In the dynamic world of social media, staying ahead of the curve is essential for brands and influencers aiming to maximize engagement. With over 4.9 billion active social media users worldwide as of 2023, the potential for reaching a vast audience has never been greater . As we move into 2024, here are the top seven social media best practices, backed by the latest trends and statistics, to ensure your content captivates and engages your audience.
What is social media marketing?
Social media marketing is the trendiest form of marketing, where different social media platforms help brands to create social networks. These platforms with social networks build a company’s brand by driving more traffic to the website and improving sales. Social media marketing is based on the relevant content that users will share within their social networks. Some popular social media platforms that are used worldwide include Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn and more.
Brian Clark once said, “These days, people want to learn before they buy, be educated instead of pitched.”
Social media marketing is the perfect platform for brand promotion, product description and finding the right customer. Most brands create content that is both informative and promotes the product. These posts can be a combination of images, texts, stories and videos that attract the relevant audience. If you are planning to increase your revenue through the posts and videos uploaded as assets for social media marketing, you need to monitor the activity on a particular post. Social media marketing offers both free and paid campaigns. You can set the budget and start social media marketing accordingly. As Jeff Bezos said and we all agreed to “It’s hard to find things that won’t sell online.” More people can connect with you or learn about the brand through social media engagement.
Why is social media marketing important?
Most brands across the globe are using social media to find new customers for their brands and expand their business. But the question is why social media marketing is important, and why it outnumbers other marketing strategies. In this section of our article, we will provide you insights about the importance of social media marketing and some recent statistics available:
Build brand reputation- Reputation is everything, and when it comes to establishing your business in such a competitive economy, you need to create a positive reputation. The 2023 State of Social Mediareport states that building a brand reputation is the priority of businesses. Social media plays a crucial role in building a brand reputation. A statistic says that 94% of industry leaders found that social media has a positive impact on brand loyalty.
Drive Traffic- Each business that uses social media marketing as its prime marketing strategy adds links to its website with its social media posts. This will drive more traffic to the website and improve your website search engine optimization. With more visitors to your website, you have the opportunity to convert them into leads and then potential customers. This social data can help you understand the requirements of the customers like what they are looking for when they visit the website, and 91% of the businesses agreewith this fact.
Generating and nurturing leads- Attracting and engaging the target audience is important to convert them into potential customers. If you are a brand that wants to generate leads, then you can create posts, videos, and trending content to build credibility with the potential buyer. You will certainly generate some leads with these strategies, and now you need to nurture them. The next step will be handled by the customer sales professionals who will connect with the customers and resolve their problems with a positive sale of the product. The 2023 Sprout Social Index stats show that 76% of the customers appreciate and recognize the brands that prioritize customer support.
Brand awareness- These days people follow brands on social media platforms to get the latest updates and recent product launches. Earlier selling products through social media platforms was considered to be spamming customers but today social media platforms have become catalogues. People use their phones all the time to find something trending and new and your social media posts can help them find what they are looking for. Around 68% of customers follow brands on social media to stay up to date with the brands.
These are some of the reasons that define the importance of social media marketing for businesses. Now, we will explore the elements of social media marketing that will strengthen your business in a competitive economy.
Elements of Social Media Marketing:
When marketers decide to implement social media marketing as their marketing strategy, they need to remember the five major elements of social media marketing.
Social Strategy- For a successful marketing campaign, it is important to have an appropriate strategy. The marketing team must set up some goals for the campaign and pick the right social media platform for their product. There are various social media platforms, but all are not required or fit for each business. After this, you need to prepare a mix of different types of content to create more engagement. According to Statista, Facebook is the most widely used social media platform for business, around 3 billion people use Facebook in a month.
Publishing & planning- So, your content is ready, and it is good to get published on the decided platforms. This is an easy step as you only have to post and share the blogs, videos, and images. But the most important thing to keep in mind is the consistency. To ensure that the audience will remain engaged and freely visit our website then your social media platforms will need the desired content.
Engagement- Businesses use social media platforms to increase interactions and promotion of the brand and product. These posts, blogs and videos are the first options through which communication between the company and the customer begins. They share posts and mention brands in the comments, and as a result, the brands will enable good customer service. People who spend most of their time scrolling through social media want new and trending content. They will remain engaged with your posts if they find that this post can add value to their life or business.
