Social Media: Why Your Business Needs It & How To Do It Right
Have you heard of someone offering Twitter $44,000,000,000.00 to purchase the social media platform? Now, you may not be active on Twitter, but imagine that if someone is willing to offer that much money for it, that says something about the power, popularity, and even influence of the platform.
For many reasons, companies rely heavily on social media. When we come across a new business, we normally do a quick search on social networks to learn more about them. Finding information on social media helps to legitimise the business and allows people to learn more about your business.
You can’t deny that social media marketing is a highly powerful instrument. Whether or not you use it frequently in your personal life, it is now strongly suggested for professionals and enterprises to include it in their business plans. Not only is social media an excellent tool for advertising and has been shown to help create new leads, but it can also be used to maintain successful connections with existing clients if used correctly.
In this Digital Age, having an online presence is critical. You don't need to be extremely technologically adept to utilise Social Media, but it does help to have already stated your goals and objectives so that it serves your organisation rather than being a squandered or useless resource.
This then brings us to the first question we have to ask ourselves:
What is social media engagement?
The number of comments, likes, and shares on social media is used to calculate engagement.
Of course, you want to increase your follower count, but the most important metric of social media success is an engaged audience, not just a large one.
As a firm, you should strive for quality rather than quantity.
Assume you held a party and a large number of people turned up, but they all sat there silently. There will be no small chat, dancing, talks, or dubious drinking games. Was the event truly a success? Sure, the RSVP list is impressive, but did your guests have a wonderful time? Do they enjoy your dip?
Every social network requires activity and engagement to create a great brand experience and meaningful interactions with current and possible future consumers.
A variety of measures are used to quantify social media engagement, which may include the following:
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Mentions (either tagged or untagged)
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Followers and audience growth
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Using branded hashtags
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Click-throughs
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Likes
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Shares or retweets
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Comments
Simply put, social media engagement grows whenever someone interacts with your account and may be measured in a variety of ways.
Alright, that’s easy enough to understand, but why should you care about engaging with your clients or anyone on social media?
Well let’s take a look at the following:
Benefits of using social media
Let's take a look at the various ways social media may assist you in connecting with your target audience, engaging with clients, and growing your brand.
Increased Brand Awareness
With more than half of the world's population using social media, sites such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are obvious places to reach new and highly targeted potential clients.
Do you believe that individuals only connect with businesses they already know on social media? Consider that 83% of Instagram users claim they find new items on the network. There’s a lot to be said about the habits of social media users to find you and possibly buy something from you online just off that interaction.
Boosts Sales
Your social accounts are an important aspect of your sales funnel, which is the process through which a new contact becomes a customer. (Lingo alert: this is referred to as social selling!)
Social networks will become increasingly significant for product discovery and ecommerce as the number of individuals utilising social media grows and social sales technologies expand. The moment has come to integrate your social marketing activities with your sales objectives.
Be The Brand That People Can Trust
According to the 2021 Edelman Confidence Barometer, while there has been a recent shift toward distrust of government, non-governmental organisations, and the media, business is an institution with a 61 percent degree of trust. People turn to companies for insights and information... and there's no better place to deliver it than on social media.
Whatever sector you are in, social media allows you to create your brand as a thought leader — the go-to source for knowledge on matters connected to your area.
When it comes to establishing thought leadership, LinkedIn — particularly the LinkedIn Publishing Platform — is a terrific place to start.
Ryan Holmes, chairman and co-founder of Hootsuite, has over 1.7 million LinkedIn followers, where he offers his thoughts on social media and business.
Website Traffic
Social media postings and advertisements are effective techniques to generate visitors to your website. Sharing amazing information from your blog or website on social media is a terrific strategy to acquire viewers as soon as you publish a new piece. (UTM tracking tags can also be used to collect statistics on click-throughs!)
For example, Architectural Digest previews Story material in its Instagram feed and then urges readers to read the complete story (and see more stunning photographs) via the "link in bio."
Participating in social conversations may also help you boost your exposure, attract new people's attention, exhibit your skills, and generate traffic to your website. (However, make sure to go beyond self-promotion to provide genuine value!)
Also, include your website address in all of your social media profiles so that anyone interested in learning more about you can do it with a single click.
