She is editor-at-large for Western Living and Vancouver Magazine, author of the National Magazine Award-nominated ‘City Informer’ column, and a regular contributor to Dwell. Her previous work covers a wide range of topics, from SEO-focused thought-leadership to profiles of mushroom foragers, but her specialties include design, people, social media strategy, and humor. You can usually find her at the beach, or cleaning sand out of her bag. If you’re flying solo or have a small social team without a graphic designer, Canva is the go-to for crafting original and branded graphics. There’s a reason it’s a favorite tool among social media marketers.

These tools will help you create interesting Stories, posts, and Reels for social media without any designing experience. However, to make your visual content outrank your competitors, you must also accompany it with relevant text content. Their blend of product promotions, engaging content, and seasonal campaigns ensures they’re always top-of-mind for coffee lovers. By diversifying your content and actively engaging with your audience, you ensure that your brand remains a consistent presence in their daily social media scroll. Depending on your brand and target demographic, some channels might be more effective than others. For instance, while Facebook and Instagram are universally popular, offering a mix of shopping tools and visual content, platforms like LinkedIn might be more suited for B2B interactions.

The study also found that corporate culture, gender, easiness to use, and perception of usability did not affect the use of social media by B2B customers. Sułkowski and Kaczorowska-Spychalska (2016) investigated the adoption of social media by companies in the Polish textile-clothing industry. By interviewing seven companies representatives of small and medium-sized enterprises the study found that companies started implementing social media activities in their marketing activities.

More than 70% of B2B companies use at least one of the “big 4” social media sites such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Additionally, 50% of the companies stated that social media has improved their marketing optimization and customer experience, while 25% stated that their revenue went up (Gregorio 2017; Sobal 2017). Gen Z is getting older and still using the platform in full force, even as a search engine. They’re jumping on trends, creating content that feels real and letting creators take the lead.

The ideal social media management software depends on your budget, industry and unique goals. For further insight and help determining which is best for you, read the complete breakdown of the best social media management software. Inbox pulls all social media messages and interactions into one unified interface, regardless of platform. Organize fun and creative contests or giveaways to boost engagement and attract new followers (we’ve got 12 inspiring examples right here).

This information can help you improve customer engagement, understand how your audience perceives you in comparison to your competitors, uncover pain points that no one is addressing, or identify industry influencers. Perhaps paid social media advertising is a better option when it comes to increasing brand awareness, traffic generation, and customer acquisition. Here are the key areas you should consider when putting together a social media marketing plan for your business. But the real question is how can you build and implement a winning social media marketing plan that will reap all of these rewards.

CSAT (customer satisfaction score), is a metric that measures how happy people are with your product or service. Calculating social sentiment requires some help from a social media metrics tool that can process and categorize language and context. Social media strategic planning and analysis require tracking metrics to understand your business’s social media activity. They’re like scorecards for your online posts and interactions, showing how many people saw, liked, shared, or commented on your content. Social media metrics also reveal how much effort and money you’re spending and how much you’re getting in return.

YouTube is still the top platform for video content, outpacing competitors in watch time and engagement. Even as user preferences shift, the platform appears to be growing, so marketers may not want to count it out yet. The brands that thrive here are actively engaging in trending topics, responding quickly and maintaining a strong brand voice.

As you’ll have gleaned from this article, social media marketing is a deep, nuanced subject, and there’s often plenty to consider before a business kicks off any kind of social media marketing campaign. As your business and social media following grow, conversations about your brand will also increase. People will comment on your posts, tag you in their own posts, or message you directly.

Explore the top trends in social media, along with opportunities, challenges, and new data to optimize social content. The book teaches you how to make impactful content for your followers to interact with and share with their networks. Author Dave Kerpen also describes why you need to ensure you’re consistently delighting your followers to avoid losing them at any point in time. This New York Times Bestseller explains why being likable and engaging with followers on social media is one of the most powerful ways to grow a customer base. 96% of top searches on Pinterest are unbranded, showing that Pinners are open to new ideas.

Another challenge of social media marketing is the need for consistent and quality content creation. With the constant demand for fresh and engaging content, businesses must invest time and resources into creating content that stands out from the competition. This requires a deep understanding of the target audience and the ability to create content that resonates with them. Whether you’re a marketer or business owner, your potential customers are active on social media platforms and it’s vital to stay on top of different social media trends. In this guide, I’ll share everything I’ve learned about social media marketing, its benefits, and how to build a social media marketing strategy that delivers the results you want.

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We’ve even included pitfalls to avoid and tips to ensure successful campaigns. By connecting with potential customers on social media, your business can generate more leads and drive traffic to your website. You can also interact directly with your audience, building relationships that generate recurring sales of your product or service. Social media platforms provide a vast and invaluable addressable audience to reach and showcase your brand.

Designed to revolutionize your content strategy, it effortlessly generates engaging post ideas, recommends tailored hashtags, and optimizes content for different social platforms. With SocialPilot, you have a trusted ally to ensure your content consistently resonates and captivates your target audience. With platforms like Facebook offering granular targeting, brands can ensure their content reaches the most relevant audience segments. With paid promotions, brands can amplify their message, drive targeted traffic, and achieve specific campaign objectives. It’s a strategic blend of organic and paid efforts that yields the best results.

