Social Media Marketing: Tools, Tips, and Strategy

Social media has become a huge platform for users to interact with each other and with brands. With literally millions of people interacting on such platforms, it is frankly irresponsible to not be on social media. But with platforms and trends to keep track of, where do you start?

Social Media Trends

Currently, thousands of businesses carry out a successful marketing and interaction plans on social media platforms. A 2019 study showed that Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram were the top three social platforms for brands. More users are on these platforms every day than any other platforms combined. They are also easy to market on, share images, link sharing, and video-friendly. They are also excellent places where you can interact with your consumer base, a feature highly sought after among most consumers.

Other popular platforms include sites with a specialty strategy. LinkedIn, YouTube, and Pinterest come in at the next three, with less known sites and apps like Whatsapp, IGTV, Snapchat, Twitch, and TickTok coming in further down the list. These sites are often seen as untapped markets with fewer businesses clogging up the ad space. Even so, these sites have much narrower target markets and don’t often look kindly to advertisements that don’t fit with the site’s theme. For example, you wouldn’t see an ad for a new swimsuit set on LinkedIn. These other platforms can be powerful to your cause if done carefully and correctly.

Have a Planned Strategy

Did you know that more than 50% of businesses don’t have a planned and documented social media strategy? Trying to execute a cohesive social media marketing plan 100% on the fly is a recipe for disaster. If you don’t have one in place, you risk losing any semblance of a plan. Not having anything in place also makes tracking progress and market trends difficult. A well balanced social media plan includes many measurable metrics that you can look back on to determine success or failure. How can you make any positive adjustments when you don’t know what the problem is?

Orchestrating a Cohesive Strategy: Tools of the Trade

With so many different media platforms to advertise and interact on, it can be difficult to keep track of everything. Fortunately, there are many tools out there that do just that - organize and congregate. Using these tools is vital to any social media manager tasked with executing a campaign spanning multiple platforms. Some of our favorites are Agorapulse, Hootsuite, and Social Report. Each of these come with a variety of tools geared toward making your social media campaigns successful. They each have measuring tools to track specific metrics related to your campaigns that track in real-time. Customer contact is also a standard feature. They will receive and congregate all customer comments and direct messages, allowing you to see everything in one convenient dashboard. You can like and reply to anything. The biggest differences are the design preference. Each has created excellent layouts geared to make your experience as easy as possible. One other thing, for full functionality, each requires you to sign up for a monthly plan at varying rates. Hootsuite does have a free plan with limited functionality for you to take for a spin.

The social media marketing landscape has changed drastically even in the last few months. It is important to keep up to date with any industry changes!