Social Media Promotion for Companies
Reaching the proper audience at a minimal cost is possible with social media, and if your company isn’t active on sites like Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn, you’re probably losing out. Social media marketing can generate loyal brand champions, drive leads and sales, and make your business reach unprecedented success if done correctly.
In this complete guide to social media marketing, you’re going to learn:
What social media marketing is, with benefits, stats, and tips.
How to build a social media marketing strategy and a plan to carry it out.
The seven best social media marketing platforms and how to use them.
What is social media marketing?
Social media marketing is online marketing that leverages the popularity of top social media platforms in an attempt to acquire your branding and marketing objectives. But it is not just a matter of creating business accounts and posting as you please. Social media marketing involves a dynamic strategy with measurable objectives and encompasses:
- Keeping your profiles updated and optimized.
- Posting photos, videos, tales, and live streams that resonate with your brand and attract the appropriate audience.
- Replying to replies, shares, and likes and monitoring your reputation.
- Followers and interactions with followers, customers, and influencers to establish a community for your brand.
- Social media marketing also includes paid social media advertising, where one can pay for his/her business to be seen by excellent volumes of highly targeted users.
Benefits of social media marketing
Because there are so many applications for it and used so extensively, social media is one of the best free marketing platforms for your business right now. Some of the following are some of the particular advantages of social media marketing are listed below:
Humanize your business: With social media, you can humanize your business into an interactive player in your field. Your profile, messages, and users’ interactions convey a warm presence that your following can get to know and trust, and become entrusted with.
Drives traffic: Between your profile link, links within your blog post in your posts, and ads, social media is a great way to drive traffic to your site where you can convert visitors into customers. Social signals are even an indirect component of SEO.
Drive leads and customers: You also drive leads and conversions right on these sites, through such means as Instagram/Facebook stores, direct messages, call to action buttons on a page, and appointment booking features.
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Boost brand awareness: The graphical nature of social media sites allows you to build your graphical identity across huge crowds and boost brand awareness. And boosted brand awareness equals boosted results with all your other activities.
Form relationships: These sites provide direct and indirect avenues of communication with your followers along which you can network, seek feedback, conduct discussions, and connect directly with people.
The larger and more active your following is on social media sites, the simpler it will be for you to reach your marketing objectives.
Social media marketing statistics
And as for the aforementioned benefits, don’t believe us. Let’s take a look at some social media marketing stats that show its strength:
- The typical US adult spends 2.25 hours daily on social media.
- More than 70% of consumers who have had a good experience with a business on social media will endorse the same business to their networks.
- Facebook users click on 12 Facebook ads per month on average.
- 81% of consumers shop for products and services on Instagram.
- Almost 80% of Twitter users will feel more inclined to be positively inclined towards a company if they receive a reply to a tweet.
- 4 out of every 5 LinkedIn users drive business decisions.
- 46% of TikTok users are using the site with no other distraction around.
The elements of an effective social media marketing campaign
How a successful social media marketing campaign will look will vary for each business, but this is what they will all share:
Knowing your audience: Where they are on the sites, when and why they appear, what they enjoy, who else they are following, etc.
Brand identity: What do you need to convey to your audience? How do you want them to feel when looking at your content?
Content strategy: There is some improv happening on social, but you will need a solid content strategy in order to consistently be heard and create quality content regularly.
Analytics: You are going to be working with measurable data to inform your strategy, i.e., who you are communicating with, what to post, when to post, etc.
Daily work: Social media is a real-time setting. To use it to develop your business, you must post daily, interact with your business, respond back, listen for trends, and have correct profiles.
Inbound strategy: Don’t market your business on social media. Use social media to generate value with content that is valuable and informative and build up the people around you. This will then naturally promote your business and other people will do the marketing for you.
Creating your social media marketing plan
Now that you have the basics of a social media marketing plan, it is time to put it into action. Your social media marketing plan is your road map for executing your strategy. It creates structure in your efforts so you can gauge your success and know you are investing your resources well. Here is how to write your social media marketing plan:
Select your platforms: Select according to your audience, well-known platforms utilized in your field, and bandwidth. Do not do so many that you will not be able to handle them. Begin with one, and gradually construct from there as you learn more about them.
Set objectives and targets: These will be task-oriented and basic to begin, e.g., post once a day for a month, get your profiles up, or do competitive analysis. When you’ve settled into a rhythm and are learning, you can set more strategic and explicit objectives such as grow your following by X% or produce X [types of content you’ve discovered your audience adores] monthly.
Report and adjust regularly: Use each platform’s analytics to identify which posts generate the most engagement, whether you’re getting more followers, and to see your audience demographics. Harness and scale up what works and nix what doesn’t.
Social media marketing tips
Ready to get started with marketing on social media? Here are a few social media marketing tips to kick off your social media campaigns.
