Social Media Strategy

How to use social media trends to your advantage

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Social media has become an essential tool for businesses of all sizes and industries. Not only can it be used to connect with customers and promote products or services, but it can also provide valuable insights into industry trends and consumer behavior. By keeping an eye on social media trends, businesses can improve their marketing strategies, product development, and overall operations.

a mobile phone screen with various social media apps
New trends can be found across all social media

Where to start

One way that businesses can use social media trends to improve their operations is by monitoring customer sentiment. Social media platforms provide an unprecedented level of access to customer feedback, and businesses can use this data to gain insights into what their customers are saying about their products or services. By monitoring sentiment on social media platforms, businesses can identify areas where they need to improve and make changes accordingly.

Another way that businesses can use social media trends to improve their operations is by identifying new opportunities. Social media platforms are constantly evolving, and new features and functionalities are added regularly. By keeping an eye on new developments, businesses can identify new opportunities to reach their target audience or improve their products or services. For example, the rise of video content on social media platforms has led to an increase in the use of video in marketing campaigns, which can be a powerful way to reach and engage with customers.

Social media trends can also be used to improve business marketing strategies. Platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat are all popular among younger audiences, and businesses can use these platforms to reach these audiences with targeted marketing campaigns. Additionally, social media analytics tools can be used to track the performance of marketing campaigns and identify which strategies are most effective.

Stay up to date

hand pointing with pen to social media analytics page
Social media analytics

Businesses can also use social media trends to improve their products and services. By monitoring conversations on social media platforms, businesses can identify areas where their products or services are falling short or where there is a gap in the market. This information can then be used to inform product development or to identify opportunities to expand into new markets.

Social media trends can also be used to improve customer service. Many customers now turn to social media platforms to voice their complaints or ask for help. By monitoring social media platforms, businesses can identify issues and respond to them quickly, preventing negative sentiment from spreading.

Always keep monitoring your platforms

However, it is important to keep in mind that social media trends are constantly evolving, and what works today may not work tomorrow. Businesses need to be proactive in monitoring and adapting to these trends in order to stay ahead of the curve. This requires dedicating resources to social media monitoring, such as hiring a social media specialist or investing in analytics tools.

In conclusion, social media trends can be a valuable tool for businesses looking to improve their operations, marketing strategies, products, and services. By keeping an eye on social media trends, businesses can gain valuable insights into customer sentiment, identify new opportunities, and make data-driven decisions. However, businesses need to be proactive in monitoring and adapting to these trends in order to stay ahead of the curve. With the right approach, social media can be an invaluable resource for businesses looking to improve their bottom line.

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5 ways to use short-form videos in your social strategy

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Image of TikTok site

Short-form videos are becoming increasingly popular and used in nearly every social media channel as a useful method way of marketing your content. Whilst creating this content sounds easy, creating unique and engaging content can be a challenge. We’ve created this handy guide to how you can market your content to get the most out of your posts.

What are short-form videos?

Short-form content is exactly what you would expect – video content that is shorter than your average video, typically two minutes or less. This type of content is utilised by businesses on platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Instagram. The main aim of this type of content is to encourage the user to engage with the brands, through liking and subscribing or even to create User-generated content.

What are the different types of short-form videos

Short form videos can easily integrate into your social media plan, whether it’s a product launch or brand awareness you’re wanting to achieve, here are a few ways in which this can be done.

Trends and challenges

TikTok is the best channel for a brand to show its personality. Through trending music, themes and pre-recorded sounds, Tiktok trends are changing daily. TikTok is a platform in which being first to a trend can result in engagement. Whilst the platform also gives you and your audience the opportunity to create content together in the form of Duets and challenges. Perfect for any company looking to show a lighter side to their workplace, this is certainly worth incorporating into your social content plan.

Similarly, YouTube shorts can also be utilised in the same way in this same way allowing you to incorporate challenges into your branding and provide a light-hearted look to your brand.

Product launches

Perfect for providing a first look or reveal of a product, video shorts can be a perfect way for people to find out about your brand. Video Shorts can also be used to provide small teaser videos leading up to the product’s initial launch. This could be incredibly useful and a great way to heighten anticipation for the audience if done well.

