7 Social Media Marketing Best Practices for Beginners & Marketers

It’s 2024, and we all know that digital tech and social media are like peanut butter and jelly in our everyday lives. With its mind-boggling knack to reach billions of people in rapid time and deliver information like wildfire, social media has been a game-changer for businesses, making or breaking their success. Staying on top of the newest social media trends and effective tips and tricks in social media marketing can help you keep up with the ever-changing landscape.

So, you’ve asked, this article got you covered, 7 friendly social media marketing tips for 2024 that will help you boost your digital presence and maximize sales.

7 Social Media Marketing Tips for Beginners and Advanced Marketers

Social media marketing is a must-have tool for businesses to connect and engage with their target audience. Whether you’re a small business, a beginner, or a pro in this ball game, optimizing your marketing with social media tips can make a real difference.

But before we dive into the winning marketing tips for social media to boost your online presence (whether on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or even Linkedin), let’s talk about the fundamental building blocks of your digital strategy.

First off, let’s set some goals. Figure out what you want to achieve through your social media efforts. Maybe it’s getting more people to know about your brand, driving traffic, shaping your unique brand identity, boosting sales, or generating leads. Just make sure your goals go hand-in-hand with your overall business vision.

Next, let’s get to know your audience. It’s super important to understand who your ideal customers are and create content that clicks with them. Think about their age, interests, and online habits. You can get creative with target audience segmentation by making personas, checking out your existing customers or your competitors’ audience, and even using marketing research and big data.

Don’t forget to define who your target audience isn’t; that way, you won’t throw away your ad dollars on groups that aren’t productive despite having strong social media marketing tips in hand.

Once you’ve nailed down those essential marketing pillars and jotted them down in your trusty memo book, get ready to dive into 7 social media market tips that will catapult your brand’s digital presence to new heights. 

1. Selecting the Right Platforms

As a first marketing tip for social media, selecting the ideal platform for your social media marketing can be a breeze if you keep a few crucial factors in mind.

•  Firstly, consider your business type and the media consumption habits of your target audience.
  
  find out where they spend their time online and gather information that influences their purchasing decisions.

• Next, define your brand identity.
  
  Decide whether you want to project a fun, creative lifestyle or provide educational and informative content. Align your platform choices with your brand goals and ensure they resonate with your audience.

• Analyze your competitors’ social media strategies on each platform.
  
  Learn from their successes and failures by performing social media competitor analysis. Engage with them on channels that support your digital marketing objectives and help you stand out from the crowd.

• Now, let’s explore different platforms.
  
  LinkedIn is great for connecting with professionals and showcasing expertise. Twitter thrives on community-driven interactions. Instagram and Facebook excel at visually appealing and lifestyle-focused content. TikTok is perfect for video, storytelling, and influencer marketing.

Remember, setting up and optimizing social media accounts requires time, effort, and resources. Make sure you have the necessary assets to make the most of each platform, as competitors may take advantage of any gaps in your strategy.

2. Crafting Consistent and Engaging Content

Creating compelling and shareable content is essential for any business to succeed.
Consider these 3 key insights from real marketers to help you curate quality and engaging content to stand out from your competitors to grab your target audiences’ effectively

• Visual: Visuals are like the superhero capes of social media, instantly grabbing attention and keeping your audience hooked. Embrace the power of cool photography, captivating graphic artwork, and eye-catching videos.
  
  Each platform has its own visual vibe that can work wonders for your content. So, unleash your creativity and find the perfect visual mix. A single image or an Instagram Story can be the attention-grabbing champ, while multi-image posts or carousels can ignite engagement. In this era of video domination, unleash the reel deal and make some noise.
  
  Hot warning: size matters! Check those visual dimensions on each platform, or your masterpiece might get lost in a pixelated mess. Don’t let your digital presence suffer from awkward cropping!

• Storytelling:  Storytelling: It’s not just about selling your product; it’s about sharing your brand, showcasing the essence of quality, and highlighting the wholesome goodness packed into each and every one of your offerings. The key to storytelling for the brands is to stir up a variety of good content; take to reveal captivating stories that connect with your audience in a sense of emotion.

• Frequency: When it comes to posting in social media, you should aim to post at least once a day or several times a week depending on how active you want to be. Make sure that the content you post is relevant and interesting so that people will be more likely to share it with their friends and family.

Pro Tips: Study your main competitor to see how many times they post per day, week and month.

3. Building a Strong Brand Presence

Once you’ve nailed the content pillars, storytelling, and visual variety, it’s time to delve into the exciting realm of brand personality. This is where the magic happens, shaping the mood, art direction, and language that communicate your brand identity with strength and consistency.

• Brand Personality: Creating a brand personality is like crafting a fascinating character. Don’t fret about defining your brand as a person right away. Instead, play around with different personality dimensions. Is your brand more of a pop meme icon or a gentle spirit? Are you all about playful fun or a no-nonsense attitude? Take these traits and develop a persona that truly captures your brand essence. For instance, if you’re a sports shoe brand, picture your brand persona as a fitness enthusiast in their prime, ready to conquer marathons with boundless energy.

• Brand Language: Now, let’s talk about brand language. It’s time to infuse your words with flavor and flair. Define the tone of voice that runs through every sentence and letter; whether you’re going for a laid-back and casual vibe, a humor-filled approach, or an elegant and sophisticated style, let your brand language shine through. 

• Art Direction: Last but not least, art direction comes into play. It’s the secret ingredient that elevates your visual design and sets your brand apart. Craft a consistent color palette that paints your brand’s world, select fonts that capture its essence, and consider unique graphic elements or symbols that become synonymous with your brand’s identity.

