As the social media landscape evolves over time, it becomes increasingly difficult for businesses to keep up. Because of this, social media sites that were once a crucial piece of the puzzle are no longer effective at engaging potential customers in the same way. That’s why it’s important to always evolve your social media marketing strategy to keep relevant and ahead of your competitors.
Here are 8 crucial elements of modern social media marketing for your business:
1. Run ads on Facebook and Instagram
Running ads on Facebook and Instagram has become a lot more seamless and straightforward recently. The technology allows you to target extremely specifically ensuring that you reach an audience that is perfect for your business. When building a modern social media marketing strategy, it should include ads. With the mass amounts of content on social media sites, ads help you cut through the clutter and build your brand presence. When creating ads on Facebook and Instagram, make sure you have a goal in mind. Is your goal to increase your following or to bring traffic to a landing page to increase your leads on your website. Having a goal laid out will allow you to better assess the effectiveness of your ads so that you can continue to grow and evolve your social media ad strategy.
2. Ditch Twitter
Twitter is no longer a crucial element of social media marketing for businesses. Some businesses use Twitter for customer service efforts, however if your company doesn’t have a presence on Twitter already, there’s no point in starting to build one now. Twitter has been on the decline, with many of the website’s users becoming more automated and spammy. Because of this, the engagement you can make with real people who may be interested in your business is low. Also, in comparison to other social media traffic sources the amount of traffic you can generate from Twitter is typically low as well. Twitter is also a hub for celebrities and news sources, which can take over the feed making it more challenging for your business to make it’s presence known.
3. Treat your Facebook page like a website
Facebook is still a commonly used source for potential leads to find information about your business. This means that it’s still an important area for social media marketing. You need to treat your Facebook page like a website, making sure that there is enough information available to inform your audience. For example it’s imperative that you have up to date and complete business information listed in the “About” section of your page. It’s also important to give users a way to instantly contact you by providing a phone number or email, and making directions to your business available. Aside from making sure your page is up to date, you should also keep your content fresh. Have a good combination of informational content, like blog posts, and personalized company updates to keep your business relevant to your friends on Facebook.
4. Make decisions based on target audiences
Just like you’d do for your website, you should create target audiences that you primarily connect with to inform your social media marketing strategy. This will be the primary factor in choosing what social media platforms you intend to use. For example, if your demographic is males age 30+, using Snapchat probably isn’t your best move when creating your social media marketing strategy. Instead a Facebook strategy, that incorporates targeted ads, is a lot more crucial. Once you’ve used your target audience to define which channels you’ll use, then use them to guide your content and posting schedule.
5. Create video content
Video content is an important piece to modern social media marketing. It’s no longer enough to only share written content or pictures as they don’t work all the time at influencing your audience. There are a ton of different ways you can create video content for your social media marketing strategy. A few ideas include doing a Q&A with a current customer, featuring your employees at an event, repurposing video webinar content or doing a short video about a topic that relevant to your audience that you repurpose as an ad. When creating video content, you should use Youtube as a hub to store all of your videos, making them incredibly easy to share across social media while also building your brand’s Youtube presence.
6. Authenticity is key
Another tip for modern social media marketing is to be authentic. More and more people are searching for brands that they can connect with on a deeper level based on values, personalities and other key elements of your branding aside from your product or service. Although it’s important to showcase your product or service and share content that shows your expertise, showing personality is key. Make sure you have a good mix of informational and authentic content, like a video of your team at an event for example, to build a connection with your audience. Your leads what to know the people behind your brand over everything else when making a decision about whether or not to purchase your product or service.
7. Go live
Going live as a part of a weekly or monthly social media schedule is a lot more common for businesses now than ever. In order to keep up with your competitors you should consider going live. Going live doesn’t have to be complicated – keep it simple! For example you can feature your owner talking about a relevant topic giving your audience simple tips. Or you could also do a demonstration video of your product live. Going live should be something you do regularly to build audience engagement for your brand.
8. Be visual
To cut through the clutter you need to be extremely visual with your content. There should be very few times that you only post a text update with modern social media marketing. Instead make sure you always incorporate at least an image. Without an image or video it’s going to be extremely difficult to influence your audience with your post.
Overall, building a modern social media marketing strategy for your business is ever-changing. That’s why it’s important to keep up with trends and build content that’s relevant to your target audience. It’s no longer effective to only post a regimented schedule of text content. Incorporating video content and being more conversational will help your business cut through the clutter on social media. What other modern social media marketing tips do you have? Let us know in the comments!