Social Media Marketing
Historically, online marketing has had a fairly one-sided approach.
Businesses used to push their ideas out and consumers passively received them, but that has changed radically today.
The internet has become highly interactive with social media creating a new style of communication with billions of conversations happening online.
All of these conversations present exciting business opportunities.
They can join conversations to increase their visibility, create their own conversations and empower their customers to do the marketing for them.
Facebook is a great opportunity for brands, but it is increasingly shifting to a pay-to-play model.
You will need to work hard to get followers for your page. You should post status updates, images and videos, but only a percentage of real users will like your page.
This is also helped by Facebook’s new rules where it is harder to get users to like.
Of course, that doesn’t mean you can’t succeed, but you can find huge success by investing in paid Facebook ads, which are one of the best investments in social media.
Facebook has the largest percentage of users who graduated from college, there you will find a strong middle class.
If your brand is targeting 24-50 year olds, Facebook is an ideal advertising network.
Younger users are shifting to Instagram or Snapchat to communicate digitally.
Facebook is useful for small and large businesses, even if the user demographics overlap.
Twitter has about 20% of internet users and is especially popular among 18-29 year olds.
There is a slight bias towards women, but not by a large percentage.
Twitter is great for short communication and tends to become a top choice for consumers wanting to get their message across to companies.
Due to its high percentage of mobile usage, about 30% of Twitter users check their feed several times a day.
If a user follows your account they will see your posts (tweets) directly in their updates.
On Twitter users need to invest more time than other networks for this and the advertising platform is relatively new.
Linkedin is the least used social network, but has the highest percentage of professionals.
Linkedin focuses exclusively on professionals and a broad exposure here can be of value to businesses.
As a small business it pays to create a business page for brand recognition by potential customers.
LinkedIn advertising is one of the most expensive social media sites, but it can be profitable for the right advertiser.
Pinterest is constantly gaining popularity.
It is based on the bookmarking model where users deposit things they find online.
It relies heavily on the visual part and the majority of users are well-to-do young women.
If your brand has a strong visual communication language, there are many opportunities for success on Pinterest.
Look at companies in a similar market to yours and study how their audience responds.