Social Media Marketing 101

Social media are highly interactive online technologies that allow individuals and groups to share content, often in virtual communities. Their best advantage is their ability to facilitate engagement, and I mean lots of highly valuable engagement I have often mentioned otherwise, like in posts about nurturing leads through x number of touchpoints down through the sales funnel.  Social media is the tactical side of those discussions. To put it otherwise, the whole point of social media is to network, ie to reach and engage with otherwise strangers.

The game changing aspect of social media is the fact that they are dialogic (ie they provide two-way communication) which varies considerably from earlier monologic (or one-way) forms of marketing communication like newspapers, television and magazines. For this reason, when using it, remember to harness its dialogic super power. If you can do that, you will be exploiting it far more fully than otherwise.

Uses & Benefits (of multiple social media channels. Beware however that, if you wish to use multiple channels, only select the few best fits. Avoid spreading yourself too thin.)

• Improve market reach. Reach as many portions of your market as possible by participating in multiple communities. Do not put all of your eggs in one basket, especially since many of your competitors likely limit themselves this way.
• Improve search engine rank. Your social media presence will be considered as part of the content that affects your rankings. Consequently, if you have your brand’s name on social media, and even multiple websites with their own high page rankings like Facebook, Twitter and so on, your business will piggyback off of those high rankings.
• Improve Customer Service & protect your brand's reputation against negative feedback in 2 key ways. First, social media platforms allow you to track what is being said about your brand. It also allows your customers to communicate with you directly regarding their grievances. You can therefore respond quickly to resolve customer problems. Your quick responses signal that you are willing and able to resolve customer concerns and are therefore a good choice.
• Follow your competition to platforms to reach their customers. Once your competition is on a platform with an audience, you will likely benefit from it also. Review their website or content for a list of all of their social media accounts.
• Go viral. If your content is well received, your audience actually does the promotion work for you. This is a marketer's dream because it costs considerably less that otherwise. Social media sites typically provide some type of function(s) that facilitate this. Examples include Facebook's 'share' function, Twitter's 'retweet' button, Pinterest's 'pin' function, Tumblr's 're-blog' function and so on.

Social Media Strategy

Do not post just for its own sake. Have a strategy instead. For for-profit businesses, you likely want your posts to convert leads through stages of the sales funnel. A social media strategy involves 1) objectives, 2) tactics and 3) performance measures. 

1) Objectives.  

1. Establish social media marketing objective(s) that align to business goals (like mission statements) and your corporate strategy plans.  Ensure these objectives are S.M.A.R.T, ie specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. Common social media objectives include the following.
• improve brand awareness
• encourage engagment
• advertise your products and services
• sell your products and services
• measure how your market perceives your brand
• offer customer service over social media platforms. Example(s).
• To use [a platform, to be subsequently selected] for customer support to lower average response rate to under 1 hour by the end of quarter 2. 
• Track your brand's performance and adjust your strategy accordingly
2. Know your audience as intimately as possible. The better you know your audience, the more consistent and attractive you can curate your brand voice and tone.
3. Know your competitors. This includes looking closely at their offering and social media behavior. Can you create a type of mini marketing communication centric SWOT analysis (using Porter's 5 Competitive Forces and Pestle)? 
• Strength: You can use the special dialects of the small local towns community while the international market leader can not.
4. Select social media platforms that meet your objectives. Key considerations include whether your audience comprises customers (B2C) or businesses (B2B), the type of content you produce, whether you want the content to be  found via daily feeds vs audience searches over the long term. For instance, if you want to know what people are saying about your brand right now, feeds are more useful than search engines. Since pull marketing content requires keywords for search optimization, YouTube is a better option over Facebook. Consider the demographics of your audience. 10-year old YouTube content can continue to generate leads and engagement in ways that Facebook won't. See basic details about different social media platforms to consider when undertaking this step. 
5. Be sure to get your account verified as a safeguard against imposter accounts. See each platform's steps.  

2) Tactics.

