Introduction
Pretty much everyone is on social media, whether that’s on the phone or your computer making it a goldmine for advertising. Accept you can’t just dive in headfirst and make a post. You have to have a plan, a strategy that you will use to become successful. Doing the proper research and using the proper tools will help you substantially in gaining a good online presence. In this paper, I will be going over what was talked about in Brian Honigman’s video: Social Media Marketing Foundations (2020), and highlight the important topics. I will go over creating a social media strategy, choosing the right channels, publishing on social media, interacting with customers, selling on social media, measuring social media activity, and innovating with social media.
Creating a Social Media Strategy
Social Media is a huge part of everyday life as an individual, small company, or large corporation. And to have an effective social media presence, a strategy is needed. A social media strategy as defined in the video Social Media Marketing Foundations by Brian Honigman (2020) is “A written document that maps out how your organization plans to use different social networks.” This plan helps keep you and your company organized when it comes to posting on social media. It helps create a plan for a campaign that your company is going to start and encourages collaboration among employees.
The strategy or plan must be goal-oriented with everyone on the same page because you don’t want the campaign to be conflicting with itself, or your organization. The goals should be SMART as in Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound, as well as easy to understand! Goals can be anything from increasing traffic, improving reputation, or meeting a certain financial goal. It all depends on your company and what goals you want to reach.
To reach the goals that you set either ongoing goals or campaign goals, you need to know who you are trying to reach, who your target audience is. You should be narrowing your marketing exposure, not marketing to the masses because the message will end up being too general and not appealing to anyone. A helpful way to help target the right audience is to create a buyer persona, or possibly a few buyer personas. These are the people that are most likely going to be shopping for your brand. This persona would include things such as age, gender, personality, career, and even a picture and name to go along with it. These personas will help you better focus on your target audience and act as a reminder of who you are serving.
Choose the Right Channels
When choosing the right channels, it’s important to use a smart mix. Don’t use just one channel, but also don’t use too many. Finding the right mix will give you the biggest return for your effort, time, and resources. Having too many takes up a lot of time and resources and can make you seem unengaged with your audience as you wouldn’t have the time to go on all of the channels or may become inactive on others. You want to pick enough where you give off a strong presence on each platform.
Focus on the media platforms that best match your business and its goals. An example could be if you’re a surf shop owner, you’re not going to spend very much time on sites like LinkedIn but rather on Instagram, Facebook, or maybe TikTok. To find the right channel for your business, there are a few things you can do which include Researching your audience, checking independent research on how each platform is utilized, and monitor behavior, and doing your research on the different sites.
No matter which channel you end up using, you need to be able to attract and keep people engaged in your posts. Try to find out what grabs their attention right off the bat and leaves them wanting to find out more. It would be wise to use at least one of the big platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, or YouTube to reach many active users. Even the smaller more niche channels should be utilized if there are audience members that are active on those sites. These sites could include Pinterest, TikTok, Quora, Tumbler and Medium, Reddit, Yelp GIPHY, and others. Some may not have as many people as the bigger platforms but could show a high user activity which is what you want to see.
As well as these sites, you can use their messaging apps as well such as Messenger and WhatsApp to directly target your audience. This can almost work as an alternative to email subscriptions where customers can sign up to be notified of deals and products. These chats can also work as live chatbots to help notify customers when your store hours are and could connect you to real-life representatives to help with more complex questions. Even in Snap Chat, companies are advertising by releasing new filters to take pictures with. The point is that you want to be where the people are, where your audience is most active.
Publishing on Social Media
To start publishing on social media, you should create 3 to 5 overarching categories of topics that you will cover on social media (Honigman, 2020). Basically, what themes will best guide your post in the direction you want. You want to make sure that they are engaging, relevant, and complimentary to your business. The topics that you talk about in your campaigns do not always need to be promotional they should mostly be consisting of entertainment and educational values. These stories that you share or post you make need to be enjoyable for the reader, so choose topics that are relevant to your customer and the persona(s) that you have created.
A good way to keep your social media efforts organized and focused is to create an editorial calendar. This calendar helps track when your posts will go live and some like https://coschedule.com/ and https://www.hootsuite.com/ can automatically post the campaign you make for you through a schedule. Of course, it is nice having this reminder and automation, but some posts are still going to be reactive to what is happening to the world around you and things happening in your business. However, most of your posts should be pre-planned. Meaning that your posts will be done on schedule and not done last minute.
