Social Media Marketing in 2022
As the internet continues to expand at an exhilarating speed, and we look for more ways to extend our outreach and connect with those around us, we often look for social media to provide us with the answers. Just about everyone has a social media account in this day and age, from individuals to companies and even pets and inanimate objects.
Whether its Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok or Instagram, the world of social media is all around us. A perfect opportunity for businesses to easily connect with an audience so massive, that would have been unimaginable 50 years ago.
What Is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing is the act of marketing a service or a business through a social media platform. The target market are those using social media, usually of a younger age for the most part, sometimes the marketing can be targeted to a particular demographic of people to advertise items or services that the individual person is interested.
Having a social media platform is a massive organic marketing opportunity, and many of our clients here at Outible have found us through the power of social media. Many businesses do not realise the untapped potential that social media marketing brings, so if you haven’t explored the power of social media before, then let us introduce you to the main social media platforms where your business can be seen, heard and engaged with.
The Different Social Media Platforms
There are a number of different social media platforms which can be used to the advantage of a business as a marketing tool. Here is a brief outline of the most popular platforms.
Twitter has become popular for being the go-to social platform for any extravagant news. You also have a high chance at being able to engage with different social media influencers or famous celebrities, who have absurd amounts of followers, into the tens of millions. After launching back in 2006, Twitter has remained on of the most used social media platforms in the world.
Businesses can use Twitter to promote their tweets to the social media feeds of their target audience, all they have to do is pick one of their tweets. Businesses can also take advantage of ads which businesses choose their objectives and goals and twitter is then able to promote them and bill only for actions which contribute to the goal.
Instagram is probably the best social media platform for businesses who wish to visually promote their products or services in both an organic way and a paid way. A great social platform for any business to enter the world of social media. Some of our clients here at Outible use Instagram as their main marketing tactic.
Instagram has quite a young user group and the platform boasts high rates of engagement. Organic posts, links and Instagram stories can be a brilliant way to help drive traffic to a business website, their product or services. There are also paid ads which can be availed of to help promote products and services.
Facebook is the largest social platform in the world by far, with billions of registered users from England to Tonga, which makes it an extremely reliably and trustworthy social media platform to advertise and become active on. Facebook also has a huge user demographic, meaning people from all over the world from all walks of life trust and use Facebook daily.
Whilst Facebook is great for allowing people around the world to engage with each other, it also offers some brilliant advertisement opportunities for businesses who wish to advertise a product or service. Facebook ads are paid and help to drive traffic to a particular service or product. Ads can also be set up to target a specific demographic of people which makes targeted marketing a breeze.
Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are among some of the most long standing and popular social media platforms, but there are a few social platforms which are on the rise.
LinkedIn is a great social media platform that is popular in the business world and allows for blog style posts and short posts for engagement. LinkedIn is considered a professional network’ and holds an almost exclusively professional user base. As a business, this can be used as an advantage for targeted marketing.
Considered the new kid on the block, TikTok offers a massive, untapped advertising potential. Businesses can reach audiences of millions using TikTok. A great tool for eCommerce-based businesses with a particularly visual product.
How to Market on Social Media
Things have changed in the world of marketing. Paying for a huge billboard is no longer the go to method to draw attention to your product or service. With the introduction of social media, marketing has become much more focused and affordable and a much wider audience can be marketed to. Some of the best ways a business can use social media to market themselves and their products and services are:
The Use of Stories – Many social media platforms have implemented a story feature, which allows an account to post a short video or picture for a few seconds. Other people who follow your account can view your story. Meaning, if you post a story with a picture of your product and a link to where to purchase it, all of your followers can see it and have the potential to click into it and buy it, generating organic traffic which converts to a sale.
This is essentially a free form of marketing and takes just a few seconds to post. You can also pay for sponsored stories which will appear as advertisements on a specific demographic that you choose to target. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram offer story services.
Photo Advertisements – Chances are you have scrolled through a social media platform such as Facebook and seen a photo of a product advertised to you. Taking advantage of photo ads is a must if you’re a business considering getting into social media marketing.
Photos are a simple way of presenting your product or services to your customer base. You can also attach links to the text in the post or even embed them in the photo which can take your audience to a website where they can buy your product or services.
It is important when advertising with photos on platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram that you ensure the photos you are uploading are of high quality and are in the correct format, such as 1080 x 1080 for Instagram.