Platforms such as TikTok and Instagram would be the perfect choice for this and a great way to gain insight into what customers think through the comments. You can also use this to inform plans for your social campaign, and include it in your social media strategy.

image example of 'a day in the life'

A day in the life

TikTok is a perfect way to implement this within your social plan. Similar to challenges and trends ‘A day in the life’ TikTok video short can be incredibly useful for building connections with your audience. Allowing your audience to see the behind-the-scenes of what happens in the headquarters of their favourite brand on a daily basis.

By incorporating this type of content into your plan you are giving the audience unique content and value, making them feel like they’re getting inside access to the company.

This type of content will also spark the interest of people unaware of your company making the viewer want to continue watching to find out more.

Ads and influencers

This is a great way for you to create brand awareness. By teaming up with influencers and having them include your product or service in their content, you can reach your existing fan base and also tap into the influencers’ fan base. This type of short-form video content allows you to easily create a relationship and association with the new audience due to the trust that they have in the influencer themselves.

Educational videos  

Linkedin and Instagram are perfect tools to deliver educational videos. Allowing you to break down information into important points to deliver a certain message. The short-form nature of these videos will keep the viewer watching. This type of content makes the information easier to consume.

Will you be implementing short-form video into your strategy?

In conclusion, short-form video is a trend and one that many marketers are benefiting from by incorporating into their social media plans. Short-form videos come in many different forms and can be a great way to inform the audience about your brand and create a good brand image.

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Top Tips: Social Media Marketing

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Do you want to elevate your marketing strategy? Increase your reach and visibility across social channels? If so, here are the Top 5 Tips to help guide you!

Social Media Impressions

Tip 1: Define Your Goals

What will you aim towards if you have no end goal? Establishing your target will be the driving force of your marketing strategy. To ensure you’re setting your goals appropriately here are three things you must remember:

  • Be Specific – By knowing precisely what you want to achieve, you know where you have to concentrate your efforts.
  • Set attainable goals – If you set realistic goals, you will be more likely to succeed and those successes will give you the drive you need to create new ones.
  • Make sure that your goals are measurable – Assessing progress helps you to stay focused, meet your deadlines, and feel the excitement of getting closer to achieving your goal. 

Tip 2: Find out who your Target Audience is

Now that the objectives are clear, the next step is to consider the audience. Your approach will be meaningless if your audience doesn’t support it.

Your target audience must be the focal point of your social media strategy. Your target audience will assist you in making all of your decisions, from the social media channels you must use to every piece of content you produce.

Knowing your audience’s top concerns will help you develop messaging that will ring true with them. It is crucial to clarify their concerns, worries, and issues. Finding the correct audience to connect with is one of the biggest hurdles for the majority of businesses. You must identify your target demographic and the social networks they frequently engage with in order to locate your perfect audience.

Tip 3: Make Wise Choices for Your Social Media Platforms

This Top Tip explains it is not essential to be present on every social media platform, but it is important to have an effect on the ones where you are.The quality matters more than the number!  Publishing inadequate content can only make your situation worse.

Alternatively, conduct research and strategically develop your presence on Social Media to meet your objectives and engage your audience. Pay attention to the platforms that your audience prefers.

Tip 4: Use Social Media Tools

Different social networks are used by different audiences at various points in the day. Which raises the issue, “How often should you post?” What kind of material will need to be published?
Start by determining when is the optimal time to post.   For the integration of a successful marketing plan, it is critical to publish high-quality content and figure out the right posting frequency.

It’s beneficial to plan out all of your social media content. Additionally, content calendars facilitate efficient distribution, enhances teamwork, and provides a deeper understanding of what functions positively and negatively. See the resource link down below!

Use social media automation tools to help with tasks. All at once, plan your hashtags, posts, tweets, pins, and stories for the entire month. With less time spent on administrative tasks, you’ll be more efficient and strategic in your approach.

Resource: Social Media Calendar Tool

Tip 5: Explore Social Media Analytics in Depth

Top Tip number 5 explains that analytics enables you to learn more about your audience and what attracts more visitors. You can’t optimize your services without these. Social media data can be used to improve performance.

Stats like follower growth, page visits, number of posts, likes, shares, impressions, clicks, etc. are highlighted whilst analysing analytics.

