The Key To Social Media Success: Engage In The Right Platform

What commenced as a medium for you to connect with the global community, transformed into a broadcasting outlet and now, it's a venue for your brand to provide the audience and clients with emotional endeavours. Yes, social media has the power to do wonders when incorporated in your marketing strategy. It aids in building your brand's voice, drive in more traffic and increase conversion rates through creativity and smartness. Do you think we are bluffing? To help you make sound decisions, we will let the statistics acquired for social media marketing, speak for itself. 

• Brand exposure increased for 90% of the marketers while website traffic surged for 75% of them. 
• Consumers suggesting a brand to others on the basis of their social media experience escalated to 71%, and 21% of them were more likely to purchase from a brand with a social media profile. 

With this being said, we would like to remind you that each social media networking sites have a specific niche, community and demands. This means that users in different platform will have distinct quirky needs and problems. What your job here, as a marketer, is to select an ideal platform where you can make the most out of your strategy. To make your journey more comfortable, we have compiled a list of suggestions that will guide you in selecting the appropriate platform for your business. Then, we dive into the characteristics of six of the most popular social media sites, namely, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.

 Criteria To Choose The Right Social Media Outlet

1. The Nature Of Your Business

The essence of your business lies in the company's general activities corresponding to develop, promote, and sell a service or a commodity. Generally, the central objective of what your corporation does in a given area of industry is known as your organization's business nature. If you indulge in an e-commerce venture, you will likely classify into at least one of these four categories. 

• B2C – Business to consumer 

(The traditional model of direct transaction between a business and an end customer)

• B2B – Business to business 

(A company deals their product or service with another business. The buyer is often the ultimate recipient, but occasionally the buyer sells it back to a client.)

• C2B – Consumer to business

(A client sells their products or services to a company. They might post about the desired work on a platform wherein the companies may bid to seize the opportunity.)

• C2C – Consumer to consumer

(This model facilitates business interaction of goods or services between individual consumers.)

It's crucial to select the right social networking platform as per your industry and business model's needs to cater to a successful completion of your objectives. 

2. The Core Target Audience

The most vital element of being a social media marketer is perhaps, building a comprehensive concept of your target audience. Since all aspects of your social media marketing plan are influenced by the characteristics of the intended consumers. Your products or services are not meant for everyone, it belongs for a particular community of your audience characterized by demographics, geographic, or behaviour, to name a few. Your role is to dominate this specific niche of consumers who are likely to indulge in your posts, services, or products. If you're running tight on your marketing budget, then you can't afford to fail innumerable times with your strategies. You must have a clear idea about where your target audience is lurking, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn, etc. Narrow the focus of your research as you continue to expand your business. Taking out time to research your customers while parallelly designing your plan will save time and money in the future. 

3. Define Your Goals

Selecting the best social media forum for your company largely depends on which matter are you addressing through the objectives. Having a set of desired goal is essential for your social media marketing strategy's success as it helps you analyze the impact generated by your contents. To aid in the formulation of your aspiration through social media marketing, here are some common goals used by several marketers.

• Increase Brand Awareness

70% of the marketers leverage social media to expand their brand's exposure. This suggests that it's more than just sales or purchases, it's about forging a connection with your audience. You see, an average individual would spend at least two hours each day wandering in their social profile. Your company must acknowledge their audience's whereabouts to grab their attention.

• Drive Traffic To Website

Do you know the backbone of all your digital and social media associations is your website? You must ensure an aesthetically pleasing design with loads of relevant contents to drive in more traffic. 

• Generate New Leads

In this step, you are focusing on engaging your current customers to eventually transform into a buyer. 44% of the B2B marketers have managed to create leads via LinkedIn, while 39% made it through Facebook, and 30% considered Twitter.

• Increase In Revenue

Social media could be your much-needed tool to attract customers, then build trust to increase your sales. It will only be possible if you strategically create and maintain your marketing campaign to inform people about your brand's nature. 

• Surge Brand Engagement

It is crucial to tackle the evolving landscape in such a way that your brand integrates the massive influx of internet usage while updating their marketing campaigns in a supportive manner. To increase an engagement with your audience, make sure to keep an eye on the current trends, delve into subtle humorous content creation, harness the power of videos and many other options from the pool of creative ideas. 

