If social media marketing is in your marketing mix this year, it’s a smart move. Social media platforms are the preferred channel for a good majority of people to socialize and stay updated about what’s happening around the world. These platforms have billions of users and, therefore, represent a big opportunity for marketers. You can reach 4.6 billion users who’re spending nearly two and a half hours a day on browsing social media content. In fact, Facebook alone has 2.9 billion users. Just imagine how many people you can target if you leverage a few of these platforms.
But we know that social media marketing comes with its own set of challenges. These include ROI measurement, budget constraints, and rapidly-changing trends. Not everyone who tries social media marketing is a success. It is quite competitive and a lot of marketers struggle to make a mark on these platforms. To succeed with social media marketing, you need all the help you can get.
But, don’t get discouraged as we are here to help you with that. To make your life easier and your social campaigns more effective, we have compiled tips that give proven results. We’ve also included a number of resources so that can save you even more time and effort.
Here are some of the most effective social media marketing tips to help you stand out in the crowd.
15 of the Most Effective Social Media Marketing Tips:
Social Media Marketing Tips You Should Know
You don’t need to be active on all social media channels. In fact, doing this can bring down your content quality and eat into your marketing budget. Especially if you are new to this, you need to target a few selected platforms before you expand your reach.
Whatever your target platforms are, the social media tips below can accelerate your outreach efforts.
1. Have a Well-Defined Strategy
For a social media marketing plan to work, it needs to be backed by a data-driven strategy. Whether you already have a marketing plan ready or are in the process of drafting one, ask yourself the following questions:
- Who is your target audience? Where do they spend most of their time?
- Who are your competitors? Where are they active?
- Is there an overlap in the above two answers? These are your target platforms.
- What strategies work well on these platforms?
- What kind of content is most popular there?
- How is your content going to stand out?
These questions will help you formulate an effective marketing strategy. If you have a hard time answering these questions, you need to go back to the whiteboard and redesign your strategy.
You can use social media marketing tools to research your audience, competitors, platforms, and content types.
2. Select the Right Platforms
A major decision for social media marketers is selecting the platforms where you want to be active. This should ideally include 3-4 of the best ones where your target audience is active. However, you should not aim to include a lot of platforms because that can be difficult to manage.
To make an informed decision, you must know what kind of people frequent each platform and what each platform is best known for.
For example, YouTube is best for video content of all types, while LinkedIn is the platform of choice for professionals. So, if you want to write expert content on topics from your industry, you might want to choose LinkedIn. And, if you think your audience will be more engaged by short videos, then you can opt for TikTok.
Similarly, each social media platform is good for posting certain types of content and has a different audience demographic. Do your research and choose the one that you want to target.
3. Maintain Consistency in All Aspects
To create a lasting impression on your social media followers, you need to maintain consistency in your post frequency, tone, and quality.
Social media marketing is not a one-off activity that you do as an afterthought. You need to prioritize it and make time for it in your daily routine. Internet users have short attention spans and they could very forget about you if you’re out of sight for too long.
You can create a content calendar to plan the timing and frequency of your social posts. Every platform’s algorithm is different and you can derive best returns if you adhere to their best practices.
Below is an example of our social media calendar:
Source: influencermarketinghub.com
You also need to keep your tone and quality consistent to inspire people to trust you. For this, you must first figure out your brand personality and your audience’s taste. Try to create a brand voice that matches your personality and appeals to your audience’s aesthetics.
For instance, Harley-Davidson, the popular motorcycle brand, has an aggressive, in-your-face tone which is reflected in their print and digital ads. Through their ad headlines and social captions, they challenge readers if they’re tough enough to handle a Harley.
Source: in.pinterest.com
4. Create Targeted Content
This is the most important advice anyone can give you on how to excel at social media marketing. Create content specifically for your target audience.
Before you even start your social media marketing campaign, you need to understand who you want to target. So, do your research, define and understand your audience, and create customer personas, if possible.
The “spray and pray” approach doesn’t work on social media. You need to focus on audiences who have the inclination or potential to engage with your brand. They can be old or existing customers, website visitors, newsletter subscribers, or followers of relevant influencers/competitors.
