What Are the Best Practices for Social Media Marketing?

As of 2023, more than 4.9 billion people use social media. This is an enormous number, and most brands understand the role of social media in marketing. No wonder so many of them strive to stay relevant on social networks.

Unfortunately, businesses do not always get their social media marketing practices right, which is unforgivable as social media can bring remarkable growth to your business. Social networks give you an opportunity to generate leads and followers, increase brand awareness, humanize your business, drive traffic to your website, build relationships, and engage with your customers.

If you’re looking to fine-tune your social media marketing plan, here are seven effective social media marketing tips that can help you get started.

Choose the Right Social Media Platform

You don’t have to be on every social media platform to be successful. In fact, spreading your marketing efforts on every channel will wear you out.

Choose the right social media platforms for your brand based on your social media marketing goals. For instance, if you’re aiming to target teens with your marketing, then you’re better off focusing your social media efforts on TikTok rather than on LinkedIn. Similarly, if your target audience is parents, you should make Facebook a priority instead of heading to Snapchat. And if you’re looking to target career professionals, consider optimizing your LinkedIn profile.

Additionally, collect data on your buyer personas and get to know the platforms they frequent. Also, when choosing among the many social media platforms, consider the kind of content you’ll be sharing. For instance, if you plan to use a lot of photos, you’ll want to share them on a visual platform such as Instagram. If you are relying a lot on user-generated content, you might want to consider platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok.

Notably, new platforms are constantly emerging, so social apps that may be working for your SMM may not be the same platforms that work in the future. Social platforms such as TikTok, Quest, Discord, Clubhouse, and Twitch are just a few examples of new social networks that are gaining popularity. But before you jump in on new platforms, ensure you test them and that your audience is using them.

Keep Your Audience in the Spotlight

Make your social media strategy about your audience. Seek to answer questions that center on your audience with your social media marketing plan. For instance, what pain points will you solve with your strategy? What is your audience saying about your products? What are their feelings and opinions about different topics? What are their experiences with your industry, brand, and products?

Further, monitor your audience’s conversations to know what they are talking about. Social listening tools can also help track comments and replies related to your brand. Use such conversations to come up with a strategy that can provide meaningful solutions to your customers’ challenges.

Strive for Authenticity

Authenticity is one of the proven strategies for successful social media marketing.

Authenticity helps your brand shine on social media.  In the last few years, users have shown a preference for genuine and unfiltered content on social channels such as Instagram. Your bio content, posts, videos, photos, and live streams all provide an opportunity for you to show your authenticity.

Create a tone that is unique to your brand and share content that aligns with your brand’s tone and beliefs. Other ways to build authenticity on social media include:

• Be transparent by sharing real-life experiences
• Be open to feedback and criticism
• Stay real by sharing valuable content and actively interacting with your potential customers
• Humanize your brand by sharing behind-the-scenes images and employees  testimonials
• Keep automated social media posts to a minimum

Respond Fast

No one wants to be kept waiting, so do respond to your customers’ inquiries promptly. Have a dedicated customer service team and provide them with tools that can shorten your brand’s response time. For example, a social media tool like chatbots can help provide customer service support when you’re away. Also, create several customer care handles where customer issues can be quickly solved.

Additionally, have a plan on how to quickly deal with negative feedback and complaints. For instance, you can send an unhappy customer a direct message, or you can publicly issue an apology when you’re wrong. Since users will not always tag you in their questions or complaints, actively listen for mentions and monitor keywords and hashtags related to your brand so you can respond promptly.

Manage Your Calendar and Daily Schedule

Come up with a social media posting schedule, as this will help you create a balance between your leisure time and social media time. Having a daily schedule also helps create a balance between posting too often and not posting at all.

A social media content calendar will also ensure you post content on your channels even when you aren’t on social media. For instance, some social media network posting schedules allow you to select a time in the future when your post can be published. Other third-party scheduling apps plan your posts and provide you with optimal times to post.

Examples of some popular social media scheduling apps include:

• Sprout Social
• Creator studio
• CoSchedule
• Sendible
• Buffer
• Loomly
• Crowdfire
• Planoly

Increase the Number of Organic Followers

Have an organic social media strategy to help you build a community of loyal followers. Unlike buying followers, growing followers organically helps you develop real relationships with your audience. Such followers are likely to interact with your brand and recommend your products to their friends and family.

Building an organic audience can take time, which is why most brands resort to buying followers. Unfortunately, although buying followers may make your account look like it has a mass following, most of the bought followers are usually fake accounts and bots. Such a strategy may also get your account flagged.

If you’re stuck on how you can grow followers organically, here are some tips that can help:

• Create engaging content – Create content that is valuable and that your audience is going to love. Use polls, questions, contests, and giveaway campaigns to increase engagement.
• Engage with your followers – Connect with your followers through your posts. Follow them back, like, and share their social media posts. 
• Make use of user-generated content – User-generated content is authentic and genuine, which helps build trust.
• Use an organic growth service – Use a reliable and proven organic growth service such as Twenvy to increase your followers organically.
• Create a great bio and social profiles – Optimize your bios and social profiles for search by use of keywords and hashtags.
• Collaborate – Partner with other brands, influencers, and followers.

Use High-Quality Visual Materials

Visuals include images, infographics, memes, screenshots, presentations, and video content. High-quality visuals have been shown to receive more likes, shares, and comments on social media. Most social media users also prefer visual content to lines of text.

Here is a look at some social media statistics that prove the power of visuals

• Social media posts with visual elements generate 94% more views than content without visuals
• Articles that are optimized with compelling visual content experience a 37% increase in engagement
• 90% of consumers state that watching a product video goes a long way in helping them make a purchase decision
• People can retain 10-20% of the information they read, but the retention rate goes up to 65% for any information that is paired with visuals

Thus, including visuals in your content strategies helps grab your audience’s attention, increases engagement, generates more views, and communicates your message more effectively.

To make your visuals even more appealing, ensure they are unique, well-edited, and paired with eye-catching thumbnails and text.

Conclusion

Social media marketing can help increase engagement, build brand awareness, and grow your followers. Unfortunately, coming up with an effective social media marketing strategy isn’t easy. The good news is that we are here to help. Try out the above seven best strategies for successful social media marketing, and let us know how it goes in the comments section below.