Create diverse content
As in most online marketing niches, content is king when social media marketing is concerned. Ensure you update regularly and provide really valuable content that your desired customers will appreciate and find interesting and useful. These include:
- How-to’s, quick tips
- Local and industry news updates
- Data and statistics
- Polls, questions, contests
- Update and announcements
It also involves optimizing the diversity of formats available through social media, from images and videos to stories, live video, online stores, and others.
Be consistent
Social media marketing allows your business to extend your company’s image across a broad range of various social media sites. While each site will have its own distinct setting and tone, your business’s basic personality, be it friendly, fun, or reliable, needs to be consistent.
Don’t merely post—participate
That is, don’t get on every month and schedule all your posts. Social media platforms are social communities. You have to listen who is responding to what you share and respond back—respond to comments, like, share and comment on their status, go live, put up polls and live questions to initiate conversation, and re-post other people’s content.
Employ content creation tools
Don’t let somebody convince you that Instagram is the most visually-savvy social network. They’re all! To get noticed in someone’s stream, you need to add decent-looking visuals to your updates—photos, illustrations, text turned into graphics. Content creation tools like Freepik and Canva offer templates and tools that enable you to make visuals appear professional in minutes, slap on your logo, and fit your brand.
Repurpose, repost, recycle
Social media is a busy environment, so if you want to gain momentum with your audience, you need to get some good stuff out there on a regular basis. The secret to accomplishing this? The three Rs:
Repurpose: Use a customer review and make it a Facebook post, break a blog post into pieces and stretch it out as a series of Tweets, distill a case study into an Instagram customer highlight; use a webinar deck and create a LinkedIn carousel post. Anything is possible.
Repost: Do occasionally, but excellent way to add gaps to your content calendar. Repost both on Instagram and retweet content from users as well as influencer content. You can further curate material from trustworthy sites and share their links in your posts.
Recycle: Place your TikTok videos and Reels on YouTube; re-publish your best blogs every month for new followers; upload your Facebook Live sessions to your YouTube account.
Curate your own feed
We’re constantly seeking how to appear in other people’s feeds, but we ignore that there’s worth to reap from our own. Keep an eye on your rivals so that you can monitor them, find concepts that could be applied to your own strategy, and holes that could be plugged. Keep an eye on influencers so that you may keep yourself updated with trends and learn. Watch brands that have similar values or have incredible content strategies for inspiration and genius ideas.
Utilize analytics to measure success
You can’t possibly know whether your social marketing campaigns have succeeded unless you’re measuring data. Google Analytics is something that can be utilized as a great social marketing tool that will assist you in monitoring your most effective social marketing tactics, as well as determine what social marketing tactics are best left behind. Place tracking tags on social marketing campaigns so that you can effectively track them. And make sure to utilize the analytics across all the social sites for even greater insight into what of your social content is working best with your audience.
Attempt paid social
One of the many reasons to place ads on social sites is that it is a highly affordable means to widen your reach. If you play your cards right, you can place your content and offers in front of millions of people for pennies. Most social media sites have incredibly granular targeting mechanisms, where you can target your budget to precisely the kind of people most likely to be interested in your business. Below are some tips and resources on how to begin with paid social media advertising:
- Facebook ads
- Pinterest ads
- Instagram ads
The best business social media marketing websites
Each of the top business marketing platforms, such as Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram, has its own audience, personality, and advantages. Here’s a brief overview of their differences and practical applications.
Facebook is the world’s largest social network and one of the world’s largest business directories. Facebook is utilized by individuals of all ages to stay in touch with friends and relatives, participate in groups and forums, discover and visit local businesses, and follow companies. Facebook is an excellent social marketing site to:
- Establish relationships with existing customers
- Post hour changes, events, and anniversaries
- Engage in discussions and live streams
- Market to baby boomers
Organic reach on Facebook is limited, so if you’re looking to generate leads or find new audiences, Facebook advertising is your best bet.
YouTube
You might not consider YouTube a social media marketing website, but it is: you can upload videos to your channel; share, comment on, and like other videos, and subscribe to other channels you enjoy. And you have a curated feed on your home page with recommended videos. The secret to social media marketing on YouTube is not attempting to “go viral,” but providing value. It’s suitable for:
- Tutorials, how-tos, and explainer videos
- Shoppable YouTube live streams
- Advertising (video ads and platform display ads)
- SEO (video is taking over the “how to” SERP!)
Although it entered the market many years after LinkedIn and Twitter, Instagram soon overtook those sites and had a billion monthly active users in 2018. It’s loved for its variety of content types, such as Feed posts, Stories, Lives, Reels, and IGTV. Individuals follow brands and influencers they shop with and who identify with their values on Instagram. Craft your Instagram bio and then apply it to:
- Social shopping
- Influencer marketing
- User-generated content
- Company culture
Ads on Instagram cost more than Facebook ads, but on the plus side, organic reach is greater as well.
