From running Black Friday social media campaigns to using Facebook paid ads, social media continues to evolve as an active marketing channel to drive traffic and sales for all kinds of businesses. However, just like in most things in life, there is a right and wrong way of doing things.
Execute your social media strategy correctly, and you reap bountiful results. Run your social media marketing campaigns poorly, and you burn through your marketing budget without achieving anything meaningful.
Unfortunately, a lot have turned their social media marketing campaigns into a numbers game — preventing them from genuinely harnessing its power.
To help you get better results out of your social media marketing endeavors, we’ll share tried and tested social media marketing strategies. For more in-depth tips specific to Twitter, take a look at this Twitter growth guide.
1. Load up on relevant hashtags
While hashtag stuffing should be avoided, incorporating the right hashtags into your posts has become a simple but essential way to tap into new audiences and expand your social reach.
A Facebook post with one or two hashtags reaches an average of 177 more engagements than those without it. Meanwhile, Instagram posts with hashtags get 12.6% more interactions.
That’s how important and relevant hashtags have become.
When a user clicks a hashtag, they become exposed to different content from different people and businesses. This is how companies get found by people who are interested in your products or services.
But what hashtags should you use to gain the right audience?
Hashtagify is a free online tool that allows you to find and analyze top hashtags on Twitter and Instagram. The device also allows you to see which topics are trending in your industry.
Although most of the features are only available with a paid account, the helpful features are still freely available for hashtag marketing.
Here’s how it looks. Let’s try to search for the hashtag ‘black Friday.’The results page will show you several sections dissecting the data into different categories.
The first section shows the overall popularity of your keyword. As you can see, it’s pretty high, but its recent popularity shows it’s being used less often.
The next section is where you can get more relevant keywords for your hashtag. You can click on these hashtags to find and generate more related hashtags.
Lastly, Hashtagify shows you where the “black Friday” hashtag is mostly being used. This is useful if you’re targeting a specific location for your post. It gives the idea that a hashtag is popular in that country.
For online sellers, e-commerce marketing is essential to your business for attracting your market. However, the right social media hashtag strategy can expand your market reach, increasing your leads and sales.
2. Figure out the right social media schedule
Neil Patel said it best:
“If you post too infrequently, your audience will forget that you exist, and you will quickly fade into the deep dark recesses of their minds.
However, if you are posting too often, you will become a complete nuisance, and they will dread seeing your posts overcrowding their feed.”
Never underestimate how your social media schedule can make or break you. It’s a simple and essential part of social media that many don’t maximize.
Many studies recommend general optimal times to post on different social networks such as:
● Facebook – one time a day for at least three times a week.
● Instagram – one to two times a day, every day of the week.
● LinkedIn – once a day between 10 am to 11 am.
● Twitter – five to ten times a day between 8 am to 4 pm.
Meanwhile, posting times can also differ according to the industry. According to Hootsuite’s study, the best time for B2B brands to post on Facebook is from 9 am to 2 pm EST on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday.
On the other hand, B2C brands perform best on Facebook on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday at midnight EST.
For Twitter, Hootsuite found that the best time for B2B brands is from 11 am to 1 pm EST on Monday or Thursday. On the other hand, B2C brands perform well at 12 pm or 1 pm from Monday to Wednesday.
At its core, knowing the best hours to post at ‘x’ times a week for your business enables you to be ‘present’ when your audience is online.
That is the key—determining when your target audience is most likely browsing through their social media.
They are utilizing what you already know about your target market’s behavior and testing that against social media optimal times can narrow down the best days and hours for your social media marketing strategy.
3. Post what your audience wants to see
What’s the point of posting at the right time when it’s not the right content?
Quality, consistent, and valuable content had been, has been, and will be the ultimate magic spell for successful social media marketing (and any form of marketing).
While it’s great that businesses invest time and money in advanced social media tools, trends, and strategies, many come to forget that high engagement comes from great content.
Content connects with your audiences, builds trust with your brand, and improves your conversions—all for a low cost. That’s why content marketing continues to become a prominent form of marketing.
To create appropriate and valuable content, BuzzSumo and Ubersuggest are great tools to use to know what your audience is talking about at the moment.
Let’s try to look for “black Friday” again on BuzzSumo while filtering content from the past week. As you can see, BuzzSumo shows all the top content and their social engagement for “black Friday.”
The topics, the type of content, and how much social engagement each article gained will enable you to come up with issues relevant to “Black Friday” and to your audience.
Next, although Ubersuggest is mainly for keyword research, it also offers a feature similar to BuzzSumo found in Content Ideas.
Similar to BuzzSumo, Ubersuggest, shows the top articles related to your keyword while showing how much social engagement it got on Facebook and Pinterest.
Take note that some content performs well on one channel than the other. Knowing what content works well on a chain will also be a factor for high engagement.
Bear this in mind. Top brands may not even be focusing too much on optimizing social media channels or strategy.
Most likely, they’re just focusing on connecting with their audience through their social media channels. So, before you hit that ‘post’ button, ask yourself: “Are you engaging with your audience?”
4. Keep in mind
These are three of the most basic social media marketing strategies that are worth every bit of your time and effort.
So if you want to go viral on Facebook or build your Instagram notoriety, make sure to post the right content at the right time, and don’t forget the hashtags.
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