Leads Generation
Potential clients may express interest in your company and products through social media in a simple and low-commitment manner. Lead generation is such a significant advantage of social media for businesses that several social networks include advertising formats built particularly to collect leads.
McCarthy and Stone, for example, used Facebook lead advertisements to allow those interested in knowing more about their real estate projects to discover more about the properties with only a few taps.
The advertising resulted in 4.3 times more sales leads than the previous year, at a cost that was twice as low as more standard digital prospecting efforts using real estate ads.
There are many, many, many more benefits that you can reap from engaging on social media for your business, but in the interest of being direct, we have only given you our top 5 reasons. The reason for this is that we now want to walk you through the best practices to keep in mind while going about your social media marketing efforts for your business.
Social Media Best Practices For Your Business
Without a question, one of the most exciting aspects of digital marketing nowadays is social media.
When we consider the numerous new features introduced, algorithms that are continuously improving, and social platforms that are expanding or declining in popularity, the social landscape is changing virtually in the blink of an eye.
As a result, staying up to date on the newest social media best practices has become essential for every social media manager who wants to prosper in social marketing these days.
However, with so many changes going on, maintaining ongoing oversight of social media best practices is difficult.
That's why we've compiled a list of the most significant social media best practises that any marketer interested in social media should be aware of to improve their performance in 2022. So, let's get started!
1. Post Diversely
Consider your social media profiles to be a playground. Consider your content to be the toys in it.
If you think about it - and be honest - wouldn't you become bored much faster if you only had one or two toys instead of many? I believe the solution is self-evident.
The same is true for your social media posts.
Have you noticed that carousel posts do very well on Instagram? That's fantastic; include them into your Instagram marketing approach as soon as feasible.
But don't go overboard.
People become bored or fatigued when they receive the same material from the same brand in their feed.
They may eventually stop recognising the value in what you're posting and will simply ghost you.
You don't have to take our word for it; that's also what Jane Hermann, a well-known Instagram marketing specialist, has to say.
Furthermore, according to social media research, photographs are the most common sort of material that marketers use in their social media postings across all platforms.
However, a word of caution: don't abuse them, as it appears that picture postings create the lowest levels of interaction.
Keep in mind, as one of the most significant best practices for social media marketing, that content variety is one of the pillars that can determine whether your followers stay with you or migrate to your competitors.
Which is undoubtedly something that any company strives to avoid.
With so many different sorts of posts accessible on each network – think Stories, GIFs, or less prevalent ones like surveys – establishing a diverse content plan should not be too difficult.
2. Vary Strategies According to Social Networks
Certainly, optimising your content for each channel is a must-do strategy that is among best the practices for social media.
Remember that each social media site has a distinct audience, so getting in there and reposting the same message on all of your accounts is not the ideal idea if you want to improve the performance of your account.
Your dedicated followers who have subscribed to your profile on every channel will notice these copy-paste postings and interpret them as a sign of laziness.
This may cause people to doubt your sincerity and honesty.
Furthermore, each platform has a preferred sort of content. Nowadays, Facebook appears to favour videos while Instagram loves their carousels. So, give it a go, tailor your content to the platform and see your engagement go through the roof!
3. Track Your Engagement Data
Of course, you need to know how your efforts are going. Therefore, engagement is, not surprisingly, the most tracked and significant KPI in the social media landscape. whether we're looking at TikTok, Instagram, or any other social media site.
Comments, shares, and likes all indicate how useful your social post is to your fans.
You'll be able to discover what material is more appealing to your audience if you regularly monitor your engagement.
This will be quite useful and will allow you to more quickly build dynamic and interesting social posts.
According to Sue B. Zimmerman, an Instagram specialist, the "Save" option has become increasingly crucial these days on Instagram.
Saves, sometimes known as "the new like," are a social media measure that many marketers have in mind as a target to achieve while developing their social media content strategy.
When completing your social media reporting, you should pay special attention to those social KPIs that reflect active participation from your followers as some best practices in social media.
Here are a few examples of things that you can track: link clicks, comments, and video completion rate.
4. Hashtag Analysis
Moving on, we can't talk about social media marketing best practices without emphasising the necessity of hashtag analysis.
