Social media is a major part of marketing for businesses these days. There are many methods in which they can use social media to promote their business. In this article, I’ll show you several social media advertising methods and help you decide on which will work best for you.
Choose the Right Platforms
There is no shortage of social media sites on which to share your content. The number of sites is growing every day. Sharing your content on the right platforms is crucial to your success.
When determining which channels to use, you should consider your customers and your business. It’s important that you create accounts on the platforms your target audience uses, so they can easily connect with you. Conduct some research to determine what sites your audience probably uses, and then use them too.
You should also consider which sites best fit your products. For a video production company, for example, YouTube is an obvious choice.
Create a Calendar
Scrambling to create posts at the last minute can lead to low-quality content. A lack of organization can lead to repeated posts or a lull in your presence on one of your channels. Creating social media content calendars can help avoid those mistakes and lead to more effective posts. Content calendars also help you create goals and strategies for meeting them, and track your progress toward them.
To make a content calendar, use a regular calendar for each social media channel and plan out your posts in advance, complete with hashtags, links, images and other content.
Encourage Engagement
Social media should, of course, be social. That doesn’t only apply to those who use the sites for fun. Businesses need to be interactive, too. In order to take advantage of social capability, you need to encourage interaction.
Post content that people want to read, ask questions and like, repost and comment on other users’ posts. Doing research on your audience can help you figure out what they might like.
Create profiles on multiple platforms
“We’re on Facebook.”
I hear this all the time when I’m talking with small business owners about their social media strategies.
If you have a Facebook page for your business, that’s great. You’re headed in the right direction.
But Facebook alone won’t be enough to maximize your reach. You need to establish a presence on as many social platforms as possible.
Here’s a look at the social media channels that small businesses use the most:
As you can see, Facebook leads the way for small businesses.
Less than half of small businesses use Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter to market their brands. Furthermore, less than one-third of owners are taking advantage of LinkedIn and Snapchat.
Before you rush to create a profile on all the channels listed above, it’s important you understand your target market.
For example, LinkedIn is more beneficial to B2B companies. That’s because 80% of leads generated by B2B brands come from LinkedIn.
Let’s say your small business is targeting Generation Z as your primary audience. Well, 71% of Gen Z uses Snapchat at least six times each day. More than half of this generation uses Snapchat over 11 times daily.
But if your small business is trying to generate leads from Baby Boomers, it wouldn’t make sense to prioritize Snapchat.
For the most part, starting with a Facebook profile is a safe bet. With nearly 1.5 billion daily active users, you can assume your target audience has a presence there.
Believe it or not, after all these years, Facebook is still the fastest-growing social network. So it’s not going anywhere in the near future.
After you create a Facebook page, you need to determine which other channels are suitable for your brand and marketing strategy. I’d recommend creating a YouTube channel.
The video content you upload to YouTube will be easy to repurpose for your other marketing channels. These videos will give you an excuse to post content on other platforms when you’re running low on ideas, but we’ll talk about that in greater detail shortly.
Run Contests on Social Media to Attract Attention
A contest is a subtle way to promote your product without actually advertising it. Running contests on social media platforms will drive audience’s attention towards your product. To reap maximize benefits from the contest, keep it fun, simple, and offer giveaways to all participants. Ultimately, this will create loyalty towards your product in customers; thus, will help you in generating leads in long-term.
Address Problems Quickly
Hopefully you receive mostly positive feedback on social media. Occasionally you may encounter someone who is upset, argumentative or has something negative to say about your company.
You should carefully monitor mentions of your brand on social channels, so you can catch issues before they escalate. If you spot a problem, engage with the person by publicly apologizing if necessary and offering to solve the problem over a direct message exchange. This way, people who see the post know you were responsive but don’t have to see.
Conduct a social media audit
If you’re already using social media, now’s the time to take a step back and evaluate your existing efforts.
We’ve got an easy-to-use social media audit template to walk you through the process.
Provide Value
Perhaps the most important thing you can do on social media is provide value to your followers. Create something that your audience will find useful. It could be something that tells them something they didn’t know before, makes them laugh, entertains them or anything else that’s beneficial in some way.
This aspect of social media is what attracts the right customers to your business, makes people want to follow you on social sites and helps content to spread. Master this, and you’ll be a big step closer to a successful social media marketing campaign.
With nearly 3 billion active users, social media is a potential goldmine of new customers and current patrons who could become repeat customers. Create a good social campaign, and you’ll be able to connect with some of those people and grow your customer base.
Take advantage of ephemeral content
Ephemeral content is different from a regular post. This type of content is only displayed for a short period of time, such as 24 hours.
The most common places where you’ll find ephemeral content for social media is on Instagram and Snapchat. Both of these platforms have a “story” feature.
I highly recommend using an Instagram story to promote your business.
I briefly mentioned this earlier when discussing how frequently you should post content.
Your profiles need to be appealing to consumers. Run campaigns designed to get more followers.
Research the competition
How are your competitors using social media? While you don’t want to copy them, learning from what others have done is a great way to reduce your learning curve.
A competitive analysis can help you learn what’s working and what’s not for other businesses like yours.
Run deals and promo codes on social media
Newly introduced but proven to be a good way to promote products on social media is giving away deals and promo codes. Provide special deals to your customers on social media regularly so that they remain engaged at all times. You can also do a little brainstorming on how you can personalize the whole concept of offering discounts & promo codes to make your customers feel special. For example, providing discounts on birthdays, putting names of discount credit cards, etc. This will help them turn loyal towards your brand in long term.
Provide Social Proofs to build trust in your product
Customer review and testimonials act as an influencer that promotes your product to the consumer in a good light. Even large organizations with heavy budgets set up social media command centers to monitor their social proofs. The reason why you need to provide and track social proof is that it is always better that the consumer make an informed decision by knowing other customers’ experiences, rather than after being influenced by social media advertisements. That is why it is mindful to make customer testimonials or user-generated content the face of your brand on social media.
Check out tools like Yotpo that can help you with this. If it’s too expensive for your business, there are also plenty of Yotpo alternatives that are more affordable for small businesses.
Example: The Facebook page of GoPro is filled with testimonials and user-generated content. Users submit their epic pictures clicked by GoPro camera, which GoPro share on social media to make a greater impact on the potential buyers of their products.
Share Creative Visual Content for Better Engagement
Images, videos and other visual content have proven to be most effective for engaging users on social media. So, by posting creative pictures or product demo videos on different social networks, you can bring huge attention to your product.
Conclusion
Social media advertising is not as scary as it may seem. There are countless ways to promote your business on social media.
Follow above-mentioned tips with the nature of the social media audience in mind, and see how you get more engagement & sales for your product.