Is social media marketing relevant to my business?
If having web visibility or reaching more online users makes sense to you, social media marketing could be a powerful tool in your hands.
In this article, we cover five important social media aspects you need to remember for successful marketing.
1. Determine which platforms you want to be active on
Every social media is relevant, but each social network is unique, with its own practices, its own style and its own algorithm. You need to choose the social network that best matches your strategy and the goals you want to achieve.
a. Facebook
Facebook is now the largest social network in the world, with an audience of over 1.2 billion active users who log in every single day. Many use it to seek information, have fun, buy, sell, or influence, etc.
Today, Facebook lets you deploy multi-channel marketing for ongoing customer interaction, brand awareness, and more sales. To get the most out of it, equip yourself with a Facebook Business Manager and explore the possibilities of targeted campaigns.
b. Twitter
Twitter is a platform focused on discovery, as 79% of its users are looking for something new. Its effectiveness therefore has a direct link with an audience of passionate and committed people who initiate the conversation with brands and companies.
For professionals, the platform provides you with very precise targeting tools in order to position you in a specific niche. Eye-catching visual creations, embedded videos are the content that gives you better reach.
c. Instagram
The first expression that comes to mind when it comes to Instagram is influencer marketing. As you probably know, it's the social network par excellence for marketing based on the sharing of photos and videos, with a multitude of features (filters, stories, IGTV, etc.).
As such, Instagram can be a promise for your brand with over 200 million business accounts viewed per day. The areas of predilection for Internet users are: beauty, food, health, lifestyle, business, sports, spirituality, books, etc.
d. LinkedIn
Did you know that LinkedIn, the professional network par excellence, has a specific LinkedIn Business offer for small businesses? In general, (very) small businesses don't like exploring LinkedIn. And when they do, it's not for a long period of time. However, if you are involved in services like coaching, training, etc. it might be relevant.
Also, you'll have access to tailor-made features and resources to develop a quality audience and reach qualified prospects.
2. Plan the content you want to share
Creating a tweet on twitter, posting photos or creating a Facebook page is free. From the outset, it's accessible to the general public.
But you don't want to grow your digital presence just for the sake of writing. You are above all there for specific commercial objectives.
Because of this, it's important that you think about your content, adapt it to your audience and then plan it. Be sure to define the message your advertising campaigns want to convey, while taking into account the intended objective. The more precise and concise the plan, the more effective it will be.
For each of your promotional items, you need to take care of the typography, colors and more. It's also important to choose the form (text, infographic, video) of your article according to the social network used and your audience.
3. Create a content calendar
A content calendar lets you know what to post and when. It simply allows you to post the right content on the right social channels at the right time.
You absolutely need consistency and organization on social media. This implies that once you are started, being away for a long period of time is no longer an option unless you start from scratch.
It's important to realize that social networks are constantly feeding on content, and now more and more ads. Your teams therefore need to regularly publish content to retain your readers or those who watch your videos.
4. Look for the different tools available
To effectively take advantage of social media, there are tools that facilitate, simplify and automate most of the tasks at hand.
a. Canva
Canva is a free graphic design tool with a paid subscription for additional features. Starting from ready-to-use templates, it allows you to easily create graphics, posters and many other professional visual content for your social media branding.
b. Facebook Studio
Facebook Studio is a tool to help you manage posts, it's a dashboard for content creators on Facebook and Instagram. It makes it easy for you to publish content and analyze your account's performance. You can schedule your Facebook and Instagram posts there in advance, it's a good tool for planning your future posts!
c. Buffer
Like Facebook Studio, Buffer is an app that makes it easy to schedule posts to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. It also allows you to analyze the different performances of your different accounts. It's a powerful content planning tool. Like Facebook Studio, you can schedule your posts there, including those from Twitter and LinkedIn!
d. Google Trends
Coming from Google labs, Google Trends is a tool that provides information on the number of times a term has been typed in the Google search engine. So you can use it to determine the hot topics, the topics to discuss and the keywords to use.
e. Unsplash
Unsplash is a photo sharing site, so it's basically a free photo bank. The photos are classified by theme. Unsplash has a function to create crisp images and keep them for later use. It's therefore a great tool for finding royalty-free images to use in your publications and visuals.
5. Analyze your audience's response
Depending on your audience, you will need to analyze the results of your strategy, in order to improve or change what's not working. Most social networks have tools to facilitate statistical analysis. But there are plenty of tools better suited to analyzing your audience's responses, Google Analytics, among others. choose the one that suits you best.
In terms of social media marketing, you need to organize yourself well or organize your web and marketing teams accordingly. If you want to delegate this task, it's easy to do business with an agency to have a social media strategy tailored to your business.