In the 21st century, no one can deny the power of social media for businesses. This is as true for tiny enterprises as it is for multinational corporations. Since the advent of social media marketing just a few decades ago, it’s been demonstrated countless times that a well-crafted content plan can completely transform a company.
The key to a successful social media marketing strategy is a plan that suits the social media goals and nature of the business. The best content marketing strategy promotes customer engagement on an emotional level by telling compelling stories of success.
Social media has evolved over the years, and it’s still working to transform businesses every day. Before the days of social media, marketers relied on traditional techniques, such as print newspapers, radio, and TV advertising, to promote their brands. This ushered in what is known as the “Golden Age of Advertising,” during which advertisers spent millions to create unique messages and engage their target audiences. Rather than focusing solely on sales, companies strived to raise brand awareness. For example, Kellogg’s created Tony the Tiger to promote Frosted Flakes cereal.
Although it looked very different, this era of advertising set the stage for what happened around 50 years later. The game changed when social media marketing (known as SMM) entered the picture. SMM involves the promotion of products and services through social networks. Its roots date back to 2006, when Facebook changed the marketing and business world by widening its network beyond universities and allowing up to 50 million users on the site. A month later, founder Mark Zuckerberg announced the launch of Facebook Ads, a revolutionary way for advertisers to join conversations in real time using the “social graph.”
The Benefits of Going Viral
Social media has revolutionized marketing because it provides an interactive platform where users can create custom messages that reach a target audience. Social media sentiment analysis gives marketers a better understanding of how people perceive their brands or products. When customers see positive sentiment surrounding a brand, it builds trust and encourages them to make purchases.
To cite a few examples, the early social media campaign “Share a Coke and a Song,” first introduced in the United States in 2016, proved to be a runaway success, with 250 million named bottles and cans sold. The concept has since seen success in over 70 countries that have all put their own spin on it. The associated Facebook campaign was equally a hit, resulting in an 870% increase in Facebook traffic and a 39% growth in fans for Coca-Cola’s page. To celebrate its 100th birthday, Nabisco’s Oreo cookie brand launched its “Daily Twist” campaign, which reached 30 million fans across social media platforms and led to 280% more shares on Facebook and a 510% increase in tweets. The campaign ultimately created 231 million media impressions.
It’s clear that SMM is a great opportunity for brands to engage with audiences through clips and images featuring fun facts, mini tutorials, and explainers. User-generated content is highly authentic in the view of consumers, and a user-generated content (or UGC) online content creator can frequently enter the market and monetize those users’ platforms. This boosts both brands and creators.
Lastly, businesses can measure the benefits of social media campaigns by looking at ROI using social media analytics tools, which provide valuable customer data that can be used to analyze and create new strategies.
The social media content marketing matrix has exploded due to its unique ability to connect with consumers and adapt to different audiences. Case in point: Small businesses employ roughly 46% of private sector workers and pay 39% of the U.S.’s payroll, yet only 50% survive past five years. A major contributing factor could be a lack of creative content marketing and communication strategies, often due to monetary constraints. However, using social media for online content marketing is a cost-effective alternative that offers reach, personalization, and measurement of social media metrics.
Easily and relatively cheaply, small businesses can increase awareness in the market and boost sales. It’s no surprise that 97% of marketers use social media and shareable content to get even more exposure.
Social Monitoring vs. Social Listening
Tracking customer engagements on social media is what’s called social monitoring. This involves monitoring any mention of a brand’s name — even if someone doesn’t use a hashtag — that results in both positive and negative feedback.
Social listening, on the other hand, requires more effort and time. This process not only collects data from all social media platforms, but also extracts valuable insights. The outcome of an effective social listening tool enables companies to make better decisions that benefit their customers.
By continuously keeping track of when people discuss their brands, companies can receive both good and bad feedback. In essence, social monitoring lets them see how users interact with their brands, as well as know what others are saying about their products and competitors on the web. They can then take things a step further by collecting data from all social networks and gaining insights from them. In short, social monitoring is more of a short-term plan, while social listening is a long-term solution.
Here are some other valuable benefits of social listening and social media monitoring:
- Getting to know customer behavior: By understanding customers’ comments, inclinations, requirements, and needs, businesses can effectively address problems and provide better service.
- Analyzing competitors: Learning more about other brands allows the business to remain one step ahead.
- Finding new trends and openings: By staying up to date with upcoming trends, a company can detect prospects for growth. It can also use social listening to track keywords and mentions to become more familiar with its target audience and industry, find leads, interact with followers to gain insight into their interests, recognize top influencers in the field, and use content research to determine what works.
