Today, social media platforms top the list of the most effective tools that can help improve your company's marketing campaign.
With about 4.62 billion people on social media, consisting of more than 58% of the world's population, it's much easier to market your business to a broader audience.
One significant aspect where social media makes your business distinct from your competitors is that it enables you to attract unique customers, regardless of location.
It also allows you to inform a larger audience about your brand, foster customer relationships, and learn ideas that may directly affect your business.
At the same time, you can make important decisions about it - both offline and online.
However, many social media practices are available online but finding the best ones suitable for you is arduous.
Fortunately, this is what this report is all about.
In this book, you’ll learn all the best social media practices for your business, possibly in the correct order, and how to implement them.
Set Explicit Marketing Goals
If you do not set explicit goals initially, there's no point in embarking on a task for your business. Knowing what to expect at the end of your mission should be your prime purpose. Not only will it help you to measure your progress, but it will also help increase your productivity level.
Setting explicit marketing goals is essential for your social media marketing mission because it guides you in preparing enough resources to sustain you through the process. You wouldn’t have shortfalls of resources, and neither would you waste them. For instance, the money and time you’ll need to spend on every marketing plan – organic or paid.
Without explicit goals, it's easy for you to get carried away or get overwhelmed by multiple tasks, stopping you from achieving your social media marketing goals.
Below are some crucial points top companies use to set social media marketing goals for their business.
Increase your brand’s awareness
Brand awareness helps you to know how much is said about you compared to your competitor and how much your audience frequently interacts with your content. While you are focused on this dream, brand awareness should be a long-term goal for your business.
Its primary influence on your business is its ability to impact your target audience strongly. Brand awareness should be your first goal in social media marketing; here, you can measure your growth through followers, impressions, and coverage.
To generate leads and sales
Lead generation simply means turning your social media presence into a funnel that gets you the paying customers. You can generate leads for your business by placing the necessary link on all your social media handles through ads, direct online communications with customers, and promotions.
Sales conversion rates, subscribers, and email/newsletter sign-ups are the common ways to measure lead generation and sales.
To engage your brand’s audience
The number of clicks, likes, shares, comments and mentions you earn regularly is the indicator for measuring your audience engagements. Building relationships with your target audience requires encouraging communication with them.
Brand engagement gives you essential information about how well your customers respond to your messaging and content strategy. While some may see this as unnecessary, active engagement with your audience helps you develop your brand's voice and forge deep bonds with your fans.
To increase your brand’s audience
Increasing your target audience is also an important goal you may want to quickly set for your business. Mentions, shares, and influencer campaigns are the best ways to do this. While this helps, you must be strategic about the process and use the relevant medium.
You can measure your brand’s audience through the number of followers you get.
Find and Target Your Audience
Finding and targeting your target audience is a no-brainer for successful social media marketing. Or of what benefit is it to your business if you focus on the wrong audience? Of course, none.
While millions of people can see your social media post every day. At the same time, you can get your content targeted toward a fraction of the audience relevant to the growth of your business.
Knowing who your audience is isn't only about identifying their gender, race, or color alone, but how they think, too, especially for your product or brand. Your target audience should be the people you've previously defined their problems and to whom you're currently willing to sell your solutions.
While sometimes, you may have no deep knowledge about the above. There's no blame on you for that. Here are 5 simple questions you need to find answers to help you define your target audience:
Who will your product help?
This question goes beyond the physique of every individual you want to target. It includes their age, location and time zone, language, their challenges. Suppose your company is a B2B company; you have to define the business size of your audience and then who makes the buying decision.
What's their occupation?
Did you know that people's occupation often influences what they buy online? If your company manufactures plumbing materials, you'll definitely want to target plumbers. Also, suppose you run an HR company. What you'll want to do is connect with top professionals in thriving companies or startups.
Similarly, people's occupation helps you to define their income range on social media. For example, you won't be targeting a 13-year-old on Snapchat if you sell real estate properties.
Do they already know you exist before coming on social media?
