15 years ago, only 1 in 20 Americans had a Facebook account, and the vast majority were college-aged people sharing pictures of their party experiences with their peers. Today, more than 70% of the country uses Facebook regularly, and other services like Snapchat, Instagram, and Twitter gain popularity every day. One of the reasons for this rapid adaptation was the realization that individuals could share their pictures, comments, etc. with a near-endless virtual audience with the click of a button, and that is where marketing minds saw dollar signs.
The evolution of social media continues to be rapid, and the most important rule for social media marketing is not getting stuck in your ways. The internet, as a whole, is a world of trends, and social media is certainly not an exception. Constantly educating yourself on these trends is the best tip for social media marketing success, and here are a few more.
Brand Influencers
Brand influence isn’t unique to social media, and some brick-and-mortar examples would be someone handing out samples at the mall, or a celebrity wearing branded clothing for public appearances. For social media, the idea is the same. Find a popular “place” and have someone there push your product to increase brand awareness.
Brand influencers come with a wide breadth of price tags, but generally getting someone to post about your product or service will cost about $10 per 1,000 followers. With this in mind, marketers should make their focus as much on the followers of a given influencer, as on the influencer himself. The best way to maximize ROI with brand influencers is to find someone who is popular in a niche relative to your product, rather than just finding someone who is a household name. As an example, if you sell basketball shoes, a more valuable target would be an up-and-comer, as only the deepest of basketball fans will be following that person, rather than someone like Shaq who is popular for many reasons outside of the target market (basketball fans).
Get Interactive
Brand Influencers are great for growing your product recognition, but they don’t tend to boost your own followings very much. Ultimately, if you can create a large following on your own company’s social media pages, you become the brand influencer. One of the most popular trends in social media is interactive content. A proven strategy has been contests for your followers, and an example would be something like “design our next logo.” With the click of a button, your followers can send these contest posts to their artistic friends (for this example), increasing your engagements and having a spiderweb effect on who sees your company’s name due to the contest.
Stay Uniform
Brand recognition is the name of the game with social media, and repetition across all social media accounts is paramount for this recognition to take place successfully. This should extend beyond social media as well, but given the rapid growth of social media outlets and the marketing opportunities they afford you, following current branding is not necessarily the only option. Discussing changes in branding that will extend beyond social media, based on strategies that are great for social media is a tactic many teams are adapting.
Evaluate and Adapt (It’s Easy!)
Social media analytics are incredibly easy to use, and given the trendiness of social media, keeping a constant eye on what is and is not working relative to your marketing strategy ensures changes can be made swiftly to adapt to these trends. Larger-scale evaluation is also easy to do with analytics, and deciding that something wasn’t worth an investment is even more important than realizing something was. Use these analytics to polish the strategies above, and reap the benefits of social media marketing in 2021 and beyond.
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