With more than three billion social media users around the world every month, it’s proven that social media is no passing trend. Social media is becoming a key element to every business’s marketing strategy, no matter the size of your company.
In this article, I cover why social media is important for both you and your customer, as well as my thoughts on some social channels and some useful insights.
Why social media is important for both you and your customer
Whenever something exciting has happened or if you need to find something out quickly, we all admit we turn to social media to let everyone know and to discover the answers to our questions. Social media has quickly become the easiest way to boost your business’s visibility amongst potential customers, learn about your target audience and also the fastest way to keep up to date with what’s going on.
We are finally starting to see companies trust in the benefits of social media, the platforms and the reporting capabilities have come so far over the last few years which has undoubtedly helped. We now see these high prospecting channels producing high volumes of target-engaged customers at a very low cost, this is mainly due to the level of detail you can set your campaign objectives and targeting.
Staying on trend
Getting overwhelmed and lost in trends on social media is easily done, especially if you can’t identify the appropriate social channel that is right for your business. A main cause for a failing social strategy is having spent time prioritising the incorrect social media platforms. Ensure you are able to identify your target audience and also have a clear outline of your overall goal. Is your goal to sell more products? To gain more traffic to your blog every month? Or even if it’s just to raise brand awareness, knowing the right channel for your business and customer keeps the right audience engaged.
A lot of people may not know but Facebook and Instagram are actually part of the same ad platform and it is a setting based on ad placement that determines where the ads are promoted too. The use of ads is almost limitless and can be used for brand awareness through to CPA targeted, however initial set-up is key. The layers of audiences such as age, demographic etc you can attach to your ads will hold the key to your success and knowing your audience is vital. There are many variations of ad formats which can be found here.
Unfortunately, Twitter is the one platform that just doesn’t seem to move forward with acquisition for businesses, the platform is still far behind Facebook, Instagram and now Snapchat. The creation of the hashtag will always stay true for Twitter and will long live in our lives moving forward. We often now see Twitter for business used as a customer services or news update which is great it has found its niche I just feel it had everything in its palm and its slipping away slowly. We would never discount this channel however with over 300 million users you just have to have a separate strategy for a very different engaged user
I must stay impartial however I cannot, Instagram is my love, for me it’s the complete social channel. The rise of Instagram Story and video over the last 12 months has radicalised how we view content on a daily basis, life is no longer words it is made up of pictures and videos. With the integration with Facebook, advertising on Instagram could not be simpler with masses of targeting options and objectives. Don’t be fooled however you are using a platform that knows what ads look like they are savvy users you must adopt an approach that is both organic and engaging, winning an Instagram like or follow is a challenge and again knowing your audience is key.
Social Media is such a big world, with so many different channels to use there is so much more to learn about as it’s continuously changing daily. As you can see from the examples above, each channel brings something different to your business’s marketing strategy and combined together it encourages different users to engage with the same product or business while targeting them in different ways.
