What Marketers Should Think About Before Approaching Social Media Marketing

Today’s marketers have so many options when it comes to venturing out into social media marketing. They can jump right in and get a social media account on all of the more popular sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest. But the way in which they should approach it all depends on who their target audience is, the type of content they are planning to create for social media, and what channels their target audience is the most active on.

Facebook:

According to Jia Wertz (2017), “American women and men between the ages of 25 - 54 make up 32% and 29% of Facebook users, respectively. And only 9% of users are between the ages of 18 - 24.” (para. 5) Additionally, she went on to state that 44 percent of the users check the app quite a lot of times a day. If your target audience is made of people within these age groups, your company should opt for setting up a Facebook account.

Twitter:

Thinking about getting a Twitter account for your business?

Christina Newberry stated that (2017):

“The platform’s 313 million monthly active users send more than 500 million Tweets every day. More importantly for marketers, Twitter users are actively discovering and interacting with businesses through the social network. Sixty-six percent of Twitter users have discovered a new small or medium-sized business (SMB) through the network, 79 percent have retweeted an SMB, and a whopping 94 percent plan to make a purchase from the SMBs they follow. And that’s not just talk. Sixty-nine percent have already purchased from an SMB because of something they saw on Twitter.” (para. 5)

Newberry also went on to state that “the number of users who interact with the site every day is holding steady at 38 percent in 2015, up slightly from the 36 percent who used the site every day in 2014.” If that’s not enough to get you excited about marketing on Twitter, I don’t know what could.

Instagram:

As stated by Jia Wertz (2017), “With 500 million users on the app and 59% of those users checking the app every single day, it's no doubt that Instagram has great reach.” (para. 7) Instagram can also serve as a major part of your digital marketing campaign if you are targeting the following demographics/ age groups.

Pinterest:

 Wertz (2017) also went on to say that, “For female-focused companies, Pinterest is the way to go because of its significant reach among women; 42% of online women are Pinterest users. 34% of users are between the ages of 18 - 29 and 28% are between 30 - 49, which creates a wide demographic of women who can be reached on this platform.”  (para.9)

After deciding which platforms their target audiences are most active on, they should then began conducting product research on the approach taken by their competitors. Some of the things about their competitors that they should monitor are: Are they posting on a daily basis? What are they postings? How much engagement are they receiving on the posts? Are they using the same content on various networks?

After analyzing this information, the companies should then approach social media participation by creating a social media calendar, links, copy, and graphics for their posts. They must also decide if they want to post the same exact content on all of their channels, or switch it up depending on which target audience is present on that channel. A lot of companies also question if they should have a primary social channel. While it would be easier for a company to just manage one platform, they would really be limiting themselves from reaching more potential consumers. There’s quite a bit of people who have social media accounts, but not all of them have every channel (or constantly check every check, some have their favorites) so there’s a chance you could miss marketing to them because your company opted for just having a Facebook account and they just have a Twitter.

Since I do not believe that they should have a primary channel, I think that companies should pay attention to the best practices for each channel and tailor their content for each channel to best catch the attention of the users active on there. Hopefully, this will afford them the opportunity to turn every channel into a primary channel for them by helping them build brand awareness, get more conversions, gain more followers, likes, and engagement across the board. They should also meet with a marketing consultant from the channels or even work with a third-party marketing firm to come up with a plan.

During my time working with Belk Corporate, we utilized a third-party marketing agency and also met with representatives from various social media networks to discuss the best ways to approach social media marketing to their users. Doing this really helped a lot and allowed us to grow our channels and increase conversion tremendously over a short period of time. They should also allocate some of their marketing funds to funding paid advertisements on these various sites. They can do sponsored posts on Twitter and Instagram and can even opt for carousal ads. That showcase various products on Facebook. There’s so many options when it comes to paid advertisement and allocating funds towards these efforts could help a business a lot.

                                               

Marketers should also think about the approach they will like to take in their company on social media. Will they ask consumers questions to invoke thinking and get them to write responses on the posts? Or will they opt for writing from a more sales focus approach. These are all things that must be considered before a company can jump into participating in social media marketing. The content is what will draw the consumers in and should never be ignored, but it is also important to make the consumers feel like they are obligated to engage with your brand by writing top notch sales copy about an offer that they can’t resist or taking a conversational approach.

There are so many platforms and so many things that companies should think of when attempting to approach social media marketing (before even setting up the accounts), I hope that this piece has gave you a little guidance on how to get started.

References:

Wertz, Jia. (2017, Feb 18). Which Social Media Platforms Are Right For Your Business?. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jiawertz/2017/02/18/which-social-media-platforms-are-right-for-your-business/#4cec2bf612a2

Newberry, Christina. (2016, August 11). Top Twitter Demographics That Matter to Social Media Marketers. Hootsuite.  https://blog.hootsuite.com/twitter-demographics/