You may monitor your social media statistics, leverage  your findings. This may mean reevaluating your strategy or developing future goals.

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Top Tips for an Effective Social Media Strategy

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Social media is rapidly emerging as an important component of digital marketing for small businesses around the world. There are billions of people all over the world who use social media every day to follow the lives of others. Companies are using social media effectively to promote their products and services, as the reach of social media is huge. In this blog post, I will be covering five tips on how you can run an effective social media strategy.

It is now common for companies of all sizes to use social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook for customer service. As social media has become a key component of digital marketing, we need to implement an effective strategy.

Plan

Being organised and planning your posts in advance is key to managing a good social media strategy. You should look to plan your posts one month before they are due to be published. Long-range planning allows you a time to think about what you want to publish. You will have plenty of time to produce something creative on sites like Visme, which will produce a high-quality post. Rushing your work will lower the quality of your posts. Hootsuite is an excellent site to plan your content and there are several plans, depending on your business requirements.

Customer Service

It is now very popular for customers to use Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter as platforms for customer service. People may look to use direct messaging/ comment sections on these channels to voice a complaint or ask questions about your services. The level of customer service you provide on these platforms is just as important as the service you provide on the phone or through email as they are in the public eye. In most cases, you will need to provide the user an email or point of contact so that information is kept confidential.

Stakeholders

In addition to posting on social media channels, you should also interact with posts from your stakeholders. You are regularly engaging with a stakeholder’s social media (i.e., liking, sharing, commenting), which would lead to them engaging with your posts. Making a habit of this will go a long way in spreading awareness for both you, and the stakeholder. It will also allow for a healthy business relationship to be built.

Be Yourself

Social media is the best way to denote your personality online to your stakeholders. They might be interested by understanding how the commercial enterprise works and what your team get up to with their time. If you are attending events or going into the office after working from home for a long period of time, post this on social media to update your network. If one of your team have achieved something big, congratulate them via comments/ sharing the post to let your followers know about the talent of your employees. This could be anything from an award win/nomination to celebrating an employee’s anniversary at the company.

Analytics

By using social media, you are fortunate enough to be able to analyse the performance of your posts. LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter provide you with detailed analytics of your posts, allowing you to understand what works well and what doesn’t. There are different factors that will help you to understand what will help your posts perform well such as:

  • Reach.
  • Impressions.
  • Audience growth rate.
  • Engagement Rate.
  • Amplification rate.

You should review your analytics every 30 days, so that you can look for improvements in your social media marketing.

Conclusion

Overall, these top tips should help assist you to create a successful and effective social media strategy. Building your experience through social media will naturally allow you to begin to find yourself running a good strategy. It will take time and hard work, but the reward can often be very valuable to you and your company.

Digital Marketing Apprenticeship: Boosting Social Media Engagement

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Social media engagement

What is Social Media Engagement?

A term heard throughout the apprenticeship of a digital marketer. A measure of how well an online business or brand is doing in its social media efforts. Engagements are shares, likes, comments and any other interactions. Historically, engagement has been a common measure of social media success.

How is it calculated?

Total engagements / Total followers X 100

Tips for better Social Media Engagement

Know your audience – Research into who it is you want to target and find out their interests, what platforms they use and at what times. There is so much you can learn from researching the target audience!

Create interactive content – The more engaging the better! how many times have you gotten sucked into random BuzzFeed quizzes? Interactive content is great because it can create emotions of curiosity, excitement and fun.

Use a social media management tool – Tools such as Hootsuite or Meta business Suite not only allow marketers to plan and schedule content best to fit their audience but also provide analytical features. This means you can track how well campaigns and posts are doing for future success!

Know the difference between Reactive and Proactive Marketing – Marketing campaigns that are proactive require specific preparation before release, while marketing campaigns that are reactive respond spontaneously to current events. Use both accordingly!

Respond quickly to queries – Customer service is key. You want the customer to feel valued always respond in a professional, timely and friendly manor. Keep inline with bet industry practice and your business or brand social media policy.

Somecontent ideas for boosting social media engagement:

  • Host Q&A’s
  • Repost / share relevant content
  • Use National days
  • Follow viral trends
  • Host a challenge
  • Repurpose old content

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Top 6 Social Media DO’S and DON’TS

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Social Media

The prospect of using social media for business can be daunting. However, having a social media presence is something that today’s consumers expect from brands, which means that a lack of it usually rings alarm bells. 

