Ever since Facebook and Twitter became a fad of the modern generation businesses of all sizes realized their potential and immediately created business pages on the top 10 percent social media sites in the world. Their goal is to attract new customers, build their brand and engage a wider audience. But how do you use the different social media channels to your advantage? Where do you start? And what do the professionals recommend?
In this article, we are going to talk about the 7 best social media marketing tricks to catapult your business into success.
Table of Contents
• Understanding your Audience
• Take Advantage of the Strengths of Each Channel
• Interact with your Audience
• Show There’s a Human Behind the Brand
• Ensure your Senior Executives are Authentic
• Use the Right Tools
• Put the Effort in to Gain Value
1. Understanding your Audience
The first thing you need to do is to understand your audience and why they particularly chose to be in that specific social media channel that you plan to market your business on. The manner in which they use social media should also be looked into. For example, certain users prefer to be on Facebook and Instagram because it allows them to post more texts, photos, videos and create “MyDay” video and picture tidbits of your day and Instagram stories. By comparison, on Twitter they can only post up to 280 characters of texts (which includes links to other sites).
What does this tell you as a marketer? It shows you that one group of users prefer to be more bold and want to build their social media profiles more prominently, while the other group prefers the minimalist style of exposing themselves to the world. Some are just there to become amateur journalists and if we take Elon Musk’s statements about Twitter users being fake bots at face value, then some are there just to become spammers. This tells you to cater your ads to your audience differently in order to capture their interests.
2. Take Advantage of the Strengths of Each Channel
How users engage in ads on different social media channels will determine how your sales output will perform. It would be a very good thing if you did a feasibility studies about this, so you can do effective social media marketing on each social media sites and succeed. Every channel has different strengths. Many businesses use Facebook as a shop window displaying lots of key information such as their location, website and opening hours, so it helps connect with the brand.
Twitter’s strength is based on delivering information straight to the point in 280 characters or less and you make sure your ads are squeezed into these parameters. On the other hand, Linkedin is slightly more formal in tone but has some great tools for engagement like groups and polls, so use this tools to market your business. Now TikTok is the most unique of them all! On TikTok users are allowed to upload videos on a myriad of topics that range from 10 seconds – 3 minutes. But we also know that people nowadays have very short attention span, so you make TikTok video ads that are short but will include all the key points about your business for people to engage.
3. Interact with your Audience
The best thing that social media created is a place where businesses and their customer base can interact on a personal level. It also gives more power to the paying customer and demand more from the businesses that they patronize. A good example of this is PayPal. A good friend of mine told me that his financial issue on PayPal was resolved faster on Facebook or Twitter than by calling them over the phone. Back in the 1990s this would’ve taken someone a week to get resolved and this is not counting the communication between banks and the fintech third party business like PayPal. This is also true on various other businesses and their customer base.
You can also hire professionals on job boards like Upwork, Fiverr and ClousPeeps to handle all the customer service for your business on social media via chat. This means that you’ll also save money on hiring employees and put them on freelance work, instead of hiring people the traditional way and adhere to government mandated salary and benefits and so forth. Some of these contractors go above and beyond to please your customers, which not only makes them happy doing business with you but they keep coming back for more and become repeat customers.
4. Show There’s a Human Behind the Brand
It’s crucial for your business to survive by engaging with your audience in not just a professional way, but also being genuine and human. As a rule of thumb, it is recommended that you drive a friendly conversation with your audience on social media, preferably with a relaxed tone and letting that human side shine through; although there may be some exceptions, especially with what type of business brand you’re marketing.
Allowing the ‘human side’ to flow unrestrained when you’re a B2B brand means that you come as an honest person rather than a business entity in the eyes of your clients. When you’re a B2B company, you are not appealing to the other company/brand, you’re actually talking to the shareholders and employees working in that company. They are a different kind of customers that you’re trying to reach out to and it’s kind of like a B2B2C. That human side that we’re referring to is absolutely critical once your clients/customers calls in to complain about your products or services – it helps reassure them that their concerns are being seriously considered when they know there is a real person behind the account that they’re communicating with.
5. Ensure your Senior Executives are Authentic
Remind your company execs that despite you respect their personal space and private lives, when they post on social media they’re like politicians and any untoward or negative post or comment or even an emoji reaction can deeply affect the company, therefore they should be careful with what they post on social media. Make sure that you tell your executives to make their interactions on social media to be relatable to the customers in general in order to resonate with their audience.
Basically just tell them to be as authentic as possible as most people can detect their insincerity, which can hurt your company’s reputation. You may call for a meeting with your executives and discuss how they should post on social media; however, try not to takeover their accounts as you could be fighting yourself in that case and you may lose that authenticity that you’re trying so hard to implement among your subordinates.
You may also want to read "How to Setup a Limited Company Online"
6. Use the Right Tools
There are more than 133 social media sites operating on the web as of August 2022 and normally experts recommend that you only market your business on the top 20 of these sites. But managing even with just a fraction of these sites can be time-consuming and exhausting, and you will need tools that can help you manage your social media pages efficiently. Perfectly timed social media posts gets the greatest audience share according to experts, therefore you should use a scheduling tool to help you post important updates on the different time zones in the US and make sure that you post mostly in the morning at around 9 – 10am local time. There are quite a few on the market such as Loomly, Hootsuite and Meltwater. These allow you to spend a couple of hours scheduling all your content for the week ahead.
A sentiment analysis tool like Clarabridge or Onalytica may also be helpful in you calibrating your social media interactions and improve your business transactions with your customers based what people are saying about you on social media. Positive responses from your audience means that you’re on the right track and you ought to keep doing what you’ve been doing. However, if you receive negative feedback from customers and the general public, then this indicates that you need to step up your game in appeasing them. Come up with a sound strategy to win back the hearts and minds of the people to your brand and outmaneuver your competitors.
Lastly, keep track of each social media analytics as this can tell you your KPIs (key performance indicators), which areas are doing well and which areas needs your attention and improvement. If you pay attention to the tiniest of details and keep your ears to the ground, then you’ll do just fine with your social media marketing efforts and be on top of your competitors. Having said that, be creative in engaging with your audience and make your competitors stumble in keeping up with you, instead of the other way around.
7. Put the Effort in to Gain Value
Doing social media marketing and managing your social media pages requires a longterm commitment. You can’t expect to make a big splash in the water by just dipping your toes into it, the same way, you cannot expect to see great results with a few days’ worth of effort. It’s ironic isn’t it? Everything now is digital and can be accomplished with a push of a button or a few clicks of the mouse, and yet still, it takes months and sometimes even years to establish a strong business brand on social media while battling it out with your competitors.
Consistency and perseverance will definitely produce amazing results for your social media marketing efforts and you’ll be very happy after a year or two of doing this, because you will have reaped the benefits of your labor.
