9 Of The Most Effective Social Media Marketing Tips

But we know that social media marketing comes with its own set of challenges. These include ROI measurement (according to 58% of marketers), budget constraints (51%), and rapidly-changing trends (50%). To succeed with social media marketing, you need all the help you can get. To make your life easier and your social campaigns more effective, we have compiled tips that give proven results. We’ve also included a number of resources so that can save you even more time and effort.

You don’t need to be active on all social media channels. In fact, doing this can bring down your content quality and eat into your marketing budget. Especially if you are new to this, you need to target a few selected platforms before you expand your reach. Whatever your target platforms are, the social media tips below can accelerate your outreach efforts.

1. Have a Well-Defined Strategy

For a social media marketing plan to work, it needs to be backed by a data-driven strategy. Whether you already have a marketing plan ready or are in the process of drafting one, ask yourself the following questions:

Who is your target audience? Where do they spend most of their time? Who are your competitors? Where are they active? Is there an overlap in the above two answers? These are your target platforms. What strategies work well on these platforms? What kind of content is most popular there? How is your content going to stand out?

These questions will help you formulate an effective marketing strategy. If you have a hard time answering these questions, you need to go back to the whiteboard and redesign your strategy. You can use social media marketing tools to research your audience, competitors, platforms, and content types.

2. Maintain Consistency in All Aspects

To create a lasting impression on your social media followers, you need to maintain consistency in your post frequency, tone, and quality. Social media marketing is not a one-off activity that you do as an afterthought. You need to prioritise it and make time for it in your daily routine. Internet users have short attention spans and they could very forget about you if you’re out of sight for too long. You can create a content calendar to plan the timing and frequency of your social posts. Every platform’s algorithm is different and you can derive best returns if you adhere to their best practices. Below is an example of our social media calendar: You also need to keep your tone and quality consistent to inspire people to trust you. For this, you must first figure out your brand personality and your audience’s taste. Try to create a brand voice that matches your personality and appeals to your audience’s aesthetics. For instance, Harley-Davidson, the popular motorcycle brand, has an aggressive, in-your-face tone which is reflected in their print and digital ads. Through their ad headlines and social captions, they challenge readers if they’re tough enough to handle a Harley.

3. Create Targeted Content

The “spray and pray” approach doesn’t work on social media. You need to focus on audiences who have the inclination or potential to engage with your brand. They can be old or existing customers, website visitors, newsletter subscribers, or followers of relevant influencers/competitors. You can even target random people who have expressed an interest in your brand by mentioning it in their social dialogue. Social listening tools can help you track all brand mentions and understand their context. Using these insights, you can create more targeted messaging for this demographic.

4. Always Be On-Trend

Social media is a dynamic space where trends keep changing. Social audiences are also very sophisticated and discerning. They are quick to spot and tune out jaded content. Plus, every platform moves at its own pace, so you can’t have an assembly-line approach for content creation. It’s important that you stay abreast of social media marketing trends that are expected to dominate your target platforms. You can use tools like BuzzSumo and Social Animal to curate trending content and topics for your posts. Another option is to compile a list of sites/pages that always have high-quality, updated content related to your niche. Then, add the list into an RSS feeder platform like Feedly and you can see all the latest posts from sources you trust. You can follow their example and create on-trend content.

5. Perform A/B Tests

Quote or stat? Video or still image? Wordy or conversational? Most content creators and marketers get confused when they create or market social content. It’s simply too hard to second-guess how the audience will respond to the content you create. You’ll be happy to know that there are ways to test your social media content for efficacy. A/B testing or split testing lets you check iterations of your content against set parameters to find out your best option. This extra effort can risk-proof your social content to some extent. You can play around with variations of captions, images, ad copy, hashtags, emojis, and CTAs to figure out which combination is more effective. Present each variant to a share of your audience and track their engagement in terms of clicks, comments, shares, and other parameters. Repeat the same process for all variants and note the changes in responses. Derive a set of best practices from the results and use the winning variant.

6. Focus on Videos

Videos are big on social media. They are consumers’ #1 most-preferred branded social content. 93% of marketers claim to have earned new customers due to social videos. And 63% of marketers are satisfied with the ROI they derive from investing in videos. You can use videos liberally in your content mix, especially on Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook which are the top three destinations where marketers post videos and video ads. You can use videos to grow brand awareness, establish domain expertise, and promote products/events. Tutorials and DIY videos are especially popular among social users. And to make video creation easier, there are many sophisticated video editing software solutions you can use to create professional-looking videos.

7. Join Communities

Groups and communities on Facebook and LinkedIn are great places to do marketing. You can create a group of your customers and promote content, deals, and products there. You can provide value to customers by sharing gated content and company news. This can help foster brand loyalty and boost repeat sales. You get real customer insights by interacting one-on-one with customers in a group. In this way, you get a better understanding of their needs and feedback about existing products. Another benefit is that you can look for loyal customers who can work as brand advocates for you. Groups of like-minded people are great for sharing knowledge and building brand awareness. You can test new content and product ideas in this small group before releasing them in the market. The expert feedback you receive can help you improve your content and strategy.

8. Don’t Stress Over Algorithm Shifts

Often, social media folks go into a frenzy when platforms suddenly change their algorithms. But, truly, there is no need to panic. If you maintain high quality in your content, there are chances that you won’t be affected too adversely by algorithm shifts. It’s better to gain an understanding of the rationale behind an algorithm change and modulate your content to align with it. Don’t try to crack the algorithm by questionable methods. For example, YouTube before 2012, ranked videos based on the number of views they got. People tried to game the algorithm by adding clickbait titles to get more and more people to open their videos. But viewers would soon realise that the video’s content didn’t match its title and abandon it. This move backfired massively by affecting the credibility of host brands. Many times, platforms are pretty straightforward about how brands can stay on the good side of a new algorithm. Mostly, the underlying logic is to serve users with valuable and relevant content along with a good user experience.

9. Partner with Influencers

Social media is saturated with great content so it can be difficult to catch the attention of your target audience. An effective way to reach new audience segments is through influencers. By collaborating with influencers in your niche, you can expose your brand to people who are relevant to you but who didn’t know you existed. When looking for partner influencers, you should look for both relevance and reach. Many brands prefer to work with micro- and nano-influencers who have smaller but more passionate communities of followers. Such influencers are more cost-effective and approachable than high-profile influencers. Through influencer marketing, you can build your credibility and authenticity. Influencers can help humanise your brand and serve more relatable content. Plus, they give an average earned media value of $5.78 for every $1 spent. You can follow the example of brands that leveraged influencer marketing effectively.

Conclusion

Social media marketing is not as unfathomable as many marketers imagine it to be. You just need to approach it strategically. The tips in this post will help refine your marketing plans and give you an edge over competitors.