There’s no doubt in the fact that social media is the fastest growing trend in the history of the world. It has successfully revolutionized the mode of communication among humans.
Since the past few years there has been a rapid growth in various social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and many others and the need for Social Media in business has become stronger over time. It has become an essential part for any kind of business whether it is a small, local operation, or a global, enterprise-level business.
Let's take a look at what benefits Social Media provides for a business:
- Social Media plays an important part in generating more interests of the audience.
- Social media acts as a complementary research tool. With its help a business can gain information that will aid it in understanding the industry.
- It helps a business to reach more audience outside their loyal customer circle.
- It helps in increasing awareness about the business.
- It enables direct interaction with the customers.
Social Media Marketing is a type of online marketing that makes use of social networking websites as a marketing tool. The goal of Social media marketing is to create content that users will share in virtual communities and networks to help a company broaden customer reach and increase brand exposure.
Keeping these things in mind, it’s time to look at the most popular social media platforms.
Facebook is the most widely-used social network to date. It has played a vital role in connecting distant friends and family members and bridging the gap between brands and their communities. It has taken the way of online interaction to a whole new level.
According to research, active users on Facebook include men and women from all age groups. However, the most active users are 25 to 34-year old men. Presently, there are over 2.32 billion monthly active users (MAU) in the world.
A Beginner’s Guide to Facebook Marketing:
Planning to use Facebook as your marketing tool? Here are some tips to be considered:
- The first and most important Facebook marketing tool for brands is Facebook Pages. A Page is the hub of information for every brand, be it a company, product, service, or even an expert or a celebrity.
- Users will automatically receive updates from that page in their news feed when they “Like” a page and “Follow” it. So, it's important for a brand or a company to set up a strong profile for its business page. A Company or Brand logo as a profile picture and a Good “About” section will serve this purpose.
- The next thing would be to select its target audience in order to create ads targeted at specific geographic areas, ages and even the types of devices used for browsing. Facebook is considered to have one of the best-targeted advertising programs online.
- Post useful information from time to time to the timeline that will serve the purpose for the users. Facebook provides a wide variety of posting content online. These include videos, offers, leads, canvas, carousel, events and many more. Each ad has a certain advantage and can be useful depending on the type of marketing one is doing.
- Make use of Facebook Page Insights tool that tells you about who your customers are, where they are located, and how much they are engaging with your page and individual posts.
Instagram:
Instagram is the most popular photo-sharing social networking site that enables users to post and share their images online directly with friends and followers on their network. As of June 2018, Instagram has 1 billion MAU and 500 Stories DAU out of which the main audience is 18 to 34-year old men and women. It has been analyzed that about 72% of teenagers use Instagram.
Instagram is considered as “the new home for brands,” because of the fact that here the followers are brand-loyal, engagement is high and real business goals can be achieved.
A Beginner’s Guide to Instagram Marketing:
Here’s everything you need to know about how to use Instagram for business:
- Start with setting up an Instagram business account and provide all the necessary information of the business including contact details, bio, and address.
- Next thing is to understand who the target audience is. Before you can decide what type of content is to be posted, you need to think about who’s going to see it.
- Set goals and objectives for the company in order to keep the company on track and focus all of its efforts on achieving real business objectives.
- Once the page starts building a following on Instagram, the followers will expect to see posts from it on a regular basis. You have to keep them well aware of your brand and keep them engaged with interesting content. Also focus should be on not overwhelming them to the point that they unfollow.
- One should also focus on the two important performance metrics such as
- Awareness metrics that includes brand awareness, follower growth rate, and post reach.
- Engagement metrics that includes metrics like engagement rate (based on likes) and amplification rate (based on shares).
- Instagram is all about sharing great content. For this, you have to create a visual aesthetic for your brand and make use of quality and trending hashtags.
- There are 4 types of ads you can choose from on Instagram:
- Showcase your products through images
- Engage with Video Ads up to 60 seconds.
- Carousel Ads that enable users to swipe through up to 10 images or videos, each with a CTA (call to action) button that connects them to the company website.
- Stories Ads, that last for 24 hours, are full-screen ads in which one can share photos and videos with their audience.