You can start by analyzing your current social media audience. Use social media listening and analytics tools to do so. Or maybe you can introduce social media audience analysis tools in your strategy. And, once you know what your audience likes, you can create and post content that they are most likely to find useful.
You can even target random people who have expressed an interest in your brand by mentioning it in their social dialogue. Social media listening tools can help you track all brand mentions and understand their context. Using these insights, you can create more targeted messaging for this demographic.
5. Create a Social Media Content Calendar
Creating a content calendar helps you plan your social media marketing better. You should have a plan in place with details on what you will post and when.
Ideally, you should have at least one week’s content ready in advance. This ensures that there are no last-minute errors and you maintain your posting frequency. It also helps you get a big picture idea of your content plan and distribute different types of content pieces throughout a specific period of time.
6. Use Hashtags
Hashtags are powerful tools that can help you amplify the effects of your social media marketing content. Hashtags help you reach a much larger and relevant audience.
On several platforms, like Instagram, people have the option to follow certain hashtags. This means that they are shown content that uses that hashtag even if they don’t follow the account. This is great for you as your content can reach beyond your followers to the people who follow the hashtags that you use.
Now that you know why you should use hashtags, let’s discuss how you can do so effectively. The key is to use the most relevant hashtags and the right amount of hashtags without overdoing it.
Different platforms have different limits set for how many hashtags you can use. So, stick to that limit or lower. You don’t necessarily have to use 30 hashtags, even if 30 are allowed.
Before selecting a hashtag, please consider the following:
- How popular is the hashtag?
- How much competition will you face if you use it?
- Is it relevant to your business or niche?
Once you have done your hashtag research, select a mix of hashtags. You can pick some of the popular ones and some relatively less popular but more relevant.
7. Always Be On-Trend
Social media is a dynamic space where trends keep changing.
Social audiences are also very sophisticated and discerning. They are quick to spot and tune out jaded content. Plus, every platform moves at its own pace, so you can’t have an assembly-line approach for content creation.
It’s important that you stay abreast of social media marketing trends that are expected to dominate your target platforms. You can use tools like Brand Watch Consumer Intelligence and YouScan to curate trending content and topics for your posts.
Another option is to compile a list of sites/pages that always have high-quality, updated content related to your niche. Then, add the list into an RSS feeder platform like Feedly and you can see all the latest posts from sources you trust. You can follow their example and create on-trend content.
8. Perform A/B Tests
Quote or stat? Video or still image? Wordy or conversational? Most content creators and marketers get confused when they create or market social content. It’s simply too hard to second-guess how the audience will respond to the content you create.
You’ll be happy to know that there are ways to test your social media content for efficacy. A/B testing or split testing lets you check iterations of your content against set parameters to find out your best option. This extra effort can risk-proof your social content to some extent.
You can play around with variations of captions, images, ad copy, hashtags, emojis, and CTAs to figure out which combination is more effective. Present each variant to a share of your audience and track their engagement in terms of clicks, comments, shares, and other parameters.
Repeat the same process for all variants and note the changes in responses. Derive a set of best practices from the results and use the winning variant.
9. Focus on Videos
Videos are big on social media. They are consumers’ #1 most-preferred branded social content. 93% of marketers claim it’s one of the most important part of their marketing strategy. And 78% of marketers noticed increased sales from investing in videos.
You can use videos liberally in your content mix, especially on TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube, YouTube Shorts and Facebook which are the top destinations where marketers post videos and video ads. You can use videos to grow brand awareness, establish domain expertise, and promote products/events.
Tutorials and DIY videos are especially popular among social users. And to make video creation easier, there are many sophisticated video editing software solutions you can use to create professional-looking videos.
10. Join Communities
Groups and communities on Facebook and LinkedIn are great places to do marketing. You can create a group of your customers and promote content, deals, and products there. You can provide value to customers by sharing gated content and company news. This can help foster brand loyalty and boost repeat sales.
You get real customer insights by interacting one-on-one with customers in a group. In this way, you get a better understanding of their needs and feedback about existing products. Another benefit is that you can look for loyal customers who can work as brand advocates for you.