1. Create a social media content calender. To this end, establish tentpole events that are most likely to appeal to your target market. For each tentpole, calculate all associated dates that require your action for each tentpole event. Use tools like Buffer to schedule your posts well in advance to different platforms (Twitter, Instagram, etc).
2. Determine what content is truly valuable and engaging for your target audience. If unsure or need inspiration, follow these tips.
• look at the content of closest competitors, direct and indirect. 
• Sometimes, a competitor is strong on one platform but weak on another. Analyze whether dominating the platform with their weaker performance is an opportunity for you to dominate that platform and attract a lot of the market.
• Use social listening tools. Social listening allows you to know what current and potential customers think about you and your competition. These analyses may uncover opportunities for brand (re)positioning, at the very least in your messaging.
3. Design brand voice and tone that appeals to your target market. Include it in your brand style guideline to ensure that your personality remains consistent, even across platforms.
4. Create content that will appropriately engage your audience. Examples include the following.
• answers to audience questions
• routinely seek out posts of other creators with a significant following. Make some meaningful and positive feedback that could get the attention of their followers. Various platforms have their means of facilitating this like Twitter's retweet feature, Instagram's @tag and so on. 
• In response to an article, you can say "I liked your perspective on X ..." (and NOT simply 'I liked your article"). 
• Demonstrate your expertise. However, for the sake of being relatable, post content that also shows your imperfections like mistakes.
• include images (NOT only text and links). For instance, businesses using inforgraphics generate traffic over 10% more than otherwise. Remember that humans process visual content faster than text. This is particularly noteworthy when considering the limited amount of time in which to capture the attention of an audience online.
• Kylie Cosmetics engaged its audience over 2 years of content in the form of selfies and home videos. They portrayed Kylie just as a luxury lifestyle brand with repeated, obligation-free touchpoints before the launch of her lip kit business. Read my full case study of Kylie Cosmetics.
• Gamification is fast becoming a great opportunity for encouraging customer engagement.  
5. ...

3) Social media audits.

1. Perform a social media audit of your accounts. Since specific steps are outside the scope of this article, read otherwise on how to perform social media audits. Example(s) of common metrics of social media audits include the following.
• engagement metrics. Focus on these metrics (over less meaningful types like vanity metrics) because engagement indicates actual engagement. They include engagement (like comments, virality behavior, etc), click-through, conversion and so on. 
• vanity metrics (number of likes, followers, )
• audience profile as planned? (demographics, demand, etc)
• Find and report imposter accounts that use your name to capture or mislead your target market.
• Useful analytics tools include hashtracking, Followerwonk, etc 
2. Have appropriate expectations for the results. For instance, brand awareness marketing is geared towards long term results like trust, loyalty, authority and so on. Consequently, do not expect immediate 'direct responses' like purchases, clicks and so on from efforts designed for brand awareness. Brand awareness is a more nebulous measure and usually takes several months or longer before sales occur. Here are some common examples. To ensure you are taking a strategic approach, list your metrics in a meaningful way. The stages within the sales funnel is an example.
• Brand awareness
• To drive traffic (with Linkedin) to your website, monitor click-throughs.
• To raise brand awareness (Instagram), track number of Instagram Story views. 
• number of followers, shares, etc
• Engagement (ie how much audience interacts with your content)
• Comments, likes, mentions, etc
• Conversions
• to advertise (Facebook), monitor cost-per-click (CPC).
• Relationship management
• testimonials, repeat sales, your team's average response rate, etc
3. Adjust your strategy accordingly.

Summary of most popular social media platforms

Among the most popular forms with over 100 million registered users include the following (listed in alphabetical order).

• Facebook and its associated Facebook Messenger.  
• Audience profile: teens to grandparents for B2C
• Your method(s) of use: business pages; groups; host events)
• Usage: brand awareness, conversion campaigns, B2B, B2C, retargeting campaigns.
• Useful features: targeted advertising; live broadcasting; offers continuously / dynamicallly evolving results for current trends
• Facebook Messenger
• Feature: Businesses can respond directly and personally with target customers who download the app.
• Instagram
• Audience profile: a bit younger than that of Facebook, gen Z, millenials; mainly used as a mobile app
• Business content type(s): visual, photos, short videos, live streams and stories that disappear at the end of each day.
• Usage: brand awareness, visual-first platform, B2C, influencer marketing.
• Useful feature(s): influencer marketing is  potentially much higher on this channel; Interactive questions in 'Stories' make the feature exceptionally good for engagement; Up to 30 hashtags are allowed per post as a means of potentially appearing in the continuously trending search results; @ tags of other accounts are useful for shoutouts for non-competing companies with the same market for new customer acquisition / market penetration.
• Pinterest
• Audience profile: mostly women, millennials.
• Usage: brand awareness, e-commerce, shopping, website visits, retargeting, campaigns, travel, food, B2C, influencer marketing.
• Quora
• Useful features: ranks highly on Google search results pages. It is also a search engine itself. This is powerful for creating backlinks and therefore boosting SEO. Consequently, it is ideal for business promotion. Users select specific topics and can therefore find you if you offer something in which they are truly interested. Your content can be shared and liked by users to rank it higher on results pages. You can enter your credentials in your profile. in order to plan your questions strategically, you can search for questions with the highest number of followers.
  