Your answer here determines if you need to create brand awareness first. Your audience needs to know you before deciding to define them on social media platforms. If your audience does not know your business before their presence online, focus on building brand awareness for it first.
Are they thinking the same way as you?
This questions whether your audience thinks your product or business will definitely solve one or two of their problems.
Your product actually wants to solve a problem(s), isn’t it? So, are your audience thinking the same about your product? If not, know how to market to them to see all the solutions they crave in your product. Otherwise, your audience goes to your next-door competitor.
What content do you want to feed them for them to think your product or service is worthwhile?
This gives you a clue into how to prepare content about your product for your audience. For instance, the Gen Z generations are more fascinated by visuals than reading text. So knowing this helps you define what content you’ll actually feed them.
What social media platforms do they frequent?
While social media apps are growing daily, it's important to note the significant social media platforms where your audience spends most of their time.
When you gather the information above, knowing who will naturally consume your content on social media whenever you drop them becomes straightforward.
Choose the Right Social Media Platforms
Choosing the right social media platform becomes essential after knowing and defining your target audience. But just because you want to reach a wider audience, you shouldn't seize the opportunity to market your business on the ever-increasing number of social media platforms. It will only result in a waste of time in the end.
Creating impact should always be your goal. It's not the number of your presence that matters, but rather the quality of content you deliver, which will give you quality engagements in return.
Before deciding which social platform is best for your business, you need to compare and contrast which platforms your audience is in abundance and which they spend time on the most. This mostly says much about which social media platform will keep your brand.
Below are the lists of the most important social media platforms useful for social media marketing today
Launched in 2004 with a monthly active user of over 2.9 billion, Facebook is a social media platform that connects almost all age groups, races, statuses, colors, tribes, or religions. Nearly all startups and thriving multi-billion-dollar companies are on Facebook.
Although the reasons why businesses and brands are on Facebook may differ, a platform with over 25% of the world’s population is equally serving the marketing industry across all niches.
YouTube
YouTube was launched in 2005 and currently has about 2.2 billion monthly active users. It’s a video-only social media platform. No one ever doubts the potential YouTube has because of its large user base after Facebook. It also has active users across all demographics, with the oldest age group of 65+, constituting about 49 percent using the platform.
Nearly all niches are on YouTube: health, education, fashion, and Do-It-Yourself procedures.
Suppose you want a social media platform where you can express and narrow your opinion as a brand to your target audience. In that case, Twitter is the platform for you.
Twitter gives you the medium to be creative, interactive, and helpful simultaneously. For this reason, most businesses prefer this platform for online customer service options.
It is a social space where you can give value in the form of content and easily share other people's content. Twitter has about 217 million monthly active users.
TikTok
Did you know that in 2017, TikTok became the most downloaded app one year after it was launched? Again by 2021, it was downloaded more than 3 billion times worldwide.
If your target audience is the Gen Z generation, you can consider using TikTok for your business promotion.
According to statistics, about 67% of Gen Z, 57% of Millennials, 38% of Gen X, and 21% of baby boomers use Instagram daily. If your target audience is under 38, you shouldn't take Instagram marketing with a pinch of salt.
With a monthly active user of 2 billion, Instagram allows for product information promotion and fosters customer relationships. You can also use your product's shoppable post features on the app to increase sales.
Instagram is also a social media platform where commodity-based brands, service-based brands, and influencers can thrive.
With about 830 million active users, LinkedIn is the social media app that constitutes the largest network of professionals only. More than 61 million senior professionals are on LinkedIn, while about 50 million people use LinkedIn to search for jobs every week.
Suppose your business needs you to connect with top business owners, marketers, directors, sales reps, etc. In that case, LinkedIn is one of the best platforms for you. Since you have unlimited access to top professionals here, you can change the face of your business if you know how to leverage it.
Your business can thrive on Pinterest if you have quality, engaging image content. Niches like fashion, culinary, decor, wedding, fitness, and step-by-step content crafted through pictures are among the most popular on Pinterest.