Advertisement Through Messenger – Not quite what you think, ads on social media do not always need to pop up on a user’s social feed. Facebook offers Messenger ads, which unlike video ads, story ads and photo ads are displayed between user’s conversations which take place in their Facebook Messenger.
Potential customers will then be able to click on the advertisement which has appeared between chats which will lead them to an automated Messenger conversation with your business or a link which will take them to your website where the user can then browse your products.
Video Advertisements – Videos are an untapped source of advertisement in the world of social media. Businesses can produce high quality, short video content and post them on social media. This can be used to advertise products and services or give potential customers an insight into the quality of your product or even provide them with an in-depth review of your product or services.
Sadly, you can only post videos which last short amount of time if you want to grab and hold the attention of your potential customer base. Facebook and Instagram allow you to create looped videos which allow users to interact quickly whilst browsing their social feed. Larger videos should be posted on YouTube, but even this platform now offers Shorts, as an alternative to TikTok.
What You Can Do with Social Media Marketing
Once you have decided on what type of social media marketing you wish to use, or a combination of all of the above mentioned examples, now it’s time to learn what you can actually do with social media marketing. As a business on social media, you can:
Improve and Optimise SEO to Improve Engagement – By optimising your advertisements for search engine optimisation, you can help drive and boost traffic to a business’s website, products or social platforms.
By optimising advertisements through things like keywords, mobile friendliness, usability and speed which can all be done organically, and will help increase traffic and user engagement.
Promote Your Other Social Platforms – One of the most notable aspects advertising on social media is that you can drastically up your social media marketing and social media strategies. You can help to build your brand by promoting your own organic content across your social media channels.
Target Specific Audiences – A target audience relates to a specific demographic of people which your business chooses to target, be this an audience based on personal interests, gender, age, where they’re from.
Advertisements can be set to target a specific audience which your product or service is most useful to in order to help drive traffic and sales. However, it is worth noting that not all demographics can be targeted under the one ad campaign.
It is important that adequate market research is carried out before to ensure that you know who your user base and audience are. By better understanding your user base, you can better market towards them in a more accurate manner.
This is a great feature of social media marketing because it allows business to reach out to potential new customers as well as retain current users and customers.
Paid Advertisements – As a business using social media platforms, you can run paid ad campaigns. By paying the social media platform to advertise your businesses ad, be it a story ad, video ad or photo ad, this can then be advertised to a target audience of a specific demographic of interests.
Facebook is currently one of the best social media platforms to run paid ad campaigns on. This gives businesses complete control over who the wish to advertise products or services to.
Other Types of Marketing
Aside from social media marketing, there are many other forms of marketing which can also help drive traffic to a business, product or service. These might include things such as word of mouth where an audience will talk to others about a particular business, product or service and promote them positively or negatively by talking or posting about them.
This is a free form of marketing and can help to drive converting traffic to a business’s website or products, but you have to make your business service or product worth talking about, which is where social media campaigns can help.
A business could also pay to have a product or service put on a billboard or a sign which will be hard to miss for potential customers and will help drive traffic from curiosity. However, this will only work locally and not have the reach which technology can.
Industry events are also another way in which you can market your business, product or service to an audience of people who are already interested in that particular niche. LinkedIn is a great place to advertise such events.
Why Is Social Media Marketing So Important?
Social media is an ever-growing industry which is worth billions and projected to rise. It is full of potential and opportunities for a small-scale business to reach an audience of millions with the right social media marketing strategy.
Having this reach is crucially important to the success of many businesses as it gives them access to potential customers that could be from the other side of the planet, allowing them to grow their customer base at a global scale as opposed to at a nationwide scale or even smaller at a town or city level scale.
Social media marketing is becoming one of if not the most effective way to market products or services. According to a recent study around 57.6% of the world population uses social media. The average time in which a person spends on social media is around 2 hours and 27 minutes per day. All that time they can be exposed frequently to business ads with a potential global reach of over half of the world’s population.
If you're looking for a reliable and professional team to handle your <a href="https://outible.com/web-design-liverpool/">website design in Liverpool</a> or If you have any questions about social media marketing, and how Outible can help you achieve success through this avenue, get in touch with our marketing director who will be happy to answer any queries you or your business may have about social media marketing.