Social listening also has use cases outside of commercial ones. For example, an “infodemic” is a surge of information, including misinformation, during a health emergency. The best way to counteract an infodemic is with evidence-based strategies. Such practices have been developed and applied during the COVID-19 pandemic and other outbreaks, such as Ebola, polio, and cholera. Social listening in public health gathers information about people’s health questions and concerns from online and offline data sources. This data is then used to identify and understand anything related to a public health emergency, such as geographic and demographic trends, networks, sentiment, and behavioral responses.
People can be skeptical of the value of social listening tools. But they’re not as exploitative as one may think. For instance, by using social listening techniques combined with natural language processing, research teams have been able to improve health outcomes for thousands of patients and effectively study various skeletal system diseases like ankylosing spondylitis and psoriatic arthritis. Ultimately, social listening gives businesses a better understanding of their industries, competitors, and audiences; helps them create content that speaks to their audiences’ interests; and provides two-way communication. At its core, this helps companies find new opportunities to reach their target audiences.
How to Influence and Win Customers
Once a business understands what social media web content marketing is, how it works, and its many benefits, it’s time to put everything into action. Here are some basic steps to follow for effective social media branded content marketing:
- Know the customers: Personalizing content is a crucial part of content marketing. It’s more than just casting a wide net and hoping for the best; it’s about making sure that the content resonates with a specific audience and turns them into loyal customers.
- Make engaging media content: This is one of the main parts of creating great content: the production phase. Whatever content a business makes needs to have all the necessary elements to amaze viewers and promote the brand.
- Schedule posts: Having a content plan and carefully scheduling posts can completely transform how well a business manages its social media presence.
- Adjust content for different platforms: Creating engaging material for social media requires both skill and craftsmanship. Each platform has its own atmosphere and fans, so unique content has to shine.
- Evaluate performance and refine tactics: After uploading content, brands must keep track of the results and assess vital points before plotting out the next month’s content creation. This will help determine what works best for different kinds of material and social media strategies.
6 Tips for Crafting Powerful Social Media Content
Here is some useful advice from actual marketers that will make any business’s social media posts impossible to ignore:
1. Develop a communication plan.
Marketers should first sit down and sketch out a communication plan. This plan needs to be based on marketing targets and target crowds, and it should detail which pieces of content to create, how often they’ll be posted, etc. This makes it easier to come up with ideas for content and kick-start the creation process.
2. Make use of social network ads.
Companies can increase the likelihood that content achieves its goal by investing in ads. Structure each ad campaign to suit its particular purpose, whether it’s heightening awareness, boosting engagement, or driving sales. It’s all about putting content in front of the right people.
For example, to increase product knowledge, brands should focus on reach. To boost social media toolengagement, select engagement or fan acquisition to grow followers. If the goal is to boost sales during promotions, using traffic and conversion campaigns can help.
3. Incorporate UGC and social media influencer marketing.
It’s a good practice to feature customer reviews and influencer shout-outs to appeal to new audiences, giving customers a glimpse into genuine experiences related to the business.
4. Add some pizzazz to social media.
Interactive giveaways, collaborations, and contests can help draw in customers. Doing this once every one or two months can lead to shares and engagements far beyond a normal digital content strategy generation. Plus, it’s an effective way to bring in new business.
5. Employ multi-image and visual content links.
Make visuals more imaginative by utilizing the unique features of each platform to tell stories or promote diverse elements of the business. For instance, businesses can add connecting graphic elements to artwork on Facebook or add an arrow on each Instagram image carousel to encourage viewers to keep swiping.
6. Leverage analytics.
Use in-depth analytics for market insights, social listening, and deep data drilling for detailed content marketing analysis of campaigns, market trends, social media benchmark analysis, and competitor tracking, with a detailed social media report and template for the team.
Brands should identify keywords and phrases related to the relevant industry, which could include brand names, product names, industry lingo, or even the hot topics of the moment. These keywords act as magnets, helping a company attract the conversations most important to it. Companies should use relevant hashtags to make posts discoverable but remember not to overdo it so that posts don’t appear spammy. Like Instagram, X — formerly known as Twitter — thrives on hashtags, so remember to use them wisely to expand the reach of tweets.
Leverage Mandala AI for Better Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing has come a long way from its origin as a tool for connecting friends online. Now, it’s an essential part of any successful digital marketing content campaign. But tailoring content for social media KPIs requires thoughtfulness, knowledge of the target audience, and creativity — not to mention careful use of analytics tools and monitoring strategies to evaluate how effective each post is. With the focused effort put into crafting engaging pieces with powerful storytelling, businesses can create posts guaranteed to draw attention and customers.
To help take any business’s social media content to the next level and create campaigns that will get results, sign up with Mandala AI. Its solutions provide tailored content marketing solutions for each business’s needs, from creating custom influencer content marketing funnel strategies to optimizing performance analytics data.