Groups of like-minded people are great for sharing knowledge and building brand awareness. You can test new content and product ideas in this small group before releasing them in the market. The expert feedback you receive can help you improve your content and strategy.
11. Interact and Network
Social media marketing is not limited to simply creating and posting content on social media. You need to do a lot more than that if you truly want to be successful with it.
One major part of social media marketing is engaging in online conversations both with your audience and with others in your niche. Start by replying to comments on your content and answer questions or simply show appreciation.
You can also use social media listening tools to keep track of your brand mentions and can engage in online conversations related to your brand.
This helps improve your audience’s experience with your brand and improves your brand image. If you are good and prompt with your replies, people will think of your brand as one that actually cares about its customers.
It does not end with that either. You should also engage in conversations with your peers and other industry experts. This helps you build connections and also establishes you as an industry expert if you provide value through such online conversations.
These connections will help you later if you are looking for collaborations and mutually-beneficial initiatives.
12. Experiment with Content Formats
Social media platforms provide a lot of options when it comes to content formats. From Stories to live videos, you have different options that you can choose from. We suggest experimenting with all of these and then using a good mix of them.
Each content format can be good for different purposes. Ephemeral content like Stories is very good for engaging your audience and promoting your other content. Live videos are great for hosting interviews or Q&A sessions that allow audience participation.
Similarly, different content formats offer different benefits. Make use of them and leverage them to your advantage.
13. Don’t Stress Over Algorithm Shifts
Often, social media folks go into a frenzy when platforms suddenly change their algorithms. But, truly, there is no need to panic. If you maintain high quality in your content, there are chances that you won’t be affected too adversely by algorithm shifts.
It’s better to gain an understanding of the rationale behind an algorithm change and modulate your content to align with it. Don’t try to crack the algorithm by questionable methods.
For example, YouTube before 2012, ranked videos based on the number of views they got. People tried to game the algorithm by adding clickbait titles to get more and more people to open their videos. But viewers would soon realise that the video’s content didn’t match its title and abandon it. This move backfired massively by affecting the credibility of host brands.
Many times, platforms are pretty straightforward about how brands can stay on the good side of a new algorithm. Mostly, the underlying logic is to serve users with valuable and relevant content along with a good user experience.
14. Partner with Influencers
Social media is saturated with great content so it can be difficult to catch the attention of your target audience.
An effective way to reach new audience segments is through influencers. By collaborating with influencers in your niche, you can expose your brand to people who are relevant to you but who didn’t know you existed.
Influencer marketing is like a catalyst that supercharges your social media marketing and takes it up a notch. Influencers can help you boost the ROI of your marketing efforts and drive better reach and engagement.
Here are some ways influencers can help you with your social media marketing:
- Improve your brand image and build audience trust in your brand.
- Amplify your content’s reach to their followers.
- Get higher engagement than you would have got on your own.
- Drive traffic to your website and even drive conversions.
When looking for partner influencers, you should look for both relevance and reach. Many brands prefer to work with micro and nano-influencers who have smaller but more passionate communities of followers. Such influencers are more cost-effective and approachable than high-profile influencers.
Through influencer marketing, you can build your credibility and authenticity. Influencers can help humanise your brand and serve more relatable content.
You can follow the example of brands that leveraged influencer marketing effectively.
15. Make Use of Social Media Analytics
Social media analytics will tell you whether your marketing efforts are successful or not. You can find tons of useful information and use it to fuel your future social media marketing strategy.
For example, you can find out what kind of content your audience prefers and then create more of it. You can also find trends that can help you identify your audience’s preferences. Use these insights to update your knowledge of your target audience and create more focused content for them.
Another important piece of information that you can gather is which platform works best for you. If there are certain platforms that are not giving you the desired results consistently, you can stop investing in them.
Conclusion
Social media marketing is not as unfathomable as many marketers imagine it to be. You just need to approach it strategically. The tried-and-tested social media marketing tips in this post will help refine your marketing plans and give you an edge over competitors.
Be sure to put them in use to improve your social media campaigns and get higher success rates.