Identifying the needs of your brand will help you select the appropriate social media platforms. Once you are aware of it, emphasize on curating contents to successfully accomplish your goals. 

4. Research Your Competitors

You are well aware of the fact that social media networking sites are considered to be a competitive arena. But to cut through the noise, you should utilize this for your advantage. Carefully examine the behaviour of your top rivals in their social media profile. Try to analyze the different types of content, number of shares and engagement rate. After this, you will know which site social media site works the best, but to deliver outstanding results, you need to throw your brand's creative bone. Acquire an understanding of what works best for your competitors and wield the knowledge to enhance your performance. 

5. Match The Platform With Your Audience

By concentrating on a few social media outlets based on the characteristics mentioned earlier, you will be able to focus better on your endeavours in social media marketing while assuring a valued return on investment. After analyzing the audience's demographics, and chalking out the details of your required goals, match your needs with the appropriate social media platform. Below you will explore the features of the five best social outlets for your business. 

• Facebook

This platform boasts about enjoying almost two billion active users. Facebook can be controlled essentially to provide endless knowledge about your brand and offers the most targeted advertisements. You have the opportunity to clearly specify the traits of your target audience in hopes to reach them effectively through your contents. Remember, people mostly indulge in Facebook to develop connections and retain old friendships. This permits you to foster an environment of trust for the current customer base. Suppose your goal is to attract a new audience. In that case, Facebook should not be in your basket because a saturated environment with large population makes it difficult for fresh people to view or interact with your posts. 

• Instagram

If you seek a social media forum that promises a high engagement rate, then Instagram is your answer. With the daily active users falling in the count of five hundred million, it truly is the most popular social site among millennials. You must ensure narrating a story of your brand and the value it may provide to the consumers. If you follow the traditional path of advertisements meant only for sales and purchases, you might fall behind the curve. Try to produce exciting and unique contents by making the most of all the features on Instagram. You may strategically employ Instagram stories with elements like ask me anything, polls, quiz, hashtags, etc. The recent addition of Instagram Reels could be incorporated in your plan to create suspense around the launch of any product. Also, don't fret from introducing influencer marketing to promote your contents as it magnifies your brand's reach.

• Twitter

Twitter is considered a goldmine for an esteem opportunity to frame your brand voice by increasing sales. It offers valuable customer insight, making it perfect for brand awareness objectives. You have the option to use hashtags and categorize conversations about any trending event. Twitter could be a noisy place, but to help organize the influential tweets related to your brand, the feature of creating a list exists. Ensure a consistent flow of theme, contents, and ideas on your profile to appear genuine, sincere, and devoted to your brand's success. 

• YouTube

Are you aware that 87% of marketers use video contents online to promote their product? With one-third of online activity spent watching videos, it's high time for you to reach out to your audience in this platform. You may choose to create how-to videos, provide a tour of your company or post customer testimonials to humanize your brand. With the correct keyword optimization of your videos, you have the chance of appearing on Google's index result. So, don't forget to add a keyword-rich title and description for your video content. Showcase the company's personality and integrate useful call-to-action messages to guide the interested viewer for a swift transition to being a customer. 

• LinkedIn

If you participate in B2B marketing, LinkedIn will provide you with more significant lead generations and professional networking. You have a high probability of reinforcing business partnerships and also recruit new talents. It has been seen that LinkedIn provides 80% of leads for B2B marketers, which results in 277% more conversions than Facebook. To know more about your target audience's opinions and desires, join a group. It might allow you to render help and interact with your customers. This will place you dynamically as a significant industry influencer to consolidate your position as a credible individual in your field of interest. As of 2019, people in the age group of 25-34 were the leading user group in India. 

 Let's Wrap

By now, you must have understood the importance of implementing your social media marketing strategy in the right platform. There is no need for your organization to associate with every other social media avenue, select the one which aligns with your objectives and target audience. As we are concerned about your success, here's another suggestion for an effectual social media marketing campaign. We are proud to introduce Haarway, a team of experienced and smart professionals working to devise the perfect marketing plan. They will help analyze the correct social medium to maximize your reach and gradually, build your business.