But simply having a social media presence is not enough; you need to know how to use it properly and stay on top of best practices if you want it to impress your customers and yield a strong ROI. When used and managed properly, social media can help boost brand awareness for your business, drive traffic to your website, grow your customer base and even increase revenue.

With these attractive prospects in mind, we have compiled a list of the top 6 social media dos and don’ts to help you avoid common mistakes and get the most out of your social media business profile.

1 – DO set clear goals and objectives

If you’re looking to achieve a strong ROI from your business social media activities then you need to start by setting clear objectives. These should reflect and complement your overall business goals, and can be anything from driving conversions to building brand awareness and improving customer experience. Setting numerical values and deadlines can also help keep you focused – for example, you could set an objective to increase landing page traffic by 20% by the end of the next business quarter.

Without setting clear goals to measure against, you will never truly know if your social media activity is having any tangible effects and, even if it is, you won’t be able to prove it.

2 – DO analyse and track activity

As you’ve set goals and objectives for your social media performance, it follows that you should also have an established system for analysing and tracking your activity and results. There are many different tools and social media management platforms to help you do this, including Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Socialbakers, Google Analytics and, of course, the built-in analytics tools on each social media platform. With these tools you can track everything from engagement (clicks, likes, shares, comments) to referral traffic, assisted conversions and revenue, plus a whole lot more.

Measurement is potentially the most crucial ‘DO’ in using social media for business. It can help you prove your successes, guide future campaigns and pinpoint any failures so you can learn and quickly change direction if necessary.

3 – DO make good use of social media advertising and promoted content

There are two ways to use social media for business: organic (which is free to use and publish) and paid. Paid social media is an extremely cost-effective method of promoting your business, costing a fraction of the price of traditional advertising methods. Paying just a few pounds can significantly boost the reach of your social media posts and content, ensuring it is seen by more of the right people at the right times and in the right places. Assuming the posts you’re promoting contain useful content with clear calls to action, this additional exposure can help drive more conversions and revenue for your business than if you relied on organic social media posts alone.

THAT’S ALL FOR THE DOS, NOW LET’S MOVE ON TO THE DON’TS…

4 – DON’T overdo it

Posting too often on your business social profiles can be just as harmful as not posting often enough. According to research by Sprout Social, 46% of social media users will unfollow a brand for posting too many promotional messages on their profiles, which means you need to restrict your output or risk losing customers.

5 – DON’T use all social media platforms for the sake of it

Not all platforms are necessarily going to complement or suit your business type, ethos or objectives. You should avoid setting up profiles across all channels just for the sake of having a presence there, as this can dilute your brand and do more harm than good. Know your audience and choose carefully.

6 – DON’T get hung up on numbers  

And finally, you should never get too fixated on numbers when it comes to your business social media profiles. This is where quality over quantity really comes into play. Often the real value is found in the amount of engagement you’re receiving, and the type of people you’re receiving it from. These are the things that can make you the real money, so pay more attention to these instead.

Find out how to implement a well-executed social media marketing strategy here!
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Organic vs. Paid Social Media

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Young people sitting on stairs using smartphones for organic and paid social media

Weighing up the options between paid and organic social media? Not sure where to start? We’ll save you some legwork: you’ll find everything you need to know in this expert guide.

As a digital marketing apprentice, social media implementation is crucial. For instance, you’ll need to show that you have a variety of skills and the ability to run digital campaigns across different social media platforms. In this guide we’ve outlined the main differences between organic and paid social media, as well as including some examples to help you understand better. We’ve also chucked in some useful links to help get you started to becoming a social media wizard!

The key to social media is being social

Eli Fennell

What is Organic Social Media?

Organic social media refers to the free content that all users, including business and brands, share with each other on feeds. For example, this could include posts, photos, videos, memes and stories.

