What Are the 6 Types of Social Media? The six types of social media, though this can be broken down in many ways, include social networking, bookmarking, social news, media sharing, microblogging, and online forum sites.
What is the most important thing in social media marketing? ›Creating an audience persona
The core of effective social media marketing is about speaking to a specific audience with your social posts. And unless you have an intuitive idea of who your target audience really is, you'll need to create audience personas.
- You reach large audiences.
- You have a direct connection with your audience.
- You can create organic content.
- You have access to paid advertising services.
- You build your brand.
- You drive traffic to your website.
- You can evaluate your performance.
- It's cost-effective.
- It provides authenticity.
- It compliments advertising.
- It fosters your creative voice.
- It provides a forum for customer care.
- It builds engaged communities.
- It helps search engine optimization.
- Step 1: Determine your objectives. ...
- Step 2: Build Your Marketing Funnel. ...
- Step 3: Define Your Audience. ...
- Step 4: Outline Your Messaging. ...
- Step 5: Select Your Marketing Channels. ...
- Step 6: Define Your Content. ...
- Step 7: Execute and Analyze.
- Step 1: Create a customer persona. ...
- Step 2: Identify your goals and tools. ...
- Step 3: Focus on blogging. ...
- Step 4: Evaluate existing digital marketing channels. ...
- Step 5: Automate marketing. ...
- Step 6: Nail mobile optimization. ...
- Step 7: Make it easy for customers to reach you.
The 7Ps of marketing are – product, pricing, place, promotion, physical evidence, people, and processes. The 7 Ps make up the necessary marketing mix that a business must have to advertise a product or service.
What are the 7 common methods of marketing communication? ›
- Advertising (TV, radio, press, PPC) Advertising covers all avenues where a business pays for their message to be broadcast. ...
- Direct marketing & digital marketing (email, social media, gamification, etc) ...
- Public relations (PR) ...
- Personal selling. ...
- Sales promotion.
- Social Networks. The primary goal of social networks is to help you connect with people, build communities and groups, share ideas, interests, and information. ...
- Messaging Apps. ...
- Photo & Media Sharing Apps. ...
- Blogging & Publishing Networks. ...
- Interactive Apps. ...
- Discussion Forums. ...
- Bookmarking & Content Curation. ...
- Review Networks.
- Instant online discussions. Social media is the go to medium for people to interact. ...
- Relationships. ...
- Knowledge Sharing. ...
- Low cost. ...
- Connect at any time. ...
- Branding. ...
- Social media content is now integrated with search results.
5 benefits of social media marketing:
Increase trustworthiness and brand recognition. Increase levels of customer service and satisfaction. Foster online community and tell authentic stories. Become part of the zeitgeist.
- Building Relationships and Staying Connected. Social media can make it easy to find groups of like-minded people or make new friends. ...
- Finding Your Voice. ...
- Showing Empathy and Kindness. ...
- Offering Support. ...
- Better Communication. ...
- Spreading News. ...
- Building a Business. ...
- Establishing Authority.
...
- Global connectivity.
- The right place for noble causes.
- An excellent tool for education.
- Information & updates.
- Share a large amount of information daily.
- Join a community.
- Drive traffic to your website.
- Access to paid advertising services.
- Improved Brand Awareness. Increasing your businesses visibility shouldn't have to be the hardest task in the world, especially with the power of social media. ...
- Cost-effective. ...
- Engage with Your Customers. ...
- Brand Loyalty. ...
- Better Customer Satisfaction.
The positive aspects of social media
Social media enables you to: Communicate and stay up to date with family and friends around the world. Find new friends and communities; network with other people who share similar interests or ambitions. Join or promote worthwhile causes; raise awareness on important issues.
- Social Networking Sites. These are sites mainly used for connecting with friends and family. ...
- Image-based sites. Image-based types of content have gained more prominence in recent times. ...
- Video sharing/streaming platforms. ...
- Discussion forums. ...
- Blogs and community platforms.
- Step one: Identify your goals. ...
- Step Two: Customer research. ...
- Step 3: Leveraging the right content management system. ...
- Step 4: Identifying what form your content should take.
What are the 12 steps of marketing? ›
- Purpose. ...
- Describe Product or Service and Market. ...
- Identify the Competition. ...
- Setting the Price. ...
- The Advertising and Promotion Mix. ...
- Develop a Budget. ...
- Location. ...
- Estimate Your Sales.
A marketing strategy is a long-term plan for achieving a company's goals by understanding the needs of customers and creating a distinct and sustainable competitive advantage. It encompasses everything from determining who your customers are to deciding what channels you use to reach those customers.
What are the 5 elements of media strategy? ›- Audience Awareness. ...
- Ideal Platform Selection. ...
- Data-Driven Risk-Taking. ...
- Constant Learning and Adaptation. ...
- Integrate within Digital Strategy. ...
- Conclusion.
- Invest time in understanding your audience's needs. ...
- Dedicate resources to your content marketing strategy. ...
- Set high editorial standards. ...
- Build a presence on social channels. ...
- Be consistent.
An effective Content Marketing strategy should have these five core elements to be successful: audience personas, brand positioning, owned media value proposition, business case, and an action plan. Let's see why these elements are essential and how you can start implementing each of them.
How can I improve my marketing strategy? ›- Establish a cross-department workflow. ...
- Work with your audience in mind. ...
- Know your customers. ...
- Align all consumer insights. ...
- Establish your key marketing metrics. ...
- Prioritize content development. ...
- Stay on brand. ...
- Focus on the ROI of your campaigns.
The building blocks of an effective marketing strategy include the 6 P's of marketing: product, price, place, promotion, people, and presentation. The effective integration of the 6 P's of marketing can serve as the foundation for an effective growth strategy.
What are 5 examples of marketing? ›- Get on the Phone and Cold Call. Whether they call current customers or members of the general public, companies often simply call people up on the phone and offer them services. ...
- Send a Punchy Newsletter. ...
- Search Engine Marketing. ...
- Meeting Customers at Trade Shows. ...
- Product Placement in Entertainment.
(Marketing mix explained) The four Ps are product, price, place, and promotion. They are an example of a “marketing mix,” or the combined tools and methodologies used by marketers to achieve their marketing objectives.
What are the 4 marketing channels? ›Broadly, the four main types of marketing channels are paid, free, digital, and traditional channels. Several marketing channels, including social media, influencers, and paid ads, fall under these main marketing channels.
What are the 9 advertising techniques? ›
- Emotional Appeal. ...
- Promotional Advertising. ...
- Bandwagon Advertising. ...
- Facts and Statistics. ...
- Unfinished Ads. ...
- Weasel Words. ...
- Endorsements. ...
- Complementing the Customers.
The three marketing channels that are the most popular today are email, social media, and text marketing.
What are the best 6 tips for content marketing? ›- Create Content That Is Long And Lean. Longer content often performs better in searches than pieces that are shorter. ...
- Use Data. ...
- Don't Forget The Visuals. ...
- Repurpose Content. ...
- Pay Attention To Analytics.
These seven are: product, price, promotion, place, packaging, positioning and people. As products, markets, customers and needs change rapidly, you must continually revisit these seven Ps to make sure you're on track and achieving the maximum results possible for you in today's marketplace.
What are examples of social media strategies? ›- Using humor.
- Use influencer marketing right.
- Involve your community and user-generated content.
- Hold social media contests and giveaways.