According to referral marketing platform Ambassador, 71% of consumers who have had a good social media service experience with a brand are likely to recommend it to others. As more than 63% of the UK population are social media users there is a huge potential audience of customers and brand ambassadors that remains untapped by those businesses that aren’t incorporating social into marketing strategy.
Social media marketing can take many forms, from text and image posts, to social media advertising and video content. It can be a very effective way to promote your branding and marketing objectives as it has many benefits, including
- Building brand profile
- Driving visitors to your website
- Creating conversions
- Establishing brand identity
- Enabling better customer communication
Which platform should you use?
Each of the social media platforms has different qualities and distinct advantages. Some are better suited to certain types of business and each platform has its own unique design.
Facebook – for most organisations this means a Facebook Business Fan Page and a range of content posted with social and informal tone. Facebook has quite limited organic reach so requires a solid strategy from the outset to optimise its use.
Twitter – as Twitter is an open platform, whatever you post can be seen by anyone in the Twitter community and beyond. It’s a very effective way to build profile as a good mix of interesting and shareable content, positive engagement and consistent posting will generate strong follower numbers.
LinkedIn – ideal for businesses targeting professionals. LinkedIn tends to be the more formal and credible older sibling in social media. It is at its most effective when used for posting jobs and thought leadership content that can be discussed and shared with other similar minded professionals.
YouTube – still the best option for social media marketing that heavily incorporates video. The aim is not to create a video that will go viral but to use YouTube to provide insight into the business, as well as instructional and useful content. By 2017, video content will represent 74% of all internet traffic so this is one to keep an eye on.
Instagram – suited to very visual industries, such as food and fashion. A little limited in terms of marketing potential, as the platform revolves entirely around images but the hashtags and ads can be incredibly effective.
Tips for using social media for effective marketing
Decide in advantage how you will measure success
– what metrics are the most important? Make sure that you have aims and goals – plus monitoring and tracking analytics – in place from the beginning so that you can measure which channel is working for you, and how.
Plan your content
– a content schedule that is informed by marketing strategy is essential. Keyword research, key events and brand values all come into play.
Add genuine value
– social media makes no excuses for bad content. If you want your content to succeed it needs to be interesting, problem solving, entertaining or value-adding in some other way. Plan in plenty of visuals, video and infographics.
Be consistent
– your tone, image and content should be a consistent experience for your followers and other users.
Promote and advertise
– social media advertising plays a big role in successful social media marketing. Low cost, flexible and high impact, it’s a great way to help generate leads, profile and web traffic.
For more advice about getting to grips with social media or to find out more about how we could help you, get in touch with the team at Iconic Digital directly today on 020 7100 0726.