- Instagram provides various options for tracking the right analytics that helps in growing your audience base and becoming more influential on the platform. Instagram’s built-in analytics tracker is one of the important tools that helps to keep a check on your profile performance at a glance. It lets you know your post reach, post engagements and profile visits.
LinkedIn is a business-oriented social network that has been specifically designed to connect career and business professionals. As of the latest stats, LinkedIn has about 240 million active users.
LinkedIn plays a vital role in business as it has the ability to tap into existing connections and grow the company brand through word-of-mouth. LinkedIn is the number one channel B2B marketers use to distribute content. It is considered to be the most effective site for lead generation by 93% B2B marketers.
A Beginner’s Guide to LinkedIn Marketing:
- The first and foremost thing is to create a strong company profile.
- The next step is to post valuable content which is considered to be the best way to grow your audience and keep your followers engaged. LinkedIn recommends posting at least once per weekday.
- Since LinkedIn is a professional platform it's better to make use of this platform in a professional manner. Sharing informative blogs, news articles and inspirational images can serve the purpose. You can keep your audience engaged with professional updates, latest job postings and corporate press releases.
- Become a part of LinkedIn Groups or create a group. It will enable you to connect with other professionals and businesses from the same field. It also helps in being a part of valuable interaction and group discussions that will also attract views to the Company Page.
- Make ample use of LinkedIn analytics. It gives you an insight about who is visiting your Company Page and the way they interact with your content once they get there that helps to maximize the effectiveness of this platform.
YouTube
YouTube is the most popular video sharing website which enables its registered users to upload and share videos with anyone accessing the site. These videos can also be shared on other sites. According to the latest stats, 1.9 billion logged-in users visit YouTube every month.
A Beginner’s Guide to YouTube Marketing:
- Start by creating a YouTube Channel for business and frame a perfect YouTube channel profile.
- For any social media platform its necessary to know the target audience. So, start finalizing your target audience.
- After finalizing your target audience, the next step will be to create videos with strong content. Videos should have an interesting title with the required keywords in order to reach the right users. Use trending hashtags in the video description and appealing thumbnails to catch immediate attention of a large number of audience.
- Another way of YouTube Marketing is YouTube ads that come in different varieties, Skippable video ads, Non-skippable video ads, Display ads, Bumper ads, etc.
- YouTube also has a YouTube Community Page which helps in finding out about your audience. It enables you to interact with your subscribers directly. In order to know more about your audience, it enables you to post questions or create polls to gain a deeper understanding.
- YouTube also provides YouTube Analytics that helps in analyzing significant changes in subscriber count, changing audience demographics, traffic sources and device reports (mobile, desktop, smart TVs, etc.).
Social Media Marketing Tools:
There are many tools that help businesses in handling and analyzing the effectiveness of their marketing strategies over various social media platforms. Let's have a brief look at some of these tools:
Hootsuite:
Hootsuite is a famous Social Media Marketing tool that enables you to handle all your social media platforms at a time.
Apart from this, it lets you schedule a tweet or a post to be posted on a particular day on all social media platforms. It also displays analytics, which helps you analyze which tweets or posts were more engaging than the others.
Buzzsumo:
Nowadays, content is the key to success. It helps you to grab your customer’s attention and engage them. Buzzsumo is a growth hacking tool that lets you do so. It finds relevant keywords and specific content topics that are more likely to be viewed by customers on social media platforms. You can then create relevant content that will engage consumers, urging them to share your content on social media, and increase conversions with strategic CTAs.
Buzzsumo is not only a great tool for tracking social shares, but also finding influencers who shared your content. The information can then be used to make a list of contacts for an influencer marketing campaign – another sure way to enhance growth.
It is also a great competitor research tool. It gives detailed insights into the most competition’s content and details about their performance, which will enable you to learn about various strategies and techniques to ensure your content reaches its target audience. Moreover, it is absolutely free to use. Companies like National Geographic, Ted, Vimeo also use Buzzsumo for customer referrals.
Conclusion
Social Media Marketing has become an important tool that businesses cannot take for granted. Just to have a social media presence is not enough; you should use it as a full-fledged marketing channel.
It should also be taken into consideration that different social media platforms have different uses. On one platform, blog content is the king. On another, video content has domination. And on another platform, pictures win the day. So, it is advisable to create content that works well on each platform.
If you haven’t chalked your social media strategy, make sure that you start planning today.