4. Fostering Audience Engagement

Creating meaningful interactions with your target audience is like a secret recipe for success, blending emotions and engagement into a delightful mix.

As the ringmaster of community management, be agile and responsive, ensuring your audience feels seen and heard. Dive into the comment section, ready to engage in lively conversations and provide timely solutions. Let your audience know that their voices matter and that you’re there to create a warmful experience.

But why stop just there? Consider these cool engaging online activities and incorporate them that fit your social media:

• Poll & Quizzes
• Giveaway
• Virtual Workshop
• Live Streaming
• Hosting Content
• Special Collaboration with brands that resonate with the same target audiences in different offerings 

By adopting all or some of these tips, apart from fostering engagement, you can also reach your new target audience as well.

5. Leveraging Influencer Marketing

Influencer Marketing is like having a squad of awesome individuals who are ready to turbocharge your brand. Why put all the promotional weight on your shoulders when you have a tribe of impactful people loved by your target audience? They’re the perfect partners to amplify your brand’s message through their own unique and captivating content.
By teaming up with influential individuals who align with your brand values, you not only showcase the key benefits and unique selling points of your offerings but also ignite a buzz and strengthen your social media presence. These influencers have the power to be seen as Key Opinion Leaders, inspiring others to create user-generated content that you may not have even imagined before. And let’s be honest, user-generated content is the secret sauce in today’s social media trend and landscape.

If your brand aims to captivate multiple target audiences, consider embracing the diverse type of influencers to cast a wider net and make a splash! Keep your social media marketing goals and budget in mind, as the tier of influencers and the type of visual material (and their efforts) play a pivotal role in the ripple effect of your investment.

6. Using Hashtags

Now it’s time to unleash the secret weapon to boost your visibility and reach on social media – hashtags. They serve as a powerful tool for categorizing content, helping people discover relevant posts and join the conversation.

Doing some hashtag homework will definitely increase the reach of your content. Apart from putting yourself in your audience’s shoes and searching for basic keywords as hashtags, try snooping around your competitors’ and influencers’ social media to see which hashtags they’re using. And if you really want to take it to the next level, leverage social listening tools to gain valuable insights into what truly resonates with your audience.

Pro tip: Find the right balance between general and specific hashtags. By incorporating both, you can cast a wider net while maintaining relevance, effectively enhancing the visibility of your content.

7. Analyzing Metrics and Developing Strategies

Tracking and analyzing social media metrics is like having a trusty compass in your adventurous digital marketing journey, where you navigate through a wilderness of fierce competitors. These key metrics will be your guiding stars to unlock valuable insights and make data-driven decisions that can take your digital marketing to new heights:

• Ads Performance: Keep an eye on engagement, reach, impressions, outbound clicks, traffic & conversion, audience growth rate, and cost per result. This treasure trove of data reveals how your ads are performing and if they’re delivering the results you’re seeking.

• Social Share of Voice: It’s like measuring the echoes of your brand in the digital realm. Track the number of tagged and untagged mentions to gauge your online presence and how much people are buzzing about you. It’s your barometer for brand visibility.

• Social Sentiment: Discover the true social media sentiment swirling around your brand. Dive into the percentage of positive and negative mentions. This emotional compass helps you understand the overall sentiment and perception people have about your brand.

To stay ahead of the game in this ever-changing digital landscape, make it a habit to conduct these analyses monthly and review the bigger picture quarterly or yearly. 

Luckily, there are mighty social listening tools ready to lend you their superpowers. Mandala AI harnesses the power of artificial intelligence to unlock your full potential in tracking these performances, and it even goes a step further by offering that analysis for you to design more successful plans in the long run. 

Real-life Case Studies and Examples

To get your creative juices flowing, we’ve got some successful case studies from big brands that implement the techniques above and can be a big inspo for your brand.

---

Coca-Cola Case Study

---

One successful example of social media marketing is the “Share a Coke” campaign by Coca-Cola, when people went wild snapping photos of themselves with a Coke bottle featuring their name on it and sharing them all over the internet. This is the magic of ‘User-generated content (UGC)’ – it creates a huge buzz on social media, connects customers emotionally with the brand, and boosts sales and recognition. If you ask about the outcome, 1.25 million more teens tried Coke the next summer, and sales of participating Coke packages shot up by an incredible 11% in the US. In terms of digital marketing, organic celebrity posts got around 13.6 million impressions and 381,424 expressions, while paid support for organic posts racked up 105 million impressions on Facebook by the end of the campaign.

---

Duolingo Case Study

---

Another cool example is Duolingo, the popular language-learning app. They turned into a growth marketing legend by growing their TikTok account 40X in under 5 months – all thanks to tapping into Gen Z’s love for social media. It got creative with pop-culture content that resonated with its target audience’s lifestyle and attitude and featured its owl mascot as the main character in super fun ways. But that’s not all – they also fostered a Twitter community by responding and replying in a witty and friendly manner, and personalized notifications based on individual user preferences to motivate them to learn even more. This strategy has turned Duolingo into a pop-culture icon for a new generation!

---

Ready to Step Up Your Social Media Marketing Effort?

---

To wrap it up, mastering social media marketing with the best and most up-to-date practices is the secret sauce for business success in today’s digital world. Now as you reach the end, either bookmark this article or note the above step in your mind.

Always keep an eye on your digital marketing performance to stay proactive and adapt to the ever-changing landscape, and don’t forget to stay flexible and keep up with the latest trends and algorithmic shifts to stay one step ahead of your competitors.

By embracing these key takeaways and incorporating them into your social media marketing efforts, you’ll definitely see real results, achieve your business goals, and gain that competitive edge you’re after.