As a brand, when you post organically to your account, you can expect that people who see it are:

  • A percentage of your followers (also known as organic reach)
  • Your follower’s followers
  • People following any hashtags you use

Brands use organic social to:

  • Establish their personality and voice
  • Build relationships through informative, entertaining or inspiring content
  • Engage customers at every stage of the customer life cycle journey

Example of typical organic content from a business:

Pantone leveraging user-generated content

Pantone excels at the strategic use of user-generated content to build a stunning feed. For example, the brand uses aesthetically pleasing, high quality content to grab the audiences attention. Additionally, the short, punny copy doesn’t detract from the image.

What is Paid Social Media?

Paid social media involves brands paying money to social networks such as Facebook and Instagram to have their content shared with specific audiences. Paid social posts will show up in the feeds of whichever audience you decide to target and can be filtered by demographics, likes, interests and more.

Cost-per-click (CPC) is one of the most common methods of charging for this type of promotion.

Businesses and organisations use paid promotion on social media to:

  • Raise brand awareness and attract new followers
  • Promote new deals, content, events
  • Generate leads
  • Drive conversions

Example of typical paid content from a business:

example of paid social media
Moz stands out with colourful ad creative

Similarly to the the organic social example, Moz uses bright colours to stand out in the audience’s feed. It grabs the reader’s attention with bold colour choices. However, this ad is targeted to people who like marketing and marketing agencies, so a case study link makes sense here. Moreover, the strong, minimal copy gets the point across quickly and efficiently.

While paid social and organic social vary in their scope it is useful to know the benefits and drawbacks of each.

The verdict on Organic vs. Paid Social Media

Both organic and paid social media suit different businesses with different priorities in different situations. If your business doesn’t have the budget to implement a paid social media strategy, then try focusing on organic social media. Write thoughtful content and actively engage with your customers online. However, if your business has a sizeable marketing budget, prioritise your paid social media efforts to immediately spread brand awareness and draw specific audiences to your profile.

Ideally, you will be able to find a way to incorporate both methods into your overall social media strategy to improve your online presence. To take your social media marketing skills to the next level, take a look at more of our digital marketing blogs to become a social media pro!

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5 Reasons to implement social media into your marketing strategy

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Social Media Marketing Overview

Social media is growing by the day. With over 45 million active social media users in the UK, there is a whole market waiting for you to tap into. Marketing your products and services through social media is a simple and free way to raise awareness for your business. Express yourself with the complete creative freedom to show your audience more about your mission statement, core values and culture. Social media marketing enables you to grow brand awareness, provides customer interaction and increases traffic to your site. Read on to find out our five reasons for implementing social media into your marketing strategy.

  1. Grow Brand Awareness
  2. Engage With Customers
  3. Cost-Effective
  4. Market Awareness
  5. Increase Site Traffic
Image displaying different social media platforms used for social media marketing.

1. Grow Brand Awareness

Brand visibility is an integral part of any marketing strategy. Social media offers a way to increase your brand awareness across an array of platforms, connecting you to new audiences and potential customers. Given the vast quantity of users, adding social media to your marketing mix is a must.

Being seen regularly by customers can help build their trust which, if done consistently can lead to repeat purchases and visits to your site.

It’s important that when a new customer visits your site for the first time, they can see that the brand is reputable. Seeing your presence and legitimate following on social media will help… offer a level of validity that can lead to potential customers putting their trust in you and potential relationships being created.

2. Engage With Customers

The more you communicate with your audience, the higher chance you have of converting them into a customer and building customer loyalty.

Replying to comments left by your audience is key to retaining followers. Making sure you respond in the correct tone and manner, whilst also being prompt, will show customers you care. Thankfully you can answer any problems almost instantaneously through social media. As easy as it may be to reply to general queries, you must also respond to negative feedback in the same manner aforementioned. Providing insightful responses can even help to show other members of your audience that perhaps the negative comment may not be an accurate representation of your brand.

Some of the best platforms to engage with customers are:

  1. LinkedIn
  2. Twitter
  3. Facebook
  4. YouTube
  5. Instagram

While responding to comments may be time-consuming, it is certainly worth it. Growing relationships can help build customer loyalty. A direct impact of customer loyalty may be customers recommending you to their peers.

3. Cost-Effective

Social media marketing is perhaps the most cost-effective method of advertising. The reason being is that it can be completely free to create an account on the most popular platforms such as LinkedIn and Twitter.

