Social media marketing is the most effective way to market your brand and products today, in this era of social networking. Regardless of who your target audience is, there is such a large population on social media platforms today that in one way or another, you will definitely be able to reach your target audience.
You can use various social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and more to market your business. All of these platforms have their own unique strengths and weaknesses, and you must know how to exploit the strengths and avoid the weaknesses.
What this means is that you cannot use the exact same content for all the platforms that you are on. You must tweak them a little and play around with the format to get the right fit for that platform. However, on a general scale, there are certain marketing strategies that remain true for most social media platforms.
In this article, we will be sharing 15 such strategies that you can use to grow your business on social media platforms.
Scheduling Posts Externally
The best way to save your time and energy is by using social media growth services to schedule your posts way before you actually post them. This allows you to create as many posts as you want when you have the time, and you can just schedule them to be posted when you want.
This way, you do not need to constantly stay by your phone or laptop to create content right before you need to post them. Social Sprout and Hootsuite are two popular tools that no only help you with scheduling posts, but also provide you with more features such as analytics on how well your posts are doing.
Be sure to schedule your posts based on the times that your audience is most active. Most social media platforms provide such data on their own in-built analytics tools, or you could use the tools mentioned above to find out the right time to post.
Video Content for the Win!
It is a well-known fact that videos are able to capture and hold the attention of most people for the entirety of their length, as long as it is a well-made and good-quality video. Among platforms that include both picture and video posts, videos work especially well for Instagram growth.
This is because the layout of the Instagram app is such that while scrolling through your feed if you happen to come across a video, it starts playing automatically and hence your focus directly falls on it. This makes the platform a highly addicting one, probably more so than some other social media platforms.
While there are platforms such as YouTube and TikTok that are largely made for video content, you can also share these videos on other platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. You can also use the Live feature that is available on most platforms to stream live videos.
Buy Some Engagement
Although this may sound like bad advice, it really isn’t. No, we are not asking you to buy fake engagement. Always remember to only buy real engagement from reputed sites such as Famoid, Viralyft, and Famups to buy real likes, views, followers and more.
Now, this can be a slightly tricky business. Social media algorithms can detect when an account is growing disproportionately or “inorganically”. This can cause a lot of problems for the account itself and will tarnish the image of the business behind the account.
To avoid such problems, you must remember two things. One, always buy real engagement from sites that guarantee it. Fake engagement includes bots and inactive accounts which make it easier for platforms to single out accounts that buy fake engagement.
Two, only buy a small amount of engagement to act as a boost for your posts and account. To make your growth look organic, you must only buy a minimal number of likes and views.
Even this will make a difference to the engagement you receive since people will be more encouraged to engage with your posts seeing the high number of likes and views you have gotten.
Specifically Target Your Audience
Depending on your niche and industry, you must have a definite target audience in mind. This target audience differs from company to company even if they belong to the same industry. To choose your target audience, you first need to narrow down on the age group you want to market your products to.
While social media is largely used by youngsters, there are plenty of older people who are also joining such platforms. Once you have chosen an age group, you need to narrow down on a geographical location. Such factors will help you to chalk out a specific target audience.
You can now use this information to create posts and ad campaigns to suit this particular demographic and attract more such people to your page.
Plan Ahead of Time
Regardless of what you do, it is always important to plan your days ahead of time. The same is true for marketing on social media platforms. You need to plan everything, from your long term objectives to your daily posts.
Without having a concrete plan and strategy in mind, you will be going in blind which will only slow down the process of gaining popularity on social media platforms. And remember, social media popularity directly translates to more customers.
So you must maintain your short term and long term goals by planning your moves on a daily basis to make the most of these platforms.
Share Stories
Everyone loves to read stories. Make sure you have an authentic, inspiring backstory to your business and share it on your social media platforms. This helps to create a persona for your page that connects with people on a personal level.
By doing this, you make yourself seem more trustworthy to your audience. Additionally, you can share stories from behind-the-scenes at work that may be funny or sad. Show your audience that there is a genuine person behind the screen. Keeping things formal doesn’t quite help on social media (unless you are using LinkedIn).
So have some fun, share real-life and personal stories with your viewers to encourage them to engage with you. Some of your audience may also have had experiences similar to yours and then they may share it on your posts too.
