The reach of social media is staggering, with nearly 4 billion people—one-third of the world's population—using platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. This gives businesses and organizations a unique opportunity to connect with a global audience.
Marketing your business through social media is a wonderful way to engage with both potential and current clients. People use social media to find, connect, and buy products and services from companies on social media.
If you're not utilizing social media networking platforms, you're missing out on a huge portion of your target market. Using social media to its fullest potential can be a boon to your brand, building a loyal following and even generating leads and increasing sales.
What is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing is a digital marketing tactic that uses major social media platforms to help you achieve your marketing objectives, establish your brand, boost sales, and drive visitors to your website.
Social media marketing not only offers brands an efficient way to communicate with their present and future clients; its integrated data analytics enables brand marketers to track the performance of their efforts and discover new methods to engage with these clients.
When Did Social Media Become Mainstream?
Social media emerged in the early 2000s. MySpace was the first social media platform to blow up and reach a million monthly users in 2004. In many ways, this marks the birth of social media.
Since then, a slew of other social media platforms have emerged, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok, which now account for billions of monthly users and dominate the social networking market.
What are the Top Social Media Platforms Today?
With 2.3 billion members, Facebook is today's most popular social networking site. YouTube, Instagram, and WeChat are the next most popular platforms, each with over a billion subscribers. Tumblr, and TikTok follow, each having over 500 million users and Twitter, with over 365 million users.
How Do Marketers Use Social Media?
Marketers use social media to increase brand recognition and promote products and services by combining technology and social interaction tools such as text, pictures, and videos.
Social media provides marketers with a platform to engage with current and future customers. As a result, marketers make use of social media to humanize brands and convey brand messages in a casual and natural manner.
How to Use Social Media in Your Marketing Strategy?
An effective social media strategy can help you achieve your business goals by providing a roadmap for your social media activities. By outlining your goals, tactics, and metrics, you can ensure that your social media efforts are aligned with your overall marketing strategy. Additionally, identifying all of your active and planned social media accounts can help you maximize your reach and engagement.
How to create a social media marketing strategy in 7 steps?
1. Set Social Media Marketing Goals that Align with Your Brand's Objectives
Establishing your objectives and goals is the first step in developing a successful social media strategy. Your company's social media objectives should be in line with your entire marketing goals. That way, it is easier for you to measure success and ROI.
Using SMART goals as a framework, you can make sure that your strategy delivers the desired effect on your company's bottom line.
2. Get to Know Your Target Audience
Understanding who your customers are and what they want to see on social media is key if you want to convert social media followers into consumers for your business.
Social media analytics provides you with the demographics of your followers, their locations, and how they engage with your business on social media. These insights can help you tweak your plan and target your audience more effectively.
3. Get to Know Your Competitors
Social listening is a powerful way to stay one step ahead of the competition. By monitoring their social media accounts and relevant keywords, you can learn about their strategies, successes, and challenges. This way, you can adjust your own plans to stay ahead of the game.
4. Perform a Social Media Audit
Each of your social media accounts should have a certain function, and your audit should highlight this to you. After the audit, you should be able to decide if some accounts are worth maintaining.
Consider the following questions to assist you in making a decision:
- Which networks does the majority of your target market use?
- In comparison to your competitors, how active are you on social media?
- What works and what doesn't?
- Which areas need improvement?
5. Design a Social Media Posting Schedule
If you want to get the most out of your content, you need to have a strategy in place for when and how you'll publish it.
A social media content calendar will help you:
- Set your posting schedule
- Determine the right content mix
- Make sure you don't post too much or too little
6. Produce Engaging Content.
Creating content categories that are appropriate for the network and the goals you've established for it is the next stage in the process. The goal is to keep your content aligned with the purpose of each social media networking platform.
7. Monitor Results and Change Your Social Media Approach as Needed.
As you begin to apply your strategy and track your outcomes, you may discover that certain techniques may not work as well as you planned, while others perform even better.
What are the Best Social Media Platforms for B2B and B2C?
The best social media platforms for B2C companies are consumer-focused networks, such as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, while B2B brands will be more successful on platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter since they can easily target other companies.
How Does Social Media Aid Marketing Campaigns?
Utilizing social media can give your marketing campaigns a boost by allowing you to connect with your target audience, engage with existing and potential clients, gain customer loyalty, improve web traffic, and boost revenue.
Using HubSpot to design your marketing strategy is the best way to obtain the best results.
For companies managing multiple accounts and platforms, scheduling social media posts in advance can help things run smoothly. HubSpot's Social Inbox Tool is designed to make this happen.
The Best Social Media Platforms for B2B Marketing Strategies
LinkedIn
What kind of content is best for LinkedIn?
LinkedIn is an excellent platform for sharing long-form content, such as blog posts, articles, and guides. To get the most benefit from LinkedIn, aim to create articles that are in-depth, and around 1,500 to 2,000 words long.
You can share the whole article on LinkedIn, post a short excerpt, or add a link to the article on your business website.
How to Create LinkedIn Ads?
You can easily create LinkedIn ads on Campaign Manager- the advertising platform on LinkedIn. After creating a free account, the platform will guide you through each step of setting up your first campaign. By following these simple steps, you will be well on your way to creating a successful LinkedIn campaign.
How to measure the effectiveness of LinkedIn ads?
You can measure your LinkedIn ad campaign performance in 6 easy steps:
1. Determine your objectives and key metrics.
2. Create Insight Tags.
3. Make use of Lead Generation Forms.
4. Perform routine reviews.
5. Use Campaign Demographics.
6. Make use of Campaign Insights.
Twitter
What kind of content is best for Twitter?
Twitter is best for sharing list-based or how-to content. As for media types, photos outperform videos, text beats images, and quotations surpass questions in terms of popularity. Memes don't fly with Twitter users.
What is the user persona for Twitter?
Twitter's analytics dashboard has a "persona" filtering option. For example, personas may be used to identify a wide range of people and groups of people, including parents, teenagers, small businesses, college grads, and executives.
Social Media is the Future of Marketing and Corporate Branding
Brand recognition is identified as the number one objective for marketers, and social media networks provide a one-to-many method for spreading awareness about products and services. You can attract a wider audience by developing a solid brand following on social media.
The potential for social media is only growing. As more and more platforms adopt AI-powered chatbots, augmented reality, and social commerce, marketers are discovering new ways to leverage social media for efficient marketing and lead generation. As a sales-first demand generation agency, Highway 9 uses the Social Inbox Tool included in the HubSpot CRM platform to manage all of our client‘s account social media accounts in one place.
Visit Highway 9 to find out more about how to leverage social media to build your brand and corporate identity as well as how to incorporate it into your overall marketing strategy.
Contact us today!