Launched in 2010, Pinterest currently with a monthly active user of 444 million, 60% of which are females while 40% are males. If your target audience is exclusively females, Pinterest should be one of the social media platforms you should consider.
Snapchat
Snapchat was launched in 2011 and currently has over 530 million monthly active users worldwide.
Its active users are the 13-year-olds who spend more than 30 minutes daily on the app. This implies that if your target audience is of a younger age, Snapchat can be the best one for you.
Secure Your Handles Across all Platforms
You must have chosen a unique name for your business, but that is not enough. Next is, securing your social media handles across different platforms without delay.
Otherwise, you might lose your unique username to another business owner. By then, it would be impossible for you to get your name back, or you get sanctioned for trying to do that.
One way to secure your handles is to create accounts with similar names for your business on those social media platforms. Once you get your accounts created, it is left to you to determine whether to use each account for a while after you've reached your desired results or to delete it.
Build Your Follower List
Many businesses are finding it challenging to build their followers lists and, for this reason, have done the unthinkable to grow their followers' list. While I agree that building a follower list on your own can be challenging initially, I’ll also confess that it is a strategic process.
Below are a few unpopular tips that top businesses use to build their follower list in a short while:
- Consistently contribute to people's posts
- Host competition or giveaway sessions related to the brand’s niche
- Strategical use of hashtags
- Going live with the audience
- Collaborating with other brands
- Request for follow backs
- Preparing a presentable social media profile
- Use mesmerizing image and video content with posts regularly
Post Varying Engaging Contents Regularly
Whether you want to sell a product online or promote a brand, it is recommended that you let your audience feed their eyes with the varying contents of your product or brand.
You can post content in the form of photos, reels, carousels, texts, videos, and polls at regular intervals. Your audience wants to see varieties, and it’s by no chance that that’s how the human brain is wired.
Posting one content format at all times or for a more extended period will surely nauseate your audience, making you lose engagement or followers in some instances. In social media marketing, you should be intentional about the content you want to feed your target audience across every social media platform.
Typically, you help your audience to have an entertaining mental attitude towards your products if you post varying content. Your audience will not only anticipate more information to digest from your brand, but you'll also see a significant boost in customer retention and an increase in sales.
Here are some unique content ideas for your social media marketing goals:
- Short videos that show part of the processes behind creating your products
- Video tutorials on how to use your product
- Step-by-step video guide to maintaining your product after use
- Attention-grabbing product images capturing the variety of product options your customers can choose from
- Famous motivational quotes relevant to your brand
- Memes and GIfs
- Screenshots from customer reviews
- Links to blog posts or news in your niche
- Polls and questions
- Webinars and live stream videos
While some social media platforms restrict you to only a content format, e.g., YouTube and TikTok support video-only content, some other platforms allow you to share different kinds all at once.
For example, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. It’s up to you to optimize the combination of content you deem fit to engage your audience.
Define Your Brand Tone of Voice
A critical aspect of social media marketing strategy that many successful brands never take with a pinch of salt is their brand tone of voice. It is one of the best social media marketing practices that you must employ to set you apart from your competitors. Establishing your brand tone of voice depends mainly on how your audience perceives your product or brand.
Think about it as one or more adjectives that can describe your brand if it were to be a human targeting its kind. A brand's tone of voice ranges from powerful, exciting, sincere, luxury, or what have you. Ask yourself these questions: do you want to appear like everyone in your niche? Or do you want to stand out?
Your brand's tone of voice can also include how you interact with your audience via messaging, captions, language(slangs), and imagery in all your social media posts, response to complaints in DMs or comment sections, emails, and landing pages, and advertisements.
In social media marketing, you can decide how to set your tone of voice to meet your audience's expectations by paying attention to how they interact online, and you replicate the same.
Aside from setting you apart from your competitors, your brand's tone of voice helps you build authority in your niche and boost trust with your customers.