Another way of publishing on social media to grab attention is through paid media advertisements. These ads should be crafted to know what channel to target, align the ad with your goals, know the audience you want to reach, and know what you are trying to achieve (what is your goal?). Paid advertisements come at a cost, so you will have to choose a budget. This budget will be set on what your company is comfortable allocating for social media exposure. These paid ads are going to need to be experimented with a bit to see what is going to work best and on what platform it will work best on. Monitor the progress of your campaigns and do some research on the different media to see what works best for you.
Interacting with Customers
Social media marketing has the huge benefit of being able to talk and interact with your customers. It’s an opportunity to build your community online where people are interacting with each other and your business. I remember I used to do a lot of hiking in the past and followed Nature Valley on Instagram joining in on their conversations. I even tagged them in a picture of me with their product on top of a mountain where they commented and shared it! It showed me that they care about their customers and made me loyal to buying Nature Valley when I go out hiking. They listened, responded, and acted. Those three things are something that all companies need to do whether that comment about them is positive or negative to help create trust between them and the client.
Everyone can see customer responses whether they are positive or negative. So, responding to them in a timely and professional matter is incredibly important. However, sometimes these comments can be on sites you might not check. Thankfully there are sites out there like https://keyhole.co/ and https://mention.com/en/ that can help you locate where customers may be mentioning you so that you can respond. Otherwise, without these tools, you can always check manually on the different sites where you know your audience will be active. If there are complaints, you always need to first apologize publicly and ask to resolve the issue in a private message.
Selling on Social Media
A great way to sell on social media is to use stories to engage your audience. Stories are a great way for your audience to relate to your company and feel that they need your product. However, customers are always going to trust people over a brand (Honigman, 2020). So, a good way to connect with your target demographic is through an influencer. Influencers, big or small, can persuade their audience to take action and purchase your product. This is one of the biggest reasons why companies are looking to partner with them, and there are a few different ways companies can do this. Those three ways are through sponsorships, getting them to test and review your product, or co-branding a new product and splitting the revenue.
Measuring Social Media Activity
Measuring your activity is a very important step for improving your presence on social media. You should be checking your activity regularly to know which of your efforts are leading to the best results. Don’t rely on your gut when data is much better at giving you the real answers you need to see. There is lots of data out there, so make sure that you look specifically at the data that is going to help you achieve your goals. Some of these analytics can be found using third-party sites such as Google Analytics, MixPanel, and Matomo. These sites can be used to better “measure progress across social media and other marketing channels holistically” (Honigman, 2020). As well, you can always use the tools built right into each social media site that can give you a brief amount of data.
Innovating with social media
Social media has taken a bit of a turn in the past century with things like the Facebook Scandal where personal data was being shared without permission and research coming out showing how addictive social media can be. People are starting to shift more into taking in-person to share options rather than online and businesses need to account for shifts like these. With any change, the business’s main focus should be to “serve your customers with the right message, in the right place, at the right time” (Honigman, 2020). A good idea to get people’s attention and post on a regular schedule would be to create a series on social media, like a show. Use this series to be entertaining and educational for your specific audience. There are no shortcuts to finding the best message to give to your audience. It depends on your company and audience which will lead to making an advertisement feel more natural.
Following best practices is always a good idea, however, that is only a part of the battle. Marketing is a science and experimentation to see what works and what doesn’t is essential to create successful campaigns. Use the best practices to your advantage by adding onto them or shifting them in a direction that works better for your company. Once you understand the best practices, they act more like guidelines rather than instructions for you to follow.
These are good steps to follow to get started experimenting on social media:
o Choose a singular focus
o Define the goal you want to achieve
o Establish a timeline
o Monitor progress in real-time
o Document the results of each result
Conclusion
There are many important topics to remember when advertising on social media. It’s not an exact science, but there are guidelines to help you on your marketing journey. However, the one that is not a suggestion would be knowing your customer. Knowing your customer is the most important part of marketing. The data that you collect from your customers and the research you do is going to give you the best ROI on your social media accounts. You have to go where the people are. For example, I wouldn’t expect to see an athletic brand like Nike, or Adidas advertising on a niche site for interior design. Establish your goals, choose the channels that best match your business, and monitor and document the results so that you can create a plan for your next social media marketing campaign.
References
Choosing a social media platform [Online Image]. (2023). Tap Filiate. https://tapfiliate.com/blog/choosing-the-best-social-media-platform-to-find-and-recruit-affiliates/
Honigman, B. (2020). Social Media Marketing Foundations (2020). . LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/learning/social-media-marketing-foundations-2020/set-strategic-goals?autoSkip=true&resume=false&u=2109516
Smart Goals [Online Image]. (2022). Helpful Professor. https://helpfulprofessor.com/smart-goals-in-education/
Liam Nielsen's Extraordinary Blog 
Leave a comment