Did you know that there are 4.59 billion social media users in the year 2022? The past decade has brought an exponential rise in social media users and a host of social media platforms connecting users around the world.
Previously, social media was simply a platform where individuals shared photos and interacted with one another. But that is now history. Nowadays, social media has become an intrinsic part of our lives. We are hooked up to our phones from the moment we wake up till we fall asleep at night, scrolling apps to quickly browse through content, be it a new reel or story.
Social media has increased in importance to the point that it is now a channel via which people and companies market their brands and sell their products or service. So, if you’re looking to get into the game and use social media to grow your business, you’re in luck because we are going to share the best social media growth marketing strategies with you today.
What is Social Media Growth Marketing?
Before going to the point, let’s first learn about what social media growth marketing is.
The process of employing social media platforms to interact with your audience in efforts to promote your brand, boost sales, and improve website traffic is known as social media growth marketing. This entails publishing high-quality content to your social media profiles, interacting with and responding to your followers, evaluating your outcomes, and putting relevant social media marketing into practice.
Social media marketing is always growing, with new features and platforms being introduced on a daily basis. It is basically the practice of developing content for social media platforms to advertise your products and/or services, establish a community with your target audience, and generate traffic for your business,” notes Brian Lim, CEO of iHeartRaves & INTO THE AM.
Social media marketing has developed into a variety of techniques and plans for interacting with customers and promoting services and products. The use of interactive chatbots, the customization of online experiences for customers, the use of social media influencers, the growth of an online audience, and other strategies fall under this category.
How can social media marketing benefit you?
Social media marketing can assist in sending customers directly to your site. However, to maximize your customer acquisition potential, it is important to have a comprehensive lead generation strategy in place that not only drives traffic to your site but also captures potential customer information for future marketing efforts. Search engines are great, but being overly reliant on search results means you’re missing out on a ton of potential traffic. Social media channels allow for more diverse inbound traffic streams. With the extensive use of social media these days, it is quite evident that people are getting used to it. In recent years people have begun to utilize social media as one of the most effective free growth marketing mediums to boost their business. To give you a better idea have a look at the advantages of social media growth marketing:
- By using social media you can make your business an active contributor to the market. Your audience can now get to know more about your company and gain trust by seeing your engagement through your social media handles where you post pictures, stories, and videos and interact with your followers.
- By using these platforms, you may connect with people personally and establish immediate and indirect channels of contact with your followers. This allows you to network, get feedback, have conversations, and hold direct real-world connections.
- Your ability to accomplish your marketing objectives will increase with the size and level of engagement of your audience on social media platforms.
- Social media is a leading avenue for boosting traffic to your website, where you may turn visitors into buyers, thanks to the link in your profile, blog post links in your posts, and your commercials.
- These platforms also allow you to create leads and clients by using tools like Instagram and Facebook stores, direct messaging, call-to-action buttons on profile pages, ability to schedule appointments and build your email list through Linkedin using email finder tool.
- The graphical element of social media platforms gives you the opportunity to develop your creative vision and raise awareness of your brand. Additionally, increased brand recognition will improve the outcomes of all your other initiatives.
A few statistics on social media marketing.
Here are a few statistics on social media growth marketing as per a survey conducted by Hubspot:
- The majority of surveyed marketers claim to publish four to six times each week on the majority of social media sites.
- 54% of social media marketers utilize short-form videos as their primary social media format, followed by live streaming, live audio chat rooms, and user-generated content.
- 67% of marketers claim to collaborate with micro-influencers who have 10K–100K fans, subscribers, or followers. However, just 29% of respondents claim to collaborate with celebrities who have more than one million followers.
- 77% of social media marketers think their organization has benefited from social media marketing this year in a moderate to significant way.
- According to 80% of marketers, humorous content performs best on social media.
- 68% of marketing firms collaborate with social media influencers.
- According to 25% of respondents in the survey, amusing material is most successful with Gen Z.
- Marketers report investing in creating social media communities to the tune of 64%.
- Millennials are targeted by 84% of marketers as part of their social media strategy.
- According to 27% of respondents, providing compelling content is the top difficulty facing marketers on social media.
- Twitch, Snapchat, and Clubhouse have the lowest reported interaction rates among the platforms.
Tips to Grow Your Social Media Presence and Boost Your Business
In this age of influence, you can use social media to your advantage in numerous ways. To help you out here is a list of tips that you can use to grow your business on social media platforms.
Know What You Want.
Before you start using social media for the growth of your business, you will need to first decide what you want. For that, you will need to set goals and objectives. The gist of this step is to convey the thought that if you don’t know what you want, then how can you lay out steps to achieve it?
