How to succeed in marketing on social media? (Choosing the Right Platform - Writing Effective Content)
Sometimes you wonder about the reason for the success of marketing on Social Media for some commercial activities, and you find that the number of followers and interactions on their pages multiply in short periods, and you do not know the secret of this strong interaction?
This is too easy! Simple but basic information, its absence makes project owners spend effort and energy in marketing on social media without bringing them any gains, and knowing it makes the path shorter and clearer.
It is about knowing two things: how to choose the right marketing platform to work on and focus efforts to develop it, and knowing the type of marketing content that attracts the target audience.
Let's start first with how to choose a marketing platform.
If you think that all social platforms can be used for marketing for all kinds of businesses, and that the more platforms you use, the stronger results will be, then you are definitely wasting your resources! This is one of the most common misconceptions about social media marketing.
Here are 5 questions that if you answer them, you will be able to choose your ideal platform with ease:
1- What platform is your target audience on?
The most influential factor on the basis of which you should choose an effective marketing platform is the presence of the people you want to reach your content a lot! What is the benefit of any platform if your target audience does not accept it? Therefore, by studying the specifications of your ideal customer - the buyer persona, identify the platforms that your potential customer is interested in following up periodically to use in reaching him.
For example, if your target audience is men from the age of 40 to 55, is it useful to use the Instagram platform to reach them? of course not..
2- What platform are your competitors using?
You can save time and effort and avoid “reinventing the wheel.” Just identify the social media platforms that your direct competitors use and that have brought marketing benefits to them, analyze them and find out the reasons for their success on them, and you can use these same platforms to promote yourself.
You are not limited to that, but through your knowledge of the market and the behavior of your target segment, you can discover a platform that none of your competitors has used before and achieve results through it, so do not be satisfied with the experiences of those who preceded you in the market.
3- How many platforms can you manage?
To avoid wasting time and effort working on platforms that do not produce clear results, you must determine your capabilities at the beginning and work on the platform that will achieve the most benefit for you in a professional manner, in the quality and density of the content provided, designs and customer service, and after you make your basic platform stable, you can choose another platform to work and test its efficacy.
4- What kind of content will you create?
The types of content suitable for each activity vary. If you use your social media accounts to publish updates in your field and news of your organization, meaning that you are a B2B company, it is better for you to use professional platforms such as Linkedin, or your Twitter account that you use in the context of advertising about your organization as well. .
If you provide graphic content (videos) but are short, then the best platform for you may be Instagram or Snapchat, and if the videos are relatively long, then YouTube will certainly be your best choice alongside Facebook and Twitter..
But if your activity requires heavy photo sharing and you rely entirely on it, Instagram will be effective in achieving your goals of posting photos.
If you answered the previous questions with conscious and clear answers, now go to the second part, which is defining the types of content that you will display on your marketing platform.
The types of content circulating on social media are many and varied, from which each marketing officer chooses what he finds suitable for his target segment. In the following points, we introduce you to the most popular types of marketing content on social media and the role of each of them in increasing the interaction of followers with your page..
1- Marketing content to showcase your products
It is the most popular and most used type of content, and although it is important and necessary, but it does not generate a strong interaction, and in the long run it will not help you at all in building an audience and followers for your activity page, because the social network that you use when you notice that your page followers do not interact with you because of your monotonous sales posts that Do not attract them, automatically you will reduce the visibility of your posts to them, this does not mean that you stop displaying your products, specifications and prices directly on your page, but you should be satisfied with only 10% of your total posts for this purpose.
2- Interactive content
You can consider interactive content to be the basic and most important type that you cannot neglect on your social media. Focus on reviewing the aspects of your activity, but in total without talking about a specific product. Interactive content must attract the attention of your potential followers and customers, and make them gather around you.
3- Content of news and trends review
We are all keen to follow the latest news in the areas that we are interested in, so if your followers feel that you always offer them that, they will be interested in following you more, but be sure to write about news that relates directly to the field of your page only, and avoid exploiting any trend that is not related to your activity even if you expect Have your audience interact with it.
Like Costa's post on their Facebook page on International Recycling Day: A new reusable cup, made from paper coffee cups they take back from their stores!
4- The content of the interactive competitions
One of the most popular ways to increase interaction on your page is to make competitions among followers, but the nature of the competitions you do should be appropriate to the interests of your target audience, and the prizes for these competitions are something that your audience will appreciate, and it is also preferable that this thing is less important for those who are not in the market that you target, to get the most benefit from the types of audience interacting with your competitions in the long run.
As a contest on Costa's official Facebook page, a person participates by leaving a comment saying Who would they like to share their coffee with? Costa sends the winner home their favorite coffee.
5- Photographed content from the work environment
People feel curious to see behind the scenes of the places they deal with, whether you are a company, office, gallery, shop you can occasionally share some fun photos of your team with your audience, to humanize your content that your potential customers follow, which gives you credibility and motivates People should visit you on the ground, too.
In the end, we find that the common factor that causes the success of any activity on social media is the quality and diversity of the content provided to the masses, which means that you only share images and details of your products and try to sell them is not enough to develop your social media, but you need to make dozens of types of interactive content for your audience Which in turn and with continuity will bring you sales automatically in the future.