Use Paid Promotions and Ad Campaigns
It takes a long time to achieve popularity on social media without using paid promotion and ad campaigns. However, a lot of these platforms have features that are made keeping your needs in mind. Utilise these features to their full extent and promote your brand among your target audience. You must use pictures and videos that are eye-catching and intriguing for your audience for these ads.
Some platforms only ask you to pay when a user has clicked the link you provide with your ad or fulfil the objective that you mention while creating it. This allows you to only pay when you have successfully converted a targeted user to a prospective customer.
Engage With Your Audience
To maintain the interest of your audience in your brand, you must engage with them too. Respond to their queries and suggestions regularly and make your presence known. It is unwise to be a passive brand account on these platforms, and you are required to network with your followers.
There are numerous ways in which you can engage with your followers. You could directly ask your followers certain questions, either related to your brand and page or an unrelated question about their experiences or even a question asking them how their day went. Such posts generate a lot of audience engagement and even user-generated content which you can share later.
Study Your Competitors and Other Marketers Too
Your competitors in the market definitely have a social media presence too. If they don’t, you already have an upper hand over them since customers are seen to trust brands with a social media presence more than those that don’t.
On the other hand, if they do have pages across social media platforms, you must regularly check their pages and see how they are increasing audience engagement. It is highly likely that you have the same target audience and taking inspiration from their posts could help you immensely.
Additionally, you can take inspiration from unrelated accounts too. Find influencers who have a large fan following and get ideas on how they managed to acquire such a fanbase. You can then apply these tips to your own page and gain new followers.
Cross-Platform Promotions
While marketing on social media, you must have a presence across at least 3 or 4 of the major social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. This introduces you to new users on each platform who could then be converted to customers.
To acquire followers on all such platforms, you could share content from one platform to another. For example, you could share screenshots of your tweets on Facebook and Instagram. This lets your followers know that you have a presence on other platforms as well and they may want to check out your other accounts too. This way, you can direct your audience towards all your other pages and increase the number of followers and customers you have.
Determine Your Main Objective
When you start out your account, you must keep in mind what your main objective is. Do you want people to visit your website? Do you want them to buy your products from your page itself? Or do you just want to increase the number of followers you have?
Once you have determined your main objective, you can create strategies that will eventually lead you to achieve that objective. This is also used when you create ad campaigns that can help you achieve your goal sooner.
Start Conversations
A simple “How was your day today” can start interactions between you and your followers. Don’t shy away from asking your audience questions, it can boost your popularity tremendously. You can also start conversations about certain current affairs pertaining to your industry or talk about trends.
This shows that you are up-to-date with what has been happening lately in your niche and encourages people to learn more. This can also lead to unintended content creation and you can share snippets from some conversations as posts. These conversations may have started due to a Story that you put up and lead to sharing some interesting ideas.
Conduct Polls, Competitions, and Quizzes
Creating polls and contests are a fun way to get your audience involved with your page. There are multiple ways to go about this apart from creating basic posts. Instagram provides features on its Stories that allow you to post questions to which your audience can directly respond. They also have similar features for polls and Yes/No questions.
Another way in which you can do this is by creating an external landing page that you can link to your posts. Offering exciting rewards for the winners in competitions and quizzes will increase their interest and also encourage them to involve their friends and family in these fun activities.
Study Audience Demographics
While you may have a specific target audience in mind, it could be the case that your posts and brand attracts people from a slightly different demographic. For this, you must always analyse the demographics of your audience. Most platforms provide in-built analytics tools that have such data, which makes it easier for you to access it.
Using this information, you can create content that would appeal to such an audience and attract more such users. Use trends and ideas that would entice such users and apply them to your posts and marketing strategies for the best results.
Analyse
There is a lot of data that you can study which tells you how well your page is doing and what your weak points are. Using such data, you can create strategies to make your page better and reach a wider audience.
If you require a more intensive data analysis on your posts and the engagement you are getting, you can use external analytics tools that are easily available online. Such tools also provide other helpful features that you can do to improve your social media experience and ease the process.
Such data helps you to plan forward, create ads and promotions, and generally moves your page towards success. So keep an eye out for it and use the data to its fullest extent. This also provides you with content for reports and presentations that you may require.
Using such marketing strategies, you can not only gain popularity on social media platforms but also create a successful business. The more people you reach on social media, the better your chances are of obtaining more orders. Gone are the days of television and billboard advertisements. It is the age of social media networking now.