A major subject in social media marketing, particularly regarding Instagram, has been and continues to be the importance of hashtags and how they should be employed to increase reach.
First and foremost, testing can accurately identify related themes such as the ideal location - in the article or the comments - or the optimal amount of hashtags.
However, once you've found a winning formula for a certain brand, don't expect to just copy it for other accounts and expect it to perform similarly well.
The trick with hashtags isn't just knowing where to put them or how many to use.
What hashtags you use is very essential.
When deciding which hashtags to use in your social media postings, consider how many times a specific hashtag has been used, as well as the average engagement of those hashtags.
You may utilise an analytics platform, such as Socialinsider, for this type of work.
Another bit of advice we may put among best practices in social media is the use of various social media tools, whether for scheduling, listening, or simply statistics. In general, and for 2022.
Indeed, other social media sites' use of hashtags is less prevalent than on Instagram.
They do, however, serve a purpose.
LinkedIn, for example, is a social networking platform where, while not on such a large scale, hashtags have begun to play a significant role.
When looking for social media best practises for companies utilising LinkedIn hashtags, most experts appear to agree that 3 to 5 hashtags are the appropriate quantity.
You don't want your postings to appear spammy, after all. Right?
And, because we'll be discussing LinkedIn hashtags momentarily, here's a hint from Dr. Natalia Wiechowski, a LinkedIn specialist. Just to emphasise the necessity of thoroughly studying the hashtags you intend to use once again - “When you write a post, LinkedIn incorporates the first three hashtags that you use in that post into the post's URL”.
5. Audit
Conducting a social media audit entails analysing all of your social accounts and utilising cross-channel data to better understand your outcomes and enhance your entire social strategy.
If you've ever done an Instagram audit, a LinkedIn audit, or any other study of your other social media accounts, that's fantastic.
You may begin there and expand your report data to include the rest of the social media sites you utilise as well as the outcomes you obtained with your existing strategy.
If you've never done it before, you might be wondering why doing an audit is so critical to being included in the top best practices for social media.
But the solution couldn't be much easier.
A social media audit can show you which platform is the most engaging for you, what your rivals are publishing, what works for them, and much more.
You can gain a plethora of information that will help you optimise your plan even more.
Simply give it a go and you'll see!
Honourable Mentions
Here are some tips that may not apply to all businesses, but can be implemented if you do use the following:
Research Influencers
Influencer research is one of the top social media techniques for organisations.
Every marketer should understand that when selecting an influencer for a company, it is not enough to just glance at the influencer's followers and select the ones with the largest following.
Because working with them does not ensure that you will get the outcomes you want.
The most crucial factor to consider when selecting an influencer to work with is the alignment of your brand's values and audience with those of the influencer.
When doing influencer research and examining various influencers' accounts, keep metrics like engagement rate, posting frequency, and overall account progression in mind.
And, because micro and nano-influencers typically have better engagement rates and more specialised audiences, the way businesses execute influencer marketing these days appears to be shifting more and more in that direction.
Upload Videos Directly To Social Platforms
The value of providing more video content on all of your social media networks cannot be overstated.
Why? Simply because there is video wherever we look.
Your rivals will almost surely - if they haven't already - begin to push videos on their social accounts since it has shown to be a growing sort of content with strong engagement levels.
For example, did you know that video content has the greatest click-through rate of any sort of post on Facebook?
To get the most engagement out of your video material, post it straight to the platforms where you wish to broadcast it.
This is due to the platform's objective of keeping consumers online as often as possible.
Because YouTube links direct visitors to another site rather than YouTube to watch the video, your posts' engagement is likely to suffer.
In one of our Facebook engagement experiments, for example, we observed that posts without links got double the engagement as ones with link insertions. This seems to work about the same with LinkedIn too.
Closing Words
Millions of posts have demonstrated the importance of what you say as well as how you say it.
Audiences anticipate various things from different social networks, and they often want the information to be presented in a specific way.
That is why picking the correct sort of material among photographs, videos, and carousels, selecting the most engaging format, developing compelling captions, and carefully putting your hashtags all make a difference in whether your message is received.
Remember that being up to date on the newest social media best practices is only the beginning. How creatively you use these methods will determine whether or not you achieve the required brand exposure and social media success.