Apply for Verification Badges
Another social media best practice that you should not overlook is applying for verification badges. You might think here that what's the big deal in verification badges? Well, it identifies your business as a legitimate brand and makes your username unavailable for online fraudsters to scam people online.
To ensure that your social media handles gain ground, swiftly request the ‘blue tick’ on your respective social media platforms, provided that your account is up-to-date and you have the required official documents to identify you as the legit owner.
Examples of social media platforms that give verification badges are Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Pinterest.
Collaborate With Niche Followers
It’s more challenging to grow your social media account in solitude if you don’t collaborate with niche followers. Collaborating with niches like yours or related is a surefire way to increase your followings.
One effective way to do this is to follow handles with related niches like yours. They get notified when you do this and might follow you back. Their followers get notified too, which exposes you to several followers from their accounts.
Another way to collaborate with niche followers is to invest in sponsored ads through social media brand influencers. A social media influencer's vast number of followers shouldn’t be the bone of contention here but rather the ‘specialized’ influencer with the right audience. Meanwhile, you don't have to break the bank to get one; you'll always find a social media brand influencer that suits your budget.
Collaborating with the ideal social media influencer will expand your follower list, increase your customer base, and boost ROI through consistent sales.
Sending a potential brand influencer a direct message on Instagram is a simple way to get in touch with them. Try searching hashtags relating to your product or niche to locate specialized influencers. You can also use platforms like Buzzsumo or TrendSpottr to search for qualified brand influencers.
Share Your Accomplishments and Celebrate Them
Celebrating significant events in your marketing or business life is very important, especially if you can connect it with your audience's support or contribution. Your audience wants to see you succeed too. While you show them they're a significant contributor to your success stories, they'll likely want to do more.
,A quality image of the event and a text that captions how you feel about the accomplishment will go a long way to inform your audience how much you trust them to let them celebrate with you.
Achievements like reaching audience development benchmarks (i.e., 1K followers, 1 million YouTube views, etc.), your company's birthday or anniversary, employee anniversaries, awards received by your brand, and honest testimonials from clients after using your goods are noteworthy to celebrate.
While many of your audience will congratulate and interact with you, many might share it on their timeline. This might, in turn, increase your online visibility and give you more expansive coverage.
Social media accomplishments are best celebrated by running a campaign of giveaways, promotions, or competitions. That way, you'll not only earn more online recognition, but you'll also increase your following lists.
Run Advertising Campaigns
If you want to get incredible results for your business, running advertising campaigns or paid ads is the way to go. Over time, you'll discover that there are limits to what organic advertisements can do for you, especially if your online presence is now evident.
Your strong online presence will pave the way for your brand recognition when you run advertising campaigns. Advertising campaigns allow you to target people you know have once visited your websites but did not take action. This may include a broader audience in your demographic range which will likely be your prospects.
Advertising campaigns need to be strategic to get your desired results; otherwise, you stand a chance of pouring your money down the drain.
To ensure your ads campaign is effective, your social media marketing goals and the target audience avatar you've created will give you enough clarity on how to do it. Regardless of whether you need to hire a professional or want to do it yourself.
Make Shopping Easy On Your SM Handles
It's not enough to increase your brand's audience on social media alone. If making sales and generating leads is part of your marketing goals, turning followers into clients is an important goal you need to keep in mind.
Making shopping easy on all your social media accounts is one magical way to turn your clients into followers. It helps you to stay relevant on all your social media handles. When it comes to buying online, consumers are becoming more tech-savvy and find it easier to shop using mobile.
Therefore, you must make buying your stuff from your social media handle as simple as possible. It's inappropriate to leave your audience to struggle with shopping on your social media handles. It's a recipe for disaster in social media marketing.
You can include a link to your product listing, e-commerce website, or official landing page for easy access for visitors to click on on your social media biographies.
On your Instagram and Facebook accounts, you can also create access to shop your product through the shopping feature. Here, go to the shopping option and upload the available product you wish to sell with it. This way, your customers can shop for your product without calling you for an order or purchase.
