Image courtesy of Wix
In 2024, social media is all the rage. According to Statista, 5.17 billion people use social media, which is nearly 60% of the global population. If you are not utilizing social media to grow your business, you should be.
Nearly everyone uses social media nowadays. Although using traditional marketing sources like newspaper or tv ads can be beneficial, social media allows businesses to reach more people. This article will provide you with tips and tricks on how to leverage your social media to grow your business. Utilizing social media can result in brand awareness, customer engagement, and ultimately, business growth.
Set Clear Goals
Before you begin editing your social media, you must ensure that you set goals. What do you want to achieve from social media? Do you want to grow your followers? Boost your engagement rates? You must have a clear image of what you envision for your social media. Focus on growth metrics like conversion rate and acquisition rate.
Identify your Target Demographics
Determine who you would like to target. Who is your ideal customer? Decide on things such as:
Age
Gender
Income
Education
Ethnicity
Occupation
Religion
By using these demographics to create your customer personas, you will be better able to tailor towards your ideal customers. You can also use analytical tools to assist you in determining your target market.
After you can fill in the demographics, you should create 2-3 customer personas. Get as detailed as possible with the personas. You should also include interests and hobbies in your personas.
Choosing the Correct Platforms
Now that you have determined your customer personas, you need to decide which platforms to utilize. These are the primary social media platforms:
Pinterest: a platform where users can discover and save ideas and inspirational images.
Instagram: a platform focused on sharing images and videos with other users. You can engage with others by liking, commenting, sharing, and direct messaging.
Snapchat: a platform where you interact with friends by sending each other pictures and videos.
TikTok: a platform that allows you to create and share short videos, often containing music.
Facebook: a social networking platform that allows you to share content and engage with your friends content, similar to Instagram but more common around older generations as well.
X: a microblogging platform where you create posts of phrases, images, or videos. You can interact with others by liking, commenting, reposting, or direct messaging.
Youtube: a platform used to share videos. You can interact by liking, commenting, and subscribing.
LinkedIn: a professional platform commonly used to discover potential job opportunities and career professionals.
I would suggest choosing 3-4 platforms to focus on, although it never hurts to use more than that if the audience is there. Using your persona, it should be simple to determine what platforms to utilize. For example, a retired 65 year-old woman is likely not using LinkedIn or TikTok, but rather Facebook or Pinterest.
Create Content
Invest your money into high-quality content. If necessary, hire digital marketers and content creators. Post a variety of content such as interactive posts, Q&As, tutorials, and UGC (User Generated Content). You also should follow the trends. For example, TikTok and Instagram Reels are extremely popular. People enjoy being able to watch short, witty videos. Utilize those to grow your platform.
Some examples of things to post include:
Photo
Story
Video
Status Update
Polls
Challenges
Blog Posts
Reels
Influencer Marketing
Today, influencer marketing is very common. Customers enjoy seeing real-life people using the products. Influencers typically have a lot of pull in users opinions and can have a great influence in what they buy. Not only are these ads interesting for customers to watch, but they easily demonstrate why the product is great.
After determining the types of content you'd like to post, you need to organize these posts.
Create a Content Calendar
A content calendar is a calendar the outlines when, where, and what you will post on social media. You need to ensure that you are consistently posting at peak times. A content calendar consists of what platform you will post on, what time, what type of content it is (video, image, etc) and what the content is about.
Image courtesy of OtterHalf
Peak posting times include:
Facebook: Mondays-Thursdays, 8am-1pm
Instagram: Tuesdays and Wednesdays, 10am-1pm
X: Tuesdays and Wednesdays, 9am-12pm
Pinterest: Tuesdays-Thursdays, 12pm-3pm
LinkedIn: Tuesdays and Wednesdays, 10am-12pm
TikTok: Tuesdays-Thursdays, 2pm-6pm
Avoid posting at the worst times, which is typically on Saturdays or Sundays.
Understand Your Competition
Watch your competition's social media closely to identify what tactics they use. Discover what platforms your competition heavily uses, and the ones that they lack in. For example, if they regularly post on Instagram, but neglect to use TikTok, then ensure that you utilize TikTok to leverage your content.
That being said, there may be a good reason that they are not utilizing certain social medias such as those platforms are not used by either of your target markets.
Monitor Performance Regularly
Track your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) such as followers, likes, and engagement rate. You need to analyze data to differentiate what works and what doesn't. Utilizing A/B testing will also be beneficial to test different headlines, CTAs, and images to find what works best.
Image courtesy of Adobe
Most social media platforms have a tool where you can view the analytics of your account. These tools typically show things such as the total reach, impressions, gender, age, country, and percentage that are follower/non-followers. These tools will help you determine which posts do well with who, and why certain posts may perform better than others.
Conclusion
In this blog post, we learned about how to identify your target market, the different social media platforms, the different types of content, how to create a content calendar, and how to monitor your performance on your platforms. After reading this post, you should have the basics down on how to market your business on social media!
For more information on Social Media Marketing, visit my colleague Oona's post here.
Resources
Dixon, Stacy Jo. “Number of Worldwide Social Network Users 2028.” Statista, 17 May 2024, www.statista.com/statistics/278414/number-of-worldwide-social-network-users/.
Instagram Analytics: What Are They and Why Do They Matter?, Adobe, www.adobe.com/express/learn/blog/instagram-analytics. Accessed 8 Oct. 2024.
Qin, Shu Er. “Tips for Building a Good Social Content Calendar.” Otterhalf.Co, otterhalf.co, 12 June 2024, www.otterhalf.co/otterspace/tips-for-building-a-good-social-content-calendar.
Baker, Kristen. “Social Media Marketing: The Ultimate Guide.” HubSpot Blog, HubSpot, 24 Jan. 2024, blog.hubspot.com/marketing/social-media-marketing. Sernoff, Lena. “How to Create a Solid Social Media Marketing Strategy.” Wix Blog, Wix Blog, 28 July 2024, www.wix.com/blog/social-media-marketing.
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