Social media is instrumental in carrying out various marketing and branding activities. Many social media platforms incorporate various business-friendly features to help businesses use the platforms for marketing. Well-established brands and the new ones are using social media to grow brand following, generate leads, and improve sales. Although it might sometimes appear a daunting task to use various social media platforms for branding, it is much easier than you think. With some help from a reputable company offering social media management services, you can connect with your target audience and grow your brand organically.
Although each social media platform has its characteristics of there are some commonalities shared among these platforms. Knowing how to optimize your marketing strategies will help improve the campaign and even help first-timers launch a marketing campaign.
First, be clear in your mind about your objectives of using the platform and how you can achieve your branding and marketing goals. It will help to develop strategies suitable for the platform. For newcomers and established marketers, the quality of content rules supreme over the number of posts. Moreover, create strategies for specific platforms because trying to implement any new strategy across multiple platforms will not yield any result.
Knowing the best social media practices will help you get the most from the platform you are using.
Post consistently
Consistency in posting matters most to be successful in your social media marketing campaign. Different social media platforms have a different connotation of consistency, and you must abide by it. For example, to interact closely with your audience on Twitter and Instagram Stories, you must post several times a day to maximize the potential of engagement with your audience. Whereas, there is no such urgency for other types of posts on Facebook or Instagram Posts. You can post at longer intervals on these platforms without compromising on audience engagement.
To work out a suitable posting strategy, consider how the platform’s algorithm works and the nature of posting content, whether chronologically or curated, using some other factors. It will help formulate your social media marketing plan by focusing on the interval of publishing content, the type of content to post, and the kind of audience you want to target.
Regular publishing of content keeps you in close touch with your audience.
Focus on your messaging
Understand the demographics of the platform, which differs between the platforms and are unique too. Despite some overlap of demographics, which is quite normal, understanding the demographics specific to your platform will help create tailor-made content that will have maximum impact.
When your message focuses well on the audience, you can ensure a higher quality of content that resonates with them. Having a stable and focused message without any deviation will ensure that your social media posts are always relevant to your audience. Create content for specific audience groups. Ensure that only people for who it Eis meant can view it instead of showing it to others who are not related to it.
Keep up with the trend
After determining your critical messaging, keep a watch on the emerging trend on each platform. It can help to identify some patterns in the strategies.If you find some of these having a close resemblance to your brand, then you can latch on to it to drive engagement. However, act with restraint and avoid trying to catch up with every trend that catches your eye. Remember that you must create posts that align with your overall messaging and maintains its relevance to the audience. Beware of trends that might alienate you from your audience. While it is good to draw inspiration from other successful brands, emulating them may make you deviate from your goals.
To avoid getting carried away, create a focused message that forms the benchmark for measuring all your future social media posts.
Measure results and analyze it too
Keep tracking and measuring your efforts across the social media platforms, which will gauge the kind of results you are getting from your social media marketing. This is the only way to judge the return on investment, enabling you to know which strategies are working and which you need to rethink and reshape or even discard.
Identifying the key metrics of your brand will simplify the tracking process. For Facebook, the metrics to monitor are reach and engagement; for Twitter, the metrics are impressions, retweets, and mentions. If you are on LinkedIn, keep a tab on clicks, interactions, and impressions. Likes, mentions, and comments are the parameters for Instagram, and Instagram Stories focus on views and engagements.
Weekly, monthly and quarterly tracking of metrics should put you in control of what is happening. It will help to know when and what change you need to improve your social media strategy.
Go for video content
It is more than worth investing in video content, which is social media platforms’ talk and having a booming time now. The rapid growth of YouTube, the advent of IGTV, and the ever-increasing popularity of Facebook Live bear testimony to the sharp increase in video content consumption on social media. The video viewing rate on Facebook is galloping over the years, and a close second is YouTube, where the rate of video viewing has almost doubled. Tweets that contain a video will have six times higher chances of retweeting.
Do A/B Testing
Whenever possible, do A/B testing of your content to increase its effectiveness. Also known as split testing, you can use several headlines for the same content to figure out which generates a better response. Although A/B testing for landing pages and sales pages are common among marketers, you can do the same for your social media posts. After publishing a post, schedule a link that triggers multiple sharing, and with each post, try a new headline.You will find how differently people react to the same post depending on the copy and the CTA phrases you use.
Closely interact with the audience on social media to generate more credibility and brand trust.