  
• Tik Tok
• Business content type: short viral videos, creative.
• Audience profile: mainly popular among young viewers.
• Useful features: some of the videos get shared on other sites as well.
• Twitter 

• Audience profile: Males; between 35 and 65, especially below 49. 

• Business content: microblogging (NOT as visual) so best for news and B2B; starting conversations; images, links (back to your business website) and other types of popular social media features

• Usage: brand awareness, retargeting campaigns, politics, news, B2B, B2C, mobile-first marketing efforts.

• Useful features:  polls; retweets (ie virality potential technology); paid private publishing
• LinkedIn  (to boost professional networks)

• Audience profile: B2B professional clients;

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• Usage: brand awareness, recruitment, B2B

• Your content: business-oriented; general posts that showcases your expertise, long-form content, and even job listings; great if you are a startup or entrepreneur looking to boost their professional networks, to reach out to B2B clients, to reach investors or to boost brand recognition 

• YouTube
• Business content type(s): video content; tutorials or demonstration (very popular).
• Usage: brand awareness, educational content, how-to videos, SEO-focused content (NB.YouTube is the second most popular search engine), influencer marketing.
• Useful features: share videos on non-YouTube sites; create playlists; interact with audience on the YouTube platform; content is optimized for search.
• Audience profile: Varied, even including persons over 55; over 2 billion monthly logged-in users and even more viewers without accounts, fastest growing demographics. B2C and even some B2B. 

WhatsApp

• Content type & useful feature(s): text, voice or video messaging mostly to audience's mobile devices; 1-on-1 or group chats (group chats may allow or block audience participation);
• Audience profile: U.S. and globally; especially younger groups.
• Telegram
• (similar to WhatsApp)
• Snapchat
• Audience profile: young audience
• Content: photos, short videos or text messages that remains available for 24 hours.
• Features / benefits: useful for raising brand awareness among adolescents.
• Pinterest
• Business content type: visual; posts of products, blog posts and a variety of other content; fashion; home decor; food; DIY content.
• Feature: search engine
• Audience profile: young people; women.
• Reddit
• Chat bots

CONTENT RELATED TO USING MULTIPLE SOCIAL MEDIA CHANNELS

• Sales funnel 101. Social media is useful for the all important 'engagement' phase of the sales funnel.
• Brand voice and tone
• Social media 101
• Instagram 101
• Facebook Groups
• WhatsApp Business
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Chatbots
• Tawkto
• Social media management 

• Social listening
• Use tools like Buffer to schedule your posts to various social media platforms well in advance.        

• Be guided by where in their purchase decision process your customers are. This will help you to create appropriate posts, advertisements and other engagement content. 
• Summary of other social media platforms: https://smallbiztrends.com/2016/09/social-media-channels-marketing.html 
• Internal links
• Details of the most popular social media platforms to be considered when selecting social media platforms. 

• Social media content ideas 

Nudge customers closer to buying decision by asking questions like:  

• 'Which do you prefer between A, B and C?, Which is your most favored or hated disliked option?

Use a snippet of the most powerful part of a testimonial in a graphic. Then place the entire testimonial in the description of the post (of Instagram for instance) 

Transparency: Show behind the scenes, where ingredients come from, etc especially if not usually made public knowledge.

Quick tips:

FAQs:

Before & after: results after you helped.

Other related industries:

User generated content:

Long form content (apx once monthly)

Community issues

Direct sales offer 

• Abovementioned case studies in other content
• Instagram 101 | Instagram
• Kylie Cosmetics