Today’s social media landscape includes a wide range of platforms. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitch, TikTok and many other platforms have plenty of tools for you to use as you aim to achieve your overall business and marketing goals.
Yet regardless of whether you’re promoting a line of bathing suits, a new record album or Everygame casino no deposit bonus entertainment, running an effective and comprehensive social media marketing campaign demands the investment of resources.
You can’t just assume that some junior staff members will achieve the desired results because they’re young and know about social media. You must plan out your social media marketing strategy and be prepared to invest in ads, influencers, a social media manager and other facets of running a proper campaign.
Some of the most important aspects of a social media campaign include:
Customizing Content
Each social channel has a unique character and has its own demographic. Therefore, you need to customize your content for each network. For instance, for Facebook, where people engage with others in a more personal way than they do on other platforms, short text posts and short videos perform well.
Even if you just post a few words about an achievement, it should always be accompanied by an image or a video that somehow relates to your text. Add links to your posts to allow viewers to click directly to your landing page.
Twitter allows for posts that are limited by the number of characters (280) that you can include which means that your message must be short and to the point. Like Facebook’s posts, tweets with images perform better than those that don’t include images.
Hashtags are an important part of the tweets because they help drive audiences to content that is of interest to them – consider the hashtags that you use carefully because there should only be one or two – too many hashtags is considered “overkill.”
Most people are familiar with YouTube videos – you create videos and add them to your channel to give people who are interested in the subject about which you are creating videos a chance to follow your content – and your business. To keep your audience coming back to your channel for more, try to post at least one new video every week so that viewers know that there will be fresh content coming on a regular basis.
That, in turn, encourages them to “follow” and “subscribe” which pushes up your channel in the YouTube algorithm. Try not to advertise overtly in the videos – add your marketing material as part of the video’s content to educate your audience about your service or product in an unobtrusive manner.
With Instagram, it’s the images that matter so your photos and videos need to be good enough to grab people’s interest in a matter of seconds. Create a story by combining a number of these media and the story will be featured at the top of people’s feeds.
LinkedIn was created specifically for professionals to connect and communicate so you want to tailor such posts to that audience. LinkedIn is heavily used by people who are looking for job-hunting tips and advice and companies that are looking to fill positions so any posts that you add there should be suited to that audience.
Advertising with TikTok is still a new and largely unexplored area – TikTok has only been around for a few years. But TikTok, which involves short video clips, is a favorite among the younger demographic so if that’s your audience, you shouldn’t ignore it. Since TikTok videos are quick (15 seconds is the average) you need to post frequently to grab viewers’ attention.
Crossing Channels
You can use similar social media campaigns on the various channels – just make sure that you adapt the campaigns accordingly. If you’re making YouTube videos, you can take appropriate clips for TikTok.
Facebook posts can be shortened with hashtags added for Twitter. If your product or service doesn’t lend itself to imagery, don’t worry too much about Instagram. In short, you don’t need to include every social account in every campaign.
Hashtags are another issue – whereas hashtags are very important for Instagram and Twitter posts, they are less important on Facebook – though that may change as Facebook tries different tactics to prioritize posts with hashtags – especially those in groups.
In short, you need to think about your story and then consider if and how that story adapts to each social media platform. Advertising is all about telling stories with content that is of interest to the audience. If you tell the story in a way that is appropriate to each audience, you’ll draw them in to your message. Keep your branding consistent throughout.
Social Listening Tools
Use social listening tools to engage with your audience. Social listening tools such as HubSpot, Sprout Social, Falcon.io, Hootsuite, Mention, BuzzSumo, Buffer, TweetReach, Keyhole and other tools allow you to monitor your brand’s social media profile so that you can track customer feedback, conversations with relevant keywords, competitors, industries, topics and direct mentions of your brand.
The listening tools provide you with the data that you need to improve your social media strategies, social presence and brand awareness.
Results
You won’t be able to refine your social media campaigns to get the most out of them if you don’t track your results. You need to start by setting goals and then determining relevant metrics.
Most social media platforms have sections that you can use to track your insights and analytics so you can see which content gets the most attention and determine which content brings you the most conversions.
Then, you adapt your campaigns to build on your successes. Be prepared to make changes frequently to maximize your campaigns.
