Social media marketing is one of the most essential channels for businesses to get quality traffic, customer engagement and eventually driving sales. There are now over 3 billion people on social media platforms. Almost half of the world’s population has a social media account! If you know how to leverage your social media campaigns, there will be no better opportunity for marketing out there. I’ve researched and created a list of social media tips to boost your traffic and make your life easier.
17 Vital Social Media Tips For Sales And Marketing
Social media networks continuously grow year after year. So, developing an effective social media marketing strategy nowadays is vital. Here are 17 social media tips for a successful marketing strategy.
1. Set Your Goals
What is the intent of your marketing campaign or goal? The goal you set will be the driving force of your social media marketing strategy. You can try starting with the 80-20 rule. Use 80% of your content to educate, inform, or entertain your audience. Use the other 20% to promote your brand or sell your products or services.
Be specific and create goals that can also be measurable. Study insights of your goals and campaign progression over time and adjust your marketing mix to optimize as needed.
2. Choose Your Social Media Networks
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Facebook and Pinterest are the top social networks for baby boomers. Adults over age 65 are Facebook’s fastest-growing audience segment. The data also shows that nearly a quarter of Facebook users are aged 18 to 24.
You might think TikTok marketing is not the right fit for your brand. But even well-established brands with an audience well outside Gen Z are experimenting with this fairly new platform. TikTok saw more than 59 million new app downloads in April 2021 alone.
Choosing your social media platforms doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing approach. You can use different social media networks to reach different audiences, or to meet different business goals. The average internet user has 8 social media accounts, so you can connect with them on different platforms for different strategies.
3. Know Your Target Audience
Now, let’s take a look at your target audience. Without the support of your audience, your strategy will be in limbo. Drawing your social media marketing strategy around your audience is a must. Your target audience will help you figure things out. From the social media platforms you need to be on, to the type of content you’ll create.
It is important to define their questions, their concerns and their problems. For most businesses, one of the biggest challenges is to connect with their target audience. This is one of the most important social media marketing tips. To find your ideal audience, you need to figure out who your target demographic is (interests, age, location etc.) and what social networks they use.
4. Use A Content Calendar
There’s no way around it. No matter what you do, without planning your social media marketing efforts will fail! So, use social media content calendars and tools to organize and publish all your content timely and easily. Content calendars also help to distribute resources effectively, improve team collaboration and helps give a more in-depth understanding of what works and what doesn’t.
The best thing about these tools is that it enables you to put up images, set timings for your posts and much more all within a single dashboard. Just create and update the publishing calendar once a week, and you’ll be good to go.
5. Create A Marketing Strategy
Creating a social media marketing strategy is the key to turn your vision into reality. While you prepare your marketing strategy, consider the social media platforms you’ll be posting on, make sure it appeals to your target audience and aligns with your goals.
Here’a a few social media tips to create a marketing strategy:
- Prepare a specific list of hashtags for different social media platforms and target audiences
- Create a content theme
- Make a list of upcoming occasions, special events and holidays
- Make sure it covers your primary events, features and campaigns
- Include Urgent Marketing techniques
6. Establish Relationships
One of the innate benefits of social media marketing is that it allows you to communicate directly to customers and followers. You can build relationships over time, rather than just asking for a sale upfront. More than 45% of internet users use social media networks to research brands.
Part of that discovery is getting to know who you are as a brand and what you do or offer. When people engage with your content, it’s a great idea to engage back. This will help to build trust and form a loyal following. The more fans that share and like your content, the more exposure you will receive from the social media network’s algorithm.
Engagement is one of the signals Facebook uses to help predict which of those posts are most popular. When you establish relationships with your followers, they are more likely to see your posts. Nurturing relationships can also help you build a loyal community that will lead to continuous sales over time. New customer acquisition is vital, but don’t downplay the value of customer retention.
7. Create Emotional Content
It’s the stories that create the sale, not the product! We, humans, connect to good stories. It is the emotional attachment that your brand builds with their audience that will create desired engagement. They inspire ideas and encourage interaction.
Share successive posts to relate your campaign theme’s whole story from the beginning to the end. The step-by-step arouses excitement that is great to make your story compelling and desirable.
Use Emojis
Emojis can help serve the purpose of conveying the desired emotion through facial expressions. Appropriate use of emotions is extremely important to convey the desired tone behind the message. It’s as simple as adding a 😃. Emoticons can get readers more excited about your content. So, next time you write, feel free to go all-in with one of these.