The world of social media runs faster than you can think, which is why you must set a goal before putting your thoughts into action. These goals will also help you align your overall marketing efforts.
Your objectives will serve as the driving force behind your social media marketing plan.
It’s not necessary that you have to make big goals in the beginning. Start small or divide your objectives into tiny actions while you formulate. A goal tracking app will help with this. Before you go any further, there are a few things that you should keep in mind while setting your goals:
- Try to make specific goals
- Ensure that your objectives are quantifiable.
- Set attainable objectives.
- Lastly, always set a deadline for each goal you want to achieve.
Learn About Your Target Audience
Once you have set your goal now it’s time for you to learn more about your target audience. Social media is all about engagement and the number of people to whom your content reaches. Without an audience, all your efforts to set a goal will just go into the drain.
In order to reach your audience first, you need to know who they are and what their preferences are. You can get a better hold of this information by collecting data via conducting surveys of your audience. Through surveys, you can get an idea odd your audience’s age, location, and preference.
You can also take advantage of the built-in social media analytics provided by various social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. You can get free access to this tool if you have a business account on these platforms. You can check the social media pages of your competitors to see their engagement in the comment sections and learn from them.
Once you get to know about your target audience social media growth marketing will become more fun for you as now you know whom to reach and how to reach them.
Set a Different Strategy for Each Social Media Platform.
As we mentioned, there are 4.59 billion social media users as of this year, and all of these users are active on various social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Snapchat, and many more. If you post the same content on all social media platforms, then you will notice that each social media platform has a different reach.
This is because each platform has users who belong to a certain age group or have different preferences. Facebook is one of the social media platforms, so you will find all age groups over there, but mostly those who are over the age of 40. Instagram and Snapchat have the most millennial and GenZ users, so posting content or promoting products like a walking stick is not going to help you at all.
If you want to reach a greater audience and send high-functioning messages, then use Facebook. For visually appealing and short creative videos use Instagram, for work-related content use LinkedIn and for informational, news-related content use Twitter.
Consistency Is the Key
Consistency is the key to everything. Just like your workout session or your work routine maintaining consistency in your social media post holds the same importance. The frequency at which you post should be different for each social media platform. Some social media platforms, like Twitter, have numerous active users, so, naturally, your tweet might get lost in them. To get the most out of it, you should post more often. Undoubtedly, One can use a social media scheduling tools for your business. You can schedule tweets, schedule Instagram posts, schedule GMB posts, schedule LinkedIn posts, schedule pins, and much more from a single platform. Even with scheduling tools, you can automatically auto-schedule your posts by analyzing your previous posts for those best times. On the other hand, Instagram and Facebook users’ feeds are not filled with urgent posts, so you can post on these platforms once in a while.
Another thing that you should keep in consideration is the platform’s algorithm and whether your post appears sequentially or based on some filters. Remember that the people following you might have several followers of them as well. So if you are not consistent with your post and update your account scarcely, then your content may get lost in the sea of feed of the people.
Keep an Eye on What’s Trending
Social media is a fast-paced world of its own. You can miss out on a big event or news in a few hours if you are late. Every day you will some new trends on social media platforms and people just follow that trend religiously. To attain social media growth, you should follow those trends by making content related to those trends, Especially if those trends coincide with your business. This can help you capitalize and boost your social media interaction.
Before you follow any trend be careful that you post relevant content that connects to the audience and that the overall narrative of your content is properly addressed to your target audience. Numerous other businesses are working in the same line as yours. Hence, you should always try to bring a new perspective to the plate and create content in your own distinct style.
Remember that your one trending social media content is going to set a bar for the future so try to create distinct content every time to maintain your social media growth marketing.
Engage With Your Audience
If you think that creating social media content will do all the work, then you are wrong. Social media growth marketing takes a lot more than just posting content, one of the main aspects of it interacting with your audience. Interacting with your target audience will help you create a better connection with them.
People will find your business and product more genuine when you give them a first-hand experience by interacting with them. It is also noted that people are more likely to buy a product from your website via social media if you give them a response to them. Social media is a powerful tool and with the right amount of posting and interaction, you can attain your goal easily.
You can try some simple strategies to interact with your audience, like:
- Retweet on Twitter
- Create surveys
- Try LinkedIn polls.
- Reply to comments on Facebook and Instagram.
- Interact on Twitter threads.
Check Your Social Media Metrics Now and Then
To ensure that your social media growth marketing efforts provide you with the best outcomes it is important that you keep a track of your progress and measure them every now and then. To identify whether your efforts are showing positive results or not you can use indicators like clicks, views, likes, comments, and engagement.