If you do decide to pay for ads/promotion it is extraordinarily cheaper than alternatives such as magazines, mailshots and radio. In today’s society, it is also a more popular medium than the other alternatives mentioned. Do you sacrifice the quality of the results? The answer is no, social media advertising still offers the same level of awareness and engagement which further verifies that social media marketing is a must for your marketing mix.

One drawback is the time you will have to dedicate to creating content. Engaging and insightful content isn’t easy to produce and can take up a lot of resources, however, the return-on-investment social media marketing provides shows that this is time well spent.  

4. Market Awareness

As a business, it’s important to understand the needs and wants of your customers. Social media provides a way to monitor this. By monitoring the content your customers are engaging with you can see what interests them. This might have never been seen without having a social media presence, making social media marketing an extremely useful research tool.

Not only can you monitor customers, but you can also monitor the activity of competitors. You can use competitors to see what content and products are popular with similar audiences. You can find out if a competitor is using different keywords to you and if they’re taking advantage of these keywords and hashtags then you now have a chance to see which are performing well and in turn implement them for your own business.

Run polls and ask questions to find out more about your customers’ needs. Spark up conversations with customers. Find out their wants directly and you may even have a chance to reply imminently to any feedback they offer, ensuring they aren’t left feeling confused or helpless.  

5. Increase Site Traffic

Perhaps the best reason for implementing social media into your marketing mix is the countless opportunities for driving traffic to your site. Posting about products and services and linking back to your site is a great way to do this. The more engaging the content you post is, the better the interaction you’re likely to receive.

Post about your blogs, products and services through different social media platforms and link back to your site so any engagement with the post leads back to you. The level of engagement determines the amount of traffic to your site where you can then promote further products and services.

Using engaging content such as polls and videos can increase the likelihood of a post being read, shared and engaged with. If your content gets shared with new audiences then there will be even more awareness for your posts which in turn will increase the number of potential visitors your site gets.

Conclusion

Social media is rapidly becoming more popular and opportunities to grow brand awareness will only keep on coming. Remember your competitors are already increasing the value of their brands through social media marketing and interacting with audiences that you are missing out on. The sooner you implement social media into your marketing mix, the faster you will see the results reflected in your brand.

Check out some other Digital Apprenticeships blogs here.

Must Do’s when creating Social Media Strategies

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Blog post of Must Do’s when creating Social Media Strategies – Tips for L3 Digital Marketer Apprentices

Tips for L3 Digital Marketer Apprentices

A social media strategy is a plan of action for using your social media platforms as a marketing tool. As a Level 3 Digital Marketing apprentice, being able to create and implement social media strategies is a key factor.

The objectives of any strategy are to increase brand awareness, build brand recognition and create brand loyalty.

The 4 Ps of the Marketing Mix on Social Media

Social media marketing strategies are typically executed by the following four P’s:

  • Product: What is being sold? Is it a product, service, idea or information?
  • Place: Where should it be sold? Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn?
  • Promotion: How should it be promoted on the platform? E.g. sponsored posts or ads on Instagram
  • Patience: How long will it take before reach goals are met?

Do’s and Don’ts of Social Media Marketing Strategies

We have gathered a guide listing the best practices, and things to do and to avoid when it comes to social media marketing strategies.

Social media marketing, when done right, can be a powerful tool. But many companies make mistakes in their approach to it. This section explores the common mistakes made by companies when they use social media in their campaigns and how to avoid these things when starting a campaign of your own.

Must Do’s of Social Media Marketing for businesses:

1) Have complete and updated profiles and pages on each platform. The saying “first impressions are everything” certainly rings true on the Internet. People might be meeting the company for the first time via these social media accounts and it’s vital that you depict the company in a positive way from the very start. If you want people to trust what you’re advertising, make sure your profiles are fully-fledged (completed), professional looking and that you upload high quality profile and cover pictures.

2) Post regularly. Make sure to engage with your community at least once or twice a week. Post too sparsely and you risk missing opportunities to drive awareness of your brand, but post too frequently and you might annoy your followers instead!

3) Nurture your followers by interacting with them. It’s important to show your audience that you’re active in social media. Not only active posting content, but also active listening to them, and caring for them. 1-2-1 genuine interactions can increase not only the engagement rate on your posts, but also the number of shares and even reach.