8. Connect With Influencers
Do you think your business is too small to work with influencers? Micro-influencers with as few as 1,000 loyal followers can be effective for establishing brand recognition and trust. They are often affordable and are well worth it.
9. Learn From Your Mistakes
We are not perfect, we are all humans and we make mistakes. This is especially essential to accept in the fast-growing world of social media marketing. Instead of being ignorant of your mistakes, accept and apologize for them. Work on the matter and tell your customers about it.
They’ll love to hear that you worked on your mistakes to provide them with better services. If you’ve made a grammar mistake or missed a period, there’s no need to panic or delete the post.
10. Mention Engaging Followers
Collecting user-generated content through contests and branded hashtags is a great way to create quality material for your social feed. User generated content is also a powerful source of social proof. Better yet, sharing your followers’ content on your social channels (and tagging them, of course), helps you establish relationships with some of your biggest fans.
For example, If a fan tags you in an Instagram Story, you’ll get a notification in your direct messages. Be sure to reshare it, it’s an easy win-win.
11. Embrace Each Social Network Differently
When it comes to social media platforms, one size does not fit all. Many people believe that social media is a useful distribution tool and often use the same message on each channel. But it isn’t the best marketing strategy. This is one of the more crucial social media tips.
If you want to succeed in social media, you should treat each social platform uniquely and consider its different functionalities and features. Facebook is a great communication tool and for creating targeted groups. Twitter is perfect for real-time news and offers one-on-one engagement.
YouTube and Tik Tok embrace video marketing. Instagram is a great place to share high-quality visuals. LinkedIn includes a more business-oriented audience that is searching for insightful and informative content. If you want to grow a loyal fanbase, use a creative social media strategy for each different social network.
Take into consideration your follower demographics and share content specifically targeted to them.
12. Take Notice Of Social Media Trends
It’s not necessary to react to everything that goes viral. But it is a good idea to pay attention to trends in social media, so you can understand what people are looking for and are interested in. This helps you create appropriate content that causes interest and engagement over time.
13. Share High Quality Visual Content
Do you leverage visual content when sharing blog posts on your social media platforms? If not, visual content is a must to boost your social media marketing engagement.
Research has shown we remember only 20% of what we read and 80% of what we see. The research from Software Advice and Adobe revealed that photos and images are the most powerful social media marketing strategy. People are most likely to share visual content on their social networks.
Visual content is more attractive, they offer more value and assist in generating more traffic, increasing sales and creating brand awareness. Using visual content should be the main ingredient for your social media marketing strategy.
14. Sell Products Directly With Social Media
Social media marketing has evolved in recent years to include social e-commerce, the ability to sell your products directly from social media platforms. And business is booming, with a global market value of $90 billion. Using social media for business is vital.
Statistics show almost 20% of U.S. adults have made a purchase on Facebook and close to 12% on Instagram. You can now use social media shopping tools to sell your products and services even without a website.
15. Use Different Formats
Get creative and switch up your social media post formats from time to time. If you usually post GIFs, try a still image. If you normally post still images, try a video. Take advantage of all the formats within each social network, like Stories, or Reels, or Live video. This helps you learn which formats work best for different types of content and networks.
16. Quality Not Quantity
It’s more important to create quality content on a couple of key social media networks, than it is to have a presence on every single network. Quality is king when it comes to content marketing. Above all, be sure that your posts offer value. If all you do is create sales pitches, there’s very little motivation for people to follow you.
Remember, social media marketing is about building relationships first. Be human, be honest, post great content, this is important. Focus on using one or two social media channels really well, at least to start. Once you’ve got those optimized, you can build from what you’ve learned and expand your marketing efforts.
17. Research Analytics
Analytics help you understand your audience and learn what’s working to generate more traffic. Without them, you can’t make accurate sales forecasts and perfect your marketing campaigns. You can effectively use this data to drive performance. This is another one of the most essential social media tips for small businesses.
Review the analytics, pay attention to the stats like follower growth, age, and locations. Pageviews, number of posts, likes, shares, impressions, clicks, etc. As you implement your social media marketing strategy, it’s important to keep track of what works well and what doesn’t. You can then fine-tune your efforts to improve results.
In Closing
Social media is constantly evolving. We’re seeing new updates and trends emerging every year, causing marketers to have to shift their strategies to adapt. Whether you already have a social media following or are just getting started, use these social media tips to create your marketing strategy. They can help put you ahead of your competitors and grow your audience in a way that adds value to them and your social media marketing goals.