Social Media: Strategies for Success
Social media marketing is an inexpensive and powerful method of reaching your potential customers. Social media marketing is more than simply having a Facebook page with your address and contact details. Engaging successfully with your social community will help build your brand’s reputation, will create loyal and devoted customers, drive leads and sales, and will ultimately grow your business partnerships.
Before embarking on a social media campaign, it’s important to determine exactly where social media fits as one tool or tactic within your overall marketing strategy. Just jumping online and randomly posting on your Facebook page might be fun, but it will not accomplish your marketing goals.
If you haven’t already set the foundation for success with a killer marketing plan, find out why you need a comprehensive digital marketing strategy. See what MercDigital can do for you. Get advice on the best way to grow your business, and learn how to decide which marketing tactics you need for your brand.
The more your business interacts with your intended audience, the stronger your relationship will become. Boosting your engagement is more than just spamming your followers with the latest deal. Your long-term social media goals need to focus on cultivating a relationship with your customers and reaching out to people who might be interested in your brand in the future. Social media marketing is about creating your brand image, building trust, establishing your reputation, and broadening your reach.
Keep in mind, without a social media presence you may as well close your doors. If your prospective clients can’t find you online, if they can’t ask questions, if they can’t read reviews about your product or services, if they can’t hear your brand’s ‘voice’, they will go to your competitors’ page.
Engaging with your audiences across your various social media platforms requires the right monitoring and tracking tools. It can take hard work to capture and retain the interest, loyalty, and trust of your audience. Being responsive, engaged, and offering real-time customer service is essential to building your brand’s reputation. MercDigital can help you connect on social media with time efficient systems that allow you to monitor and participate in conversations.
- When managed effectively, social media advertising offers the ability to develop highly targeted campaigns with easy A/B testing and analytics.
- Social media advertising can provide a huge increase in conversion rates and sales at a comparatively low cost of acquisition.
- Social media ads have no practical limit on your ability to scale.
- Most importantly, social media provides a unique opportunity for you to engage directly, personally, and authentically with your audience and customers.
User engagement across social media platforms varies by country and by age. The most popular social networks display both a high number of user accounts as well as strong user engagement. In the United States as of 2018, the majority of internet users aged 18 – 29 years had social media accounts with Facebook (82%), Instagram (76%), Snapchat (73%) and Twitter (52%).
For marketing purposes, the number of active monthly users gives a better indication of the reach of various social media channels. Around half of social media users report checking their social feeds more than once a day. Your future customers are on social media!
The most popular social media platforms for marketing businesses in 2019 are: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, & Tumblr. Choosing the best platform to market your brand will depend entirely upon your niche and audience. There are, of course, other social media sites that are important to consider if you want to maximize your exposure and engage with the right people. For example, Houzz may be the best platform for interior design, landscape and home improvement, or Reddit for discussion-based interaction within your niche community.
Each social media channel brings with it its own personality. Different sites have different audience demographics, different primary methods of interaction, and very different content strategies. According to recent Pew Research Center Internet & Technology demographics research, LinkedIn will find you a larger percentage of academics aged 30 to 50 with incomes over $75K, while Instagram offers you access to more urban-living 18 to 30 year olds. YouTube has broad appeal across all demographics, but won’t necessarily be the best way to spread your message within your industry.
When choosing a social media platform to market your brand, you need to consider the sort of content you want to share with your audience.
For Social networking the best platforms are Facebook and LinkedIn
For Microblogging, choose Twitter or Tumblr.
Photo sharing platforms include Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest.
Video sharing channels include YouTube, Facebook Live, and Vimeo
Facebook is the undisputed leader in social media with 68% of adults having an active Facebook account. As of the first quarter , Facebook had 2.38 billion monthly active users – that’s 30% of the world’s population! And a massive 1.56 billion people checked their Facebook account daily. If you want to reach more people with a diverse range of interests, shopping habits, and browsing behavior, Facebook is the best place to start your social media campaign, particularly if you intend to take advantage of its highly targetable paid advertising options.
Twitter’s reach is also growing. As of the second quarter , Twitter reports that 139 million people logged into the app every day. That’s up from the 134 million daily active users on Twitter in the first quarter. Twitter sees some of its highest traffic during live events, such as sports games, television shows, and special award nights. Twitter is the ideal social medium for real-time engagement during live events popular with your market, or for sharing your message during industry-specific conferences using hashtagable posts.
MercDigital can tailor a marketing strategy to suit your needs. Not sure how to use social media for your business? We’ll show you the benefits of sharing your story directly with your customers via their preferred social media platform. MercDigital’s social media managers can post branded content to your social media pages, monitor follower comments, and engage directly with your community. We can share unique blog articles and website content on your social media page – a great way to extend your reach, build brand awareness, and market authority!
A comprehensive social media strategy to increase reach and brand awareness might include a managed Facebook campaign with additional social posts and video ads. A strategy aimed at improving reputation and customer loyalty might run a YouTube promotion that highlights your product’s effectiveness through creative, branded user-generated content. Remarketing (or re-targeting) via social media is the perfect way to nurture your audience alongside your content marketing efforts. When combined with a Google Ads campaign, a Facebook Ad keeps your brand in front of your audience making them far more likely to click your link when it comes time to perform a specific keyword search prior to purchase. Talk to our experienced team to see what we can achieve for your business.
If you don’t already have an active social media page, our MercDigital team of branding experts will create an amazing social media profile for your company. We offer unlimited design concepts and design revisions to make sure you absolutely love your new social media identity. We can help get you started with a custom social media page build and managed social posts.
MercDigital can also offer social tools and analytics that make it easy to share content and monitor your impact. These including social widgets for easy sharing and collecting visitor emails, and data on your audience engagement through shares. We can even help you see which of your posts are shared across ‘Dark Social’ channels that regular analytics can’t track, like private messages and personal emails.
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