4) Post original content. The content you post must always be owned by you/your company. Not only that, but if it’s too similar and many ways to other content from competitors and other accounts, apart from plagiarism and copyright issues, you will be facing a bored audience who will lose trust. The reason for many people to follow an account is to see what original content they share.

5) Create a content calendar. This will save you tons of time and headaches. You can either use your own spreadsheets, or some more sophisticated ones, such as this HubSpot’s Downloadable Template for Excel.

Things to avoid on Social Media Marketing for businesses:

1) Using automated tools that promote your content and grow your audience. It’s tempting to use tools that do this for you but the problem is that the followers they create for you are not interested in what you have to say and will unfollow after a few days.

2) Posting irrelevant content. Always try to post content on social media platforms which are relevant to your business or industry. If your company is an app development company, don’t talk about how much weight people lost over the past year!

3) Posting uninspiring content without any call-to-action. Often times, marketers just post an image or video without explaining what they want their audience members to do.

Conclusion: Keep the Basics in Mind

As a Level 3 Digital Marketer apprentice, you will find yourself working on social media marketing strategies many times throughout your journey.

It’s important you always keep some basic guidelines in mind, and stick to them, breaking them only when you know it will work. The rules are made to be broken, but only with a study and research behind, that supports those decisions. Ideally, you should stick to the best practices, which have been proven to work.

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Top 5 tips for effective social media marketing

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Social media is quickly becoming one of the most important aspects of digital marketing. It provides the most incredible benefits that help reach millions of customers worldwide. If you are not utilising social media in your digital marketing strategy, you are missing out on an incredible marketing opportunity. Below I have written up my top 5 tips for effective social media marketing.

Start with a clear social media strategy

Creating a well thought out plan is the key to a social media presence that is consistent and effective across all platforms.

A helpful way to structure your plan is by using a clear marketing framework.

I have provided a quick but helpful guide to ensure your social media has a clear direction:

Situation Analysis: where are we?

Objectives: where do we want to be? (e.g. gain followers, improve engagement, customer service, post frequency/quality) – make sure these are SMART objectives.

Strategy: how can we get there? (Consider insights on your current audiences and content formats)

Tactics: which tactics do we need to use? (e.g. which social networks to use, post frequency, content themes)

Actions: how will tactics be carried out and who will be involved? (Consider things like staff abilities/time, outsourcing, internal systems and processes, etc).Control: how will we know we’ve got there? (KPIs, analytics, customer feedback/surveys, reports, who monitors results?)

Audience Demographics

Know your audience

You can’t post relevant content if you don’t know who you’re posting it for. Make sure you learn about your audiences. This could be through market research, social insights, or social media listening/monitoring. Create audience profiles by defining exactly who your target customer is and make sure you include the four main principles; segmentation, messaging, engagement and measurement.

Have a read of article for more details on audience profiling.

Keep your brand image consistant

Your brand should always be reflected in the right way across every social media platform. It’s important that these themes link with your overall branding strategy – including your website. In addition to visual aspects, make sure to also includes things like tone, messaging and values.

Post Helpful and Valuable Content that fits in with business objectives

Make sure that your social media posts are meaningful and not posted for the sake of it.

When you’re creating social media posts or thinking up campaigns, ask yourself – ‘how will it help the business?’ and ‘how will it help the viewer?’ If you can’t answer either of these questions, maybe you need to rethink your social media strategy!

Examples of objectives that could be achieved with social media are:

  • Increase in engagement – shares/likes/clicks/replies
  • Increased customer satisfaction/service
  • More purchases of your product or service
  • More visits to your website
  • Increased followers
  • Brand awareness – how far is your message spreading?

Monitor your results

When you monitor your campaigns, keep the focus more on just likes. There are many other useful things to gain from social networks. This includes community engagement, customer service and sharing valuable tips and information about your service or product.

Once you know the types of metrics you need to measure, find a suitable tool to do so. Many scheduling tools and social media channels provide their own form of tracking, or it’s possible to explore using third party avenues or building your own APIs.

Overall, it’s important to keep up to date with social media trends, features and algorithms that social networks are always throwing at us. Make sure you are making the most of new trends and try out some new platforms to increase reach. This will be key to an effective and (hopefully) rewarding experience with social media marketing.

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