How Do You Create A Social Media Marketing Strategy For Your Business?

Having more than 4 billion users, social media marketing is the new norm. Businesses, irrespective of the niche, are busy perfecting their social media marketing plan to get quality traffic, rigorous customer engagement, and drive sales. It is strongly advised that future studies conduct research in other countries as findings can be different due to the culture and social media adoption rates. Future studies should pay particular attention to other emerging markets (such as Russia, Brazil, and South Africa) as they suffer from the slow adoption rate of social media marketing. Some companies in these countries still rely more on traditional media for advertising of their products and services, as they are more trusted in comparison with social media channels (Olotewo 2016).

Its emphasis on high-quality visuals, from photos to stories, makes it a hotspot for B2C brands. While organic content lays the foundation, paid advertising supercharges a brand’s reach on social media. With an estimated 4.89 billion people using social media globally and the average user active on six to seven platforms monthly, the landscape is more competitive than ever.

Staying adaptable is what keeps your content relevant and your growth steady. Whether it’s answering a question, sparking a thought, or offering a quick SMM Thai win, your content should always aim to help or inspire. Responding to comments, asking questions, and sharing user content aren’t just nice-to-dos.

Doing social media marketing right starts with being diligent about your data. You can be reactive in the short term to get the most out of your running campaigns, and then proactively use these takeaways to inform your next strategy overhaul. Thanks to the rise of TikTok and Instagram Reels, social video is booming. Short-form productions continue to dominate the social space across all platforms due to their high engagement rates.

That means 5 billion opportunities to get your brand in front of new customers. For example, if you create a business page for your company and engage with other social media posts, you’re increasing brand awareness. Social media can also increase your website’s traffic through posts, shares and comments.

When you’re building that foundation, you’re not just thinking about what to post. Big follower counts sound impressive, but they mean little if your social media content doesn’t deliver value to the business. When our audiences stop trusting platforms, those platforms will cease to exist.

Of course, you have to choose the right content type, style, and tone. Short-form videos under 60 seconds capture the attention of two-thirds of consumers, making them one of the best tools for building a strong following. These are metrics that measure the performance of a social media campaign. All social media platforms have some form of analytics within the app that you can use to determine what’s working and what isn’t. TikTok offers businesses the opportunity to make a variety of content — educational, promotional, or simply hilarious. If you’re ready to take your social media marketing strategy to the next level, Brandwatch’s cutting-edge solutions can optimize your digital strategy by delivering actionable insights that drive growth.

More than one million professionals and 2,000 corporate training organizations have benefited from our award-winning programs to achieve their career and business goals. Divide your days into themes and work on one aspect of your social media strategy daily. This is often called content batching — where you create multiple pieces of content in advance. Lastly, when you’ve started gaining momentum with your social media strategy, pay attention to your audience’s comments and DMs.

For comparison, the CPM for paid social ads across Meta, Pinterest, TikTok, YouTube, and LinkedIn was $6.06 in Q4 2023, down from $6.52 in Q4 2022. For most ad objectives (except off-platform conversion-oriented ones), you’ll pay either cost per thousand impressions (CPM) or cost per click (CPC). These are mostly the same as the options for Facebook, as both types of ads can be created through Meta Ads Manager. Once you have answers to a few of these questions, it’s easier to determine which platform to use. Here’s a quick summary of age demographics from the Pew Research Center, noting the percentage of U.S. adults who say they ever use a specific platform.

To create a content strategy start by identifying your audience and understanding their needs. Research what type of content they engage with, what are their pain points and what are their interests. Use this to create a content calendar that outlines what content to create, which social media channels to use and when to post. Part of creating a social media strategy is evaluating whether or not it’s working to help you achieve your goals. To give direction to your social media marketing efforts and get clarity on what success looks like.

Social media marketing brings your message directly to your customers, while allowing you to accurately measure how effective each post, comment, and ad is at achieving your goals. But, with the rise of social media, brands no longer need to wait around for someone to turn on the TV or open a magazine. Today, people spend approximately 2 hours and 23 minutes daily on social media. This, plus the ability to accurately track, analyze, and optimize on your results, is what makes social media marketing a truly unique marketing space. Social media marketing is about building relationships with your audience in the places they already spend their time online. This might look like promoting your latest product drop, or simply jumping in on a trend that your audience is interested in.

When you sign up for our social media marketing services, we will also use organic tactics (hashtags, engagement, contests, etc.) to grow your social media channels. Digital marketing is one of the most powerful tools businesses have to generate attention and sales for their products and services. Several digital marketing techniques, including social media marketing, email marketing, SEO, PPC advertising and content marketing, offer exceptional ROI potential. You don’t need a large budget to get started, so digital marketing can be an effective tool for all types of businesses. The productivity of topical research in social media influencer marketing has evolved over the years (Fig. 5).

You need data to inform your decisions and improve your strategy over time. Take the time to analyze what content resonates most with your audience, and use that information to refine your approach. Interact with the audience by using interactive content, for example, polls. Relevant images will help increase the level of engagement while making your posts appear more uniform.