Some of the metrics you should check for are:
- Reach and engagement of Facebook
- Impressions, retweets, and mentions on Twitter analytics.
- Likes, comments, mentions, views, and interactions on Instagram posts, reels, and stories.
- You can also check for clicks and interactions on LinkedIn.
The foundation of a successful social media marketing campaign is data. Having metrics is not enough; you must put those figures in a framework that is consistent with your initial objectives. Weekly, monthly, and quarterly tracking of these indicators can help you choose if and when to adjust your social media approach.
Believing in the Power of Planning and Forecasting
Planning and forecasting go hand in hand. Formulating a plan can help you achieve your goal faster and in an organized manner. You can use social media calendar tools to create a plan for posting content on the specified date. You can add links, topics, and images on the calendar to ensure that you are up to date and after how many days you should be posting your next content.
The best part is that once you add all the data regarding your last post and the engagement you got on them the calendar tool will suggest you time and day at which you should upload your next content to get maximum interactions. You can use Google calendar, and sheets or maintain an excel sheet to keep a track of your data. You can search for the best social media calendar on your browser and choose the best one to maintain your content stats.
Stand Out With Visual Content
Written content is an important component of social media growth marketing but in recent years social media platforms have generated a new way of spreading your message via a new method of creating visual content. as compared to text-based content video content has six times more engagement and interactions.
Recently, Instagram has introduced IGTV, reels, and stories along with Facebook. Both of these platforms also allow users to go live on their accounts and interact with the audience in real-time. On live videos you can connect with anyone and all the viewers will be able to see you interact live. This has helped in increasing interaction and people can now ask about anything during those live sessions.
Not only that, but social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram give video content a higher algorithm weight. This simply implies that video content will have more exposure and reach than text or image-based content.
Use the Right Tool Wherever Necessary
It is quite common for people to have social media accounts on multiple platforms. Sometimes, managing all the accounts at the same time can be very hectic. At times like this, a social media growth marketing tool can come to your rescue and keep you updated on what’s working for your company and what your followers are interested in. These tools can handle all the tedious tasks and accomplish your goals.
When working on social media platforms, you should try to make your work as automated as you can. You can use the social media calendar tool, social media monitoring tool, and analytics tool to make a strategy and get your work done swiftly. These tools can help you pin tweets, posts, hashtags, and social media mentions for every month. They will also give you an insight into your social media engagement and help you decide what measures you can take to improve them.
Finding the correct tool can help your strategy function smoothly in the long run and defend your company’s reputation. So take some time and find the right tool for handling your social media accounts.
Organize a Hashtag Campaign
Hashtags can help you increase your engagement on social media twice as compared to posts without hashtags. The use of hashtags can significantly increase the reach of your brand on social media. hashtags are also very useful for organizing your social media posts. When you click on a given hashtag, you can find all information regarding that on the platform. This implies that hashtags are not only a good tool to increase engagement and organize your posts, but they are also brand identifiers that can help you start a discussion instantly.
But you should keep in mind that too much of anything can be harmful so don’t over-optimize your post with hashtags. Using too many hashtags can also irritate your visitors and reduce interactions, two or three hashtags are enough for a post.
Lastly, you might have seen many people diluting their content by using hashtags that are already been used thousands of times. So instead of using an overly used hashtag concentrate on creating your own branded hashtag and participating in a trend that is important to your target audience in your own unique way. this way you can contribute real value to the conversation while maintaining your individuality.
Optimize social content to increase engagement.
Every user uses social media at different hours of the day. So sometimes they can miss out on your post. This person can be a potential buyer of your product or service. Knowing the exact time of posting content is something that has no specific solution. You can learn to do that with your time and experience.
After spending a significant amount of time on social media and learning about your target audience you will learn certain things like When to post, how to post and where to post. Once you learn about these three aspects you can start publishing high-quality content on your account.
Optimizing content also involves using some techniques, like uploading the right size image and summarizing your content with the right amount of hashtags and captions.
Conclusion
Social media marketing is a big world to conquer and it’s not something you can achieve in a single day you will need a lot of time and effort to excel at each social media platform. But most importantly you need to develop a clear voice. Create a consistent voice and tone in your social media presence – one that resonates with your audience and influences how they see your brand. Listen to your audience and find ways to relate to them without looking like you’re trying too hard. Most importantly, don’t be afraid to show a little essence. This helps present your business as adaptive, friendly, and relevant.
Plus, as we mentioned, social media is all about connecting with your audience in the right way and making them feel that they are also part of your journey. So, try to connect and interact with your audience as much as you can by adapting to these amazing social media growth marketing strategies to take your business to a new height.