Also, Google search is a medium to reach your social media handle. Therefore, to make your social media handles quickly appear by a simple Google search, ensure your social media handles resemble your brand name or website domain.
Use Tools To Achieve More
From generating social media content to consistently posting regularly, social media marketing tasks can become overwhelming over time if you want to meet your audience's expectations. One of the ways to ease this task is for you to use tools to achieve more. Fortunately, there are a ton of software tools to choose from.
Tools like Canva, Wiz Social Post, Gravity, Giphy, Recite, etc., can help you create an image or video theme for your brand. Software tools like Creator Studio, Sprout Social, Later, and Planoly are also helpful for planning social media posts across many platforms. They can also help you find the best times to post for your audience by analyzing your audience's engagement data.
Login To Your Accounts Daily
Just because your social media marketing goal requires you to post fortnightly, it doesn't stop you from logging in to your social media accounts daily. In fact, logging in to your account daily is one of the secrets to consistently learning about your audience through responding to direct messages, comments, or following.
Aside from that, you get to know what your competitors are up to, get informed on what's trending, and give content ideas and inspirations to help you plan ahead.
Make Communication Easier for Your Clients
One social media best practice that does not make your online presence stale is making communication easier for your clients. Of course, your clients deserve the best customer service from you.
Nowadays, technology has gone far beyond having to wait for hours to get a reply from online sellers. Most social media platforms for businesses now have a chatbot system that helps you answer some frequently asked questions by your audience in seconds.
Platforms like Facebook for business, WhatsApp for business, and Instagram for business all have chatbot features that you can set up to help you reply to clients accurately and more invitingly.
However, some customers prefer to reach businesses via one-on-one social media chat instead of calling a customer support hotline or chatting with a chatbot. Although one-on-one communication solves this conflict, it is also a social media best practice of top brands you can emulate for your business.
Of course, it allows you to express your brand's tone of voice and let your audience connect with you uniquely. It often requires you or anyone from your team to always respond to any comments or tags that'll follow your post.
In recent times, businesses that fall into the trap of delaying communications with their audience to an appointed day of the week soon find their audience waning in enthusiasm to connect with them. Unless you encounter a glitch in your business that you must apologize for, it's obvious now that there's no tenable excuse to leave your audience unattended.
Solicit for Feedback From Your Audience
You may never know how best to make your audience happy or meet their expectations except by requesting enough feedback from them. Soliciting feedback from your audience also makes them feel valuable to your brand.
Here are a few ways to solicit feedback from your audience:
- A web survey through your social media account
- Twitter and Instagram stories polls
- Through the comment sections of your direct post
You'll be surprised by the influx of strange responses. Never mind, these responses give you insight into how much you can do better next time.
A simple tip to requesting feedback from your audience can be as soon as you notice a change in your customer or audience approach or whenever you want a service upgrade.
Keep Track of Your Performance
It's impossible to determine what works and does not work after implementing all of the above in your marketing journey if you do not keep track of your performance.
Keeping track of your social media marketing performance requires you to look deeper if you're on the verge of achieving your marketing goals or if you've completed them. This way, you become more aware of the strategies that work for you better.
Below are some lists of what you'll most surely have to keep track of:
- Posts or content that earned you more audience engagement or sales for your product(s)
- Your brand's tone of voice your audience prefers the most
- The period(s) when you earn most of your followers
- Tools that work best for you
Use These Social Media Marketing Best Practices To Get The Best Results
From the above points, keeping track of your performance uses your experience to help you forecast the time and resources you'll need to manage your handles without fear.
Obviously, social media marketing strategies helps your business to reach a wider audience and skyrocket sales. Moreover, in this report, I have been able to explain in details best practices for effective social media marketing.
Meanwhile, it is not an easy task if you want to get the desired result. Fortunately, you can reach out to a social media marketing consultant who will make it their full-time job to ensure your best practices is as effective as possible, and who has the necessary skill and experience to make sure you outshine your competitors.
