How To Market On Social Media

Understanding how to market on social media is one of the most pivotal steps a beginning business owner can take in small business marketing. Social media marketing is currently one of the most influential mediums to reach your business’ audience. Active presences on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube not only helps to skyrocket brand awareness, but also drive additional traffic and leads to your website. 

Social Media Ads For Businesses

Writing and designing content for your business is not too far off from how you personally use social media. Oftentimes, many believe that businesses only publish posts that call for a direct response of their account’s following. I’ll be honest, this rarely works nowadays. Instead, many marketers have adopted a give, give, give, then ask approach to their social media. This approach is intended to provide a remarkable amount of free value and content to a business’ following before any call-to-action is present.

For example, a business who specializes in custom WordPress web design might offer various page layouts, site architecture strategies, and more to their audience. Businesses that succeed in give, give, give, then ask provide offerings complimentary to their audience. Once audience members are able to perceive a business as being generous with no monetary involvement, they tend to associate paid services similarly. For small businesses marketing on social media, people need to buy into your brand and its values before they buy into your products or services. 

Larger businesses are able to use a long-term branding approach to their social media strategy. Simply put, branding can serve as advertising of its own. People are able to associate themselves to the positive benefits of a brand no matter the product or service it is applied to. Think of how tech giants such as Apple produce a phone and their existing audience already buys into the idea that the phone is high-quality and simple to use. This approach generally only works for companies that have earned an established following over years of being in business.

Understand Each Social Media Platform

As part of learning how to market on social media, it is important to understand each platform within its own respect. Marketers who take the time to learn what makes each platform different and which platform relates most with their audience are going to be better off than their counterparts. For instance, understanding how users interact with Instagram reels, then identifying if your audience actually uses Instagram allows for resources to be allocated efficiently.

How To Promote On Social Media

Businesses who are managing multiple social channels tend to post in bulk on each. Various software exists that allow for posts to be scheduled to all accounts at once and posted simultaneously. This is a great way to fill up social accounts quickly with content, but do not forget to regularly engage with the unique features of each platform. There’s a reason why your audience chooses to use a particular platform and you must appeal to the features they desire. When posting to multiple platforms at once, keep in mind that each channel has restrictions regarding image file size, video length, text length, and more. Posting software should help in managing this, but understand that content could be cropped poorly if not accounted for.

Focus On Where Your Audience Is

Focus primarily on the platforms where your ideal customer is active. Although important, try to think beyond just the demographics of a platform. Understanding the type of content your audience thrives on is a major part of learning how to market on social media. For instance, a movie publishing company would recognize that their audience is likely to engage most with video content. Identifying which platforms are best suited to video content, i.e. YouTube, TikTok, etc. would tend to make for the most impactful post. Is this to say that the movie publisher shouldn’t advertise their new film on Facebook and Instagram? No, they most definitely should but the focus of this particular campaign should lie on YouTube and TikTok.

How To Market On Social Media Effectively

Familiarize yourself with each platform first, then test various types of content using different tones and styles for each. Use your expertise of your brand’s audience to guide your testing, but be sure to avoid a bias for your favorite types of content. A process called A/B testing, which is normally included in third-party social media tools, helps to gauge which posts earned higher engagement overall. In short, A/B testing on social media is comparing two versions of a post and seeing which performs better. This is an elementary definition as there is a lot more that goes into effective A/B testing.

In addition to third-party tools, almost every mainstream social media platform has a business suite included. Paid advertising is generally handled within these suites, but the organic social media marketer must be fluent in these backends. Platform specific analytics are regularly provided through each suite that help substantially in catering posts to the active following of your business on that specific platform.