Not every social media platform is suitable for your company or the objectives set.
It’s not coincidence, each social media has some defined user behavior, and this is important in targeting your audience.
From my experience, people tend to look for professionals who can help handle some tasks on twitter.
On facebook, people tend to share their results, or have fun, not much serious like twitter.
While on LinkedIn, you tend to find professionals in different fields.
On Pinterest, you’ll find people who love arts and design, while on instagram, you’ll find people who crave for beauty and fashion.
Firstly, let’s look into the top social media platforms.
The following list gives you an overview of the most popular networks.
Facebook : The world’s most popular social media network with more than 2 billion users.
In addition, Facebook also has the most regular users and is, purely in terms of reach, the most attractive network.
Instagram : Instagram owes its success to its visual concept.
Successful marketing here has essentially to do with the appealing aesthetics of the shared content.
According to a study, the platform also claims the highest engagement level of all social networks with 59 percent.
LinkedIn : With more than 467 million users, the platform is the world’s largest career network.
Twitter : With a limit of 280 characters per tweet, Twitter is known for its brevity and flavor.
Snapchat : The platform on which content disappears again is particularly popular with younger users.
YouTube : If your brand has the resources, this is the best way to capitalize on the popularity of online videos.
Pinterest : It’s the users who make this platform so unique. You’re looking for inspiration on Pinterest.
This makes the network perfect if your target group should take action, for example to buy something or visit your website.
Start your selection process with this list. Determine which social media platform (s) are best for your company. Maybe it’s just one, maybe several or even all of them.
Get to Know your Target Audience
Identifying the characteristics of your target audience is part of any market research.
Without this information, there is no way you can possibly know how to get the attention of your desired audience.
Find out your age, gender, place of residence, average income and other facts relevant to your business.
One of the best ways to do market research successfully is to create audience personas. That’s how it’s done:
Gather demographic data from social media, surveys, focus groups, and customer surveys
Analyze this data for trends (behavior, age groups, occupational groups)
Use these characteristics to develop ideal customers, complete with name, job title and professional career
Market and sell your Products on Social Media
Marketing on social media is more than just tweeting your brand every now and then or advertising on Facebook.
Without an appropriate strategy, you will not achieve optimal results.
First, when curating social media content, the 80/20 rule (also known as the Pareto Principle ) is recommended : 80 percent of your social media marketing or sales success (the outcome) comes from just 20 percent of the cause (the content curated by you).
For this reason, the proportion of advertising content in all of your social media channels should only be 20 percent of the content.
The remaining 80 percent are about your customers – interact with them and share relevant content that offers them added value.
Second, you should use each social media channel according to its strengths.
Whenever possible: Use pictures, videos and graphics
It doesn’t matter which social media platform you’re on: use visuals as often as possible.
In one study, 67 percent of marketing executives said they use visual content on social media because of the engagement effect.
Whether images, GIFs and memes or videos: The integration of visual content into your social media posts is relatively simple.
Just make sure that the visuals are relevant to both the content of the post and your target audience.
Conclusion
The scope of Social media marketing is now broad. The users behavior on social networks often change and there are several factors that influence engagements on these sites.
To market your business successfully, you need to understand the general user behavior of those platforms.
You need to understand where your target customers usually visit, is it facebook, twitter, instagram, LinkedIn etc.
You also need to optimize your contents in order to improve your reach.
Most importantly, you need to offer value that’s irresistible.
