SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

Communication within social networks have increased significantly during the pandemic. Facebook saw a 50% increase in messaging within countries hit hardest by the virus, with voice and video calling doubling over Messenger and WhatsApp. So what does that mean for small businesses fighting to survive during this unprecedented event in our history?  Simple: If you want to stay relevant, increase brand awareness, gain new customers, and stay profitable, you need to use social media marketing.

Social media marketing utilizes social media platforms to connect with consumers to build brands, drive website traffic, and garnish sales. To achieve this, you need to publish great content, listen to and engage with your followers, run social media ads, and analyze your results.

At the moment, the major social media platforms include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and Snapchat. 
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Choosing which platform to use depends on various factors such as your target market, what you have to offer, and your marketing goals. Having a social media content strategy and sticking to your plan will help you pick which platform or platforms are worth the time and effort.

For many small businesses owners, managing their social media can be overwhelming with everything else that they need to get done. If this sounds like you, I would highly recommend enlisting the help of someone for just a few hours a week to drive your social media. This can either be an existing employee, a freelance writer, marketing agency, or even a student. In this day-and-age, it should be pretty easy to find someone adept at social media for business.

In addition to creating great content, you should consider using a social media management tool like Hootsuite, Buffer, and Zoho. These tools enable you to automate, analyze, better control, and dive deeper into your social media accounts. These apps can post the same updates on all your social accounts, schedule future updates, and help you find the most appropriate and effective content to post and times to post it.

Not all social media management apps are the same. However, all of them offer a free trial period and some performance analytics. Several go further and let you analyze your followers and other details from your social media accounts.

In addition to using a social media management app, you should create a social media plan for optimum success. This plan should include your messaging, goals, and when you plan to post. To save time, you can and should schedule future posts and updates to provide your followers with consistent content. If your content is far and few between, you will lose followers quickly.

Last but not least, when using social media you need to create content that is useful as well as visually appealing. While nearly 90% of all companies engage in content marketing on some level, few manage to produce “share-worthy” content. The reason is simple. Most people who post on social media do so without thinking or creating a plan.

To learn how to create killer social media content, please click here to read our previous blog. As always, we welcome your comments and questions regarding this blog post.
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