Using Social Media as Marketing Platforms: How to Squeeze The Maximum Out Of It

Social networks are the driving force behind modern digital marketing. With almost three billion daily active users, the likes of Facebook and Instagram give businesses an unprecedented opportunity to approach roughly half of the global population directly and instantly.

Although highly effective, social media marketing does not guarantee amazing results. After all, everybody else is using it and you’ll have to be clever enough to design a strategy that outclasses the biggest rivals in your niche.

The question of all questions is: How can I make my strategy better and more productive? In this post, we will give you the answer and show you how to squeeze the maximum out of your social media marketing plan in nine practical steps. Let’s take a look!

Also, read: 4 Best digital marketing certification you should obtain

Set SMART Goals

If you want to maximize the effect of social campaigns, you need to rethink your goals and apply the so-called SMART key performance indicators (KPIs). It means you ought to choose the following objectives:

Specific: Each goal has to be highly specific so that you can keep track of it easily.
Measurable: Set measurable objectives and quantify your plans.
Attainable: Don’t target objectives that are almost impossible to achieve.
Relevant: Make sure to set relevant KPIs that can really help your business flourish.
Timely: Try to stick to the goals that can be fulfilled in the next month, quarter, or six months.

Also, read: 12 Incredible Benefits of SMS marketing campaigns

Learn All You Can about Social Followers

The only way to improve your social media marketing strategy and create content that perfectly suits the expectations of your fans are to learn all you can about social followers. Start by analyzing demographic traits such as locations, gender, age, education level, job titles, and all other features that can help you to design a buyer persona.

You should also figure out additional details like personal interests, beliefs, life goals, hobbies, values, etc. As soon as you complete the audience research, it will be much easier to create a more appropriate content strategy.

Research Competitors

Now that you’ve learned all there is about social media fans, it is time to focus on competitors. It’s hard to imagine a brand without some serious social media presence, so your job is to analyze their online activities and see how they communicate with the target group.

Why would you do something like that?

The point is simple – competitor the research will show you the pros and cons of their social marketing campaigns. Such insights will help you to improve your own strategy and give you ideas on how to outperform the closest competitors.

Rethink Your Channels

The fourth suggestion on our list is to take a short break and think about your social media accounts for a moment. Why is it important? Well, it turns out that many businesses waste a lot of time and energy creating content for irrelevant networks.

For example, a B2B organization probably doesn’t need a page on Instagram or Pinterest because the two platforms attract mainly younger users. In this case, LinkedIn and Twitter are probably the most appropriate options.

You should give your channels a second thought and eliminate social accounts that don’t contribute to the overall success of your business.

Also, read: 7 Best low-cost marketing strategies for your business

Try to Be Unique

This is one of the most important social media marketing tricks, but it’s also one of the blurriest because it’s not easy to explain what is unique really means. It all depends on your company, its branding strategy, and your competitors.

According to the report, over 90% of businesses in the US are using social media for marketing purposes. It’s a staggering figure that clearly shows one simple fact – you have to be special and unique if you want to outdo so many competitors.

You need to figure out how to achieve it on your own, but our recommendation is to do it without losing professional authority in the process.

Mix All Types of Content

Winning over social media followers is difficult, but it’s very easy to lose them. This is exactly why you must avoid being monotonous and boring. How can you prevent this issue? Our advice is to mix all sorts of marketing content to make your accounts versatile and interesting.

After all, why would you focus on textual posts and images only? You can use a whole range of other formats like:

-        Videos and live streaming

-        Infographics

-        Charts and illustrations

-        GIFs and animations

-        Statistical reports

-        Templates

Also, read: 4 Reasons why video marketing is so powerful

Don't Forget to Advertise

While it would certainly be great to achieve the goals of the social media strategy organically, most companies cannot rely on this type of promotion exclusively. This is why they use social advertising, a strategy we strongly recommend to you, too.

Take Facebook Ads for example. The platform enables extremely precise targeting possibilities, so you can quickly reach verified leads only. You get to choose between core, custom, or lookalike audiences and each method makes it easy to approach exactly the type of user you want to approach. The same logic applies to pretty much every other social advertising platform.

Also, read: 6 Best ways to get customers with small budgets

Promote UGC

Do you know that engagement increases by 28% when consumers can view a mixture of user-generated product videos and official brand authored content? It is the power of user-generated content (UGC) that inspires people to take action, so it would be foolish not to make use of this strategy. The tactic has highly practical advantages:

- It makes social fans feel acknowledged and appreciated

- It helps you publish more content without wasting time

- It builds stronger relationships between brands and their followers

Besides that, it is easy to launch UGC campaigns. You only need to invite social media fans to create brand-related content and offer small incentives for the best posts.

Measure Results

Clever marketers understand the importance of analytics and they don’t forget to measure the results of social media campaigns. You should embrace the same mindset because it will allow you to improve the overall strategy and make the content more effective. In case you followed the first tip and set measurable KPIs on time, it will be easy for you to calculate performance and see whether your campaigns perform well or not.

Conclusion

Using social media as marketing platforms is the only logical way to exploit networks with billions of daily active users. But the sheer accessibility of social media does not mean that everyone can use it productively and successfully. On the contrary, only the most creative marketers can squeeze the maximum out of Facebook and similar platforms.

In this post, we discussed nine practical ways to exploit social media marketing to the fullest extent. This is not all you need to do to make your strategy work, but it’s a great starting point that can help you to kickstart social campaigns.

What is your favorite tip on our list? Do you have other interesting proposals to share with us? Make sure to leave a comment and we will be there to discuss it!

Guest Author

John Trogdon

John Trogdon is a digital marketer and a blogger at topaperwritingservices.com John specializes in email marketing and social media, but he is no stranger to other subjects such as self-branding and personal development. John is the father of two lovely kids and a passionate long-distance runner.