LinkedIn is a professional network but also an inspiring community of individuals that values leadership, learning, and core values. So besides applying it to network, identify leads, and post industry information, it’s also an ideal place to reveal your company culture and develop your personal brand alongside your business brand. There are plenty of LinkedIn company page features to leverage, so be careful while creating your page. LinkedIn is an ideal platform to:
- Attract the best talent
- Network with partners, peers, and clients
- Share company milestones and culture
- Post industry news and insights
Twitter is a wonderfully knotted net of quick ideas, bite-sized morsels, and engaged conversation. You need to be posting regularly on all social networks, but particularly here. Some users rely on Twitter to get news, stay up to date on brands, and get customer service. Make sure to retweet when a customer says something positive about you, and don’t miss a chance to reply to people’s queries when you can. To thrive with social media marketing on Twitter, you might consider:
- Following influencers in order to be informed about news and trends.
- Telling a story by tweeting a series of Tweets in one thread.
- Being available for customer service and FAQs.
Snapchat
Snapchat is not exclusively teens. Its oldest age group (75%) is 13-34 and with Snap Maps, geofilters, and collaboration with Gannet, more local than you know. Relationships can’t be built on the platform, but an audience with entertaining pictures and short video snippets can be constructed. Leverage Snapchat for:
- Location-based advertising
- App promotions
- Good feel content
TikTok
TikTok is the quickest-growing social network to ever exist, reaching one billion monthly active users in just five years. Although it’s famous for dancing, there are just an absolutely huge number of trending categories on the app that keep increasing. Companies are seeking to leverage it as a marketing tool, but don’t forget that the main reason individuals use TikTok is to have fun, so keep your videos in line with that. Utilize TikTok to:
- Join viral challenges
- Share humorous and inspirational clips
- Be relatable
Social media marketing courses
You can view our social media marketing course best of here, but naturally, these are our own. Use them to establish your social media presence using organic and paid means.
LOCALiQ Social Media Marketing Lab
LOCALiQ Social Media Marketing Lab is full of info and inspiration for any business, big or small, local or national, brand new or wanting to do better. It’s a free course that consists of:
- Demographic comparison, statistics, and overall mood of every platform.
- How to post what and when for every platform.
- Profile necessities and optimization techniques.
- More than 131 post concepts and examples.
Social Ads 101 [PPC University]
Bloom Agency’s PPC U is where you go if you need to take advantage of paid social ad advertising. Any assistance tutorials and help articles from both sites will get you started first, but what about its more strategic and advanced components? PPC U courses are crafted by industry leaders and experts and are designed with the intention of providing counsel, intelligence, and wisdom you wouldn’t have otherwise received.
Social Ads 101 consists of:
- The advantages and disadvantages, metrics, and social media advertising best practices.
- Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Snapchat, and TikTok ad buying crash courses.
- Social selling Facebook and Instagram tips and tricks.
Facebook Ads 101 [PPC University]
An extension of PPC U, this Facebook Ads 101 course is more comprehensive with intermediate and advanced subtopics, such as:
- Daily and lifetime budgeting as well as account optimization techniques.
- Facebook ad types, audience targeting options, and scheduling.
- Tips and tricks to write winning Facebook ad copy and creative.
- How to execute a full-funnel approach to beat your competition.
Social media marketing solutions
While as free and accessible as one may be, a successful social media marketing campaign incorporates a few of them and sometimes a mix of organic and paid strategies. This is time-consuming and while it’s great to have, the more you build up your audience with social media, the more difficult it will be to maintain. Social media marketing solutions range in size and shape to enable companies to capitalize on social media. For instance:
Social media management tools: Social media management tools such as HootSuite and Sprout Social employ proprietary technology to assist more established social media marketers in automating their business and acquiring detailed analysis.
Social media marketing agencies: There are a few agencies specializing in social media marketing, e.g., Akvertise or even just pure paid social advertising only.
Digital marketing agencies: While a single platform will not suffice for social media marketing, a single channel will not for overall marketing. Digital marketing agencies can assist you with incorporating social media marketing into your more comprehensive strategy involving email, website, SEO, and the rest.
Hybrid services: Others provide a combination of the above. LOCALiQ social ad options leverage proprietary technology to help oversee your strategy for you and let you concentrate only on social or as part of a larger plan.
Plan your social marketing plan first
Social marketing on social media is not solely for traffic driving and expanding your coverage. Social marketing makes your business a personality which your readers can relate with and converse on a different platform.
Where ever you might be using which websites, it’s more valuable to recall that social media isn’t a place in which you are going to be selling your business. It’s a place where you can be yourself, share your values, provide helpful information, and encourage others. With people naturally following you and engaging with your posts, there will be no pitching necessary. And with this strategy, you will get not only your business objectives but all the other intangibles that add up to satisfaction and fulfillment.
Rahul M.
B2B Service Provider