If you wish to promote your brand through social media services, you should use all the features available to you on every major social media channel. Spend time to examine case studies of brands that have successfully used each social media platform to grow their customer base and build brand loyalty.
Apart from the leading platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, you should also exploit other less known sites like Tumblr, Instagram and Pinterest that are acquiring digital influence.
There are plenty of rewards for marketers who use social media in creative and innovative ways. Brands that can build a following by posting engaging, informative and relevant content create far more opportunities for themselves to sell to consumers.
The value of social media is that it is one of the rare channels that can be viewed as “paid, earned, shared and owned media” all at the same time for a brand. In order to get the most out of a social media channel, brands have to have a coordinated strategy for all major channels, with profound knowledge of how to identify and target audiences, run ads, and create optimized content for each channel.
Please know that each social media channel now has its own in-house “consultancy” or advertising team that works with brands to educate them on platform specific marketing strategies that work. It is up to you to avail these services to derive optimum benefits.
No other social network has generated such exhaustive debate over its worth as a marketing channel than Facebook. With an audience of over 1 billion users, there’s no doubt you can’t ignore Facebook. But Facebook frequently changes its algorithm but you cannot afford to get frustrated. Experts opine that Facebook marketing needs to be measured less in terms of engagement with likes and shares and more about click-through rates and impressions.
If Facebook has now become a paid media channel, Twitter is the place where brands get to have a personality. Twitter is also a great tool for customer service, giving companies the opportunity to respond quickly and effectively to consumer complaints in a public space. Twitter is a channel for brand maintenance and community management, rather than brand building or e-commerce.
LinkedIn works extraordinarily well for B2B marketers, since the people on the platform operates in a business environment. This means they are more open to being approached for sales opportunities and more likely to click on the content that is relevant to their industry and profession. It is heartening to note that 50% of LinkedIn users report they are more likely to buy from a company they’ve engaged with on LinkedIn.
Tumblr is mostly inhabited by a very young audience of teens and millennials, who may be uncomfortable when it comes to a corporate presence. However, brands that find a way to embrace the quirkiness and align it with their marketing philosophy have seen plenty of success on Tumblr. The key to winning on Tumblr is to create entertaining, compelling, and highly visual content that gets reblogged on its merit.
Of all the platforms, Pinterest is the only one to not have a full-fledged advertising product. It is presently testing Promoted Pins that would function similar to the native ad format used by Tumblr. Marketers are now using Pinterest to highlight their products, drive traffic to their websites, and highlight branded content – all things for which this platform is exceedingly ideal.
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