Social media marketing is an important tool for any business marketing strategy. It is cost-effective and highly efficient in raising brand awareness. Social media allows businesses to stay in touch with their customers and build deeper connections.
However, not all social media platforms are the same, each one represents a different demographic and caters to different audiences. Before devising a social media strategy it is essential to determine your business objectives (i.e. raising brand awareness, driving traffic to
website, engage with audience…)
Define your brand:
Businesses, especially new ones, may sometimes overlook an important step which is to define brand personality. Creating a brand identity can help you be consistent with your brand’s social media content. Is the tone you wishing to convey formal and sophisticated or casual and informal? Without determing these parameters it is possible to waste time and money by speaking to an audience who doesn’t relate to your brand.
Creating an audience persona through statistics:
In 2018 $74 billion was spent on social media ads and this number has been increasing ever since, this means that social media marketing is essential. So knowing the numbers surrounding each platform can help decide which of those can bring optimal results.
29.7% of Facebook users are adults aged 25-34 with 76% Female user. It has almost 80 million business profiles and overall reach, including both organic and paid, is at 8.1 %. However, Instagram has even higher female percentage in which 60% of them claim that they discover products through Instagram while 75% of them proceeded to purchase accordingly. Each platform is unique to a certain demographic and knowing the numbers helps utilize time and money spent on creating a social media strategy. For example, deciding to advertise cosmetics-related products on LinkedIn is unproductive since LinkedIn is a platform with 56% male users and mostly targets B2B marketing not retail. The right platform would be Instagram because of its image-focused layout and the ease in attracting users interested in retail purchase.
Optimizing for each platform:
- 2.23 billion Facebook users
- 1 billion Instagram users
- 330 million on Twitter users
- 1.9 billion Youtube users
- 575 million LinkedIn users
After a thorough analysis has been done, it is important not to push the same content on all profile, this will create redundancy and show laziness. It is important to take the time to map out posts beforehand because your followers are not the same on each platform. For example, Facebook and Instagram focus on choices, and center on all the information contained inside a user’s individual profile. Twitter and LinkedIn, on the other hand, center less on profile information, focusing on catchphrases, client handles, and hashtags. Similarly social networks have different tones. In creating the social media strategy you can choose whether your tone will be serious and professional or reliant on humor and fun.
