With over 320 million monthly active users, Twitter provides a great way to engage with customers and prospects in real time, anytime. Twitter reports there are currently 58 million Tweets sent per day and it thrives on this fast pace of hot topics. However, with a 140-character limit for each post as well as new content every second, it’s also one of the most challenging social media platforms to use effectively.
As a visual social media platform, Instagram presents unique challenges to businesses. To be successful, you must figure out how to present your business on this channel. After you’ve decided how to present your brand – your voice, your style, your presentation strategies – do some research into what your followers find interesting and decide how you can use that information to promote your business in a way that’s meaningful and engaging to grab the attention of your audience and other Instagrammers.
Instagram is one of the fastest growing social media channels available today. There are 400 million users uploading over 80 million photos each day on Instagram giving it potential as a valuable marketing tool. Despite its parent company being Facebook, Instagram has been slow to adopt paid advertising. They only began offering this option in the fall of 2015.
According to Digital Marketing Ramblings, LinkedIn has 400 million global users, making it the world’s largest and most popular professional network. It can also be a powerful tool to expand brand awareness and generate leads. A successful LinkedIn campaign, however, depends on a strong networking strategy. Your business must not only inspire prospects to follow your brand, but also earn recognition and endorsements from other industry figures.
With over 1.5 billion active users, Facebook remains the king of social media. According to Pew Internet Research, almost three-quarters of all Internet users are on Facebook. This means that your business needs to be active on this channel in order to reach potential clients.
If you’re new to social media, you may think the buck stops with the amount of followers you have on your profiles, when in fact, your social media strategy shouldn’t focus just on the number of followers, but on their engagement with your brand. Social media, by its very nature, lets your followers spread the word about your brand, but you need an engaged crowd to help attract new followers. Successful social media marketing means you must engage your followers and build relationships with them.
Marketers everywhere are constantly told to “show instead of tell” their offers if they want to attract and keep a prospective client’s attention. This rule certainly applies to social media as much as it does to any other marketing tactic. On any given day, users post 350 million photos to Facebook. On that same day, Instagram users upload 80 million photos. And in just one minute of that day, 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube, according to Digital Marketing Ramblings.
In business, every transaction revolves around human interaction and so does social media. While social media might not always account for direct sales, it can account for a significant increase in brand awareness, traffic to your website or store, and more prospects responding to your calls to action. Think of it as a variation of word-of-mouth marketing. The more engaged users are with your profile, the more engaged they are with your brand.
From blogs to videos to social media posts, content creation is essential to marketing your business today. Equally important is promoting your content. You may think that simply publishing a post on your blog is enough, but it’s not. There are many different channels on which to promote your content and reach a larger audience.