Analysis and reporting- Each post you publish on social media needs to be monitored carefully. Each post doesn’t have to get huge customer liking, and this can be determined by using the stats analysis. Businesses can analyse the performance of the campaign using in-built analysis tools or by using other tools available online. The success or failure of the campaign will help you determine the source and resolve the issue.
Advertising- Most social media platforms offer free publishing of blog posts, images, and videos. So, any business can reach its target audience, but if you want to increase the output then it will require some investment. All the paid marketing campaigns allow targeting the audience that is classified according to the demographic details and retargeting.
Best Practices for social media to boost engagement:
There are certain ways to increase the customer engagement with social media. Marketing is not a process that ends at a specific point. It requires innovation every day to increase customer engagement. Here we have listed some of the best practices that will boost customer engagement for social media-
Research your audience- Whatever you do on your social media is directly will affect your business and that depends on the audience. The business needs to learn about their audience, their preferences and how much they rely on social media. If you are starting social media marketing for your product then you must know all about the customers you will be dealing with. Their demography, likes, interests, and a lot about their online activity. This is one of the best practices for social media to enhance customer engagement.
Find the right platform- There are seven social platforms (that you can use to promote your product, brand or service. But you need not to promote your product or service on each platform. The different platform targets different audiences and you need to pick the platform where you find the customers find your product attractive. People visit social media platforms and try to connect with brands and services in different aspects. They look for content that will fit the platform and fulfil the customer’s requirements. Businesses must explore all the platforms separately to find the best social media platform to begin social media marketing. You need to maintain the activity on the platform to keep your audience engaged.
Use visual-based posts- Most people spend their days scrolling down videos, reels and images on social media like Instagram and Pinterest. Videos and images grab more attention of the viewers and this could be the best content mode to find more customers. But don’t stick to a single pattern, use different formats of visuals and sometimes play with text as well. When you use a variety of content, you will give something fresh to the audience every time you are active on the social media platform.
Repurpose blog posts- Your blog posts are perfect for SEO and you can also use the content in the blog. You can create images, videos or some other engaging posts. Content creation from an existing blog will save you time but it will enhance customer engagement. So, posting high-quality content will boost customer engagement. Businesses can use the blog posts as sharable content and people who find it interesting either can directly share the blog posts or will share the videos and images featuring the post. A brand can create blogs and related videos to promote the product and display the features and functions through the videos added on social media platforms.
Make your content shareable- People love to share short videos and images so you can create posts that are more likely to be shared. This will result in increasing social media engagement. Add something to your post that people will enjoy and find valuable that will prompt the audience to hit the share button. The content with a story or statistic has a higher sharing rate as compared to other types of content.
Set posting frequency- The other way to boost your social media engagement is to schedule your posts frequently. It is important to be active on social media by posting content from time to time. And if you post once in a while your audience might lose interest. More content on social media means more opportunities for people to find your content. You will reach more audiences and more people will be able to find your content and increase engagement.
Track your performance- It is important to know how your social media posts are performing. The best way to know the performance status is by tracking it. You can track the social media performance by using several tools. Some social media platforms have inbuilt analytics tools so that you can determine how to improve the post content and visuals. You can use multiple social media platforms but keeping track will be beneficial to you. Some of the best tools available for monitoring post-performance include Brand 24, Mention, TweetDeck, SproutSocial, Keyhole, Meltwater and more.
Conclusion
Neil Patel mentions that, “Mediocre marketers think in terms of campaigns. Great marketers think in terms of growth frameworks.”
And we agree with him. If any business is set to implement any marketing strategy to their business, then they need to think about the growth. Any marketing method requires research and innovation to reach the target audience. As a business, you can use social media platforms to create an online presence of your brand and keep your audience engaged. You should focus on the content or design of your social media posts that will ultimately add growth to your business.
Ready to take your social media engagement to the next level? Hire a Digital Marketing Expert from SkyWeb Micro Solutions to boost your brand engagement and achieve outstanding results. Contact us today to learn more about our tailored social media strategies designed to elevate your online presence. Worldwide people are spending their day and night on social media and want to earn profits through it. The right strategy can do everything, you can reach more audience and earn more revenue. Keep in mind that your content must be unique and fulfil the customer’s requirements.
