Social Media as Marketing Platforms in 2023 | How to Use It

Social media is no longer just a means of communication. For a while now, it has been the widest used marketing tool that helps businesses rank higher in search engines. Thanks to the grand use of various social media platforms, businesses have a bigger reach than anyone in the past. If you do your social media marketing properly, you can reach thousands, if not millions of people from your target audience. That’s the tricky part.

How do you succeed across various social media platforms?

Marketing has become an ever-changing game on every platform, which makes it impossible to use the same techniques on every channel. According to a social media content expert at Writer, Nicole Smith, ‘with the different trends in social media platforms, changes in rules and new marketing innovations, you must constantly keep informed with what these offer to your business.’

The Powers of Social Media Marketing

At this point, over 3 billion people use social media platforms, which makes for around 40% of the global population. These figures are tremendous and if you add the consistency with which people use social media every day, you simply can’t afford to put effort into this kind of marketing.

On most channels, the marketing goes through content like text, videos, and images. Nowadays, this also includes paid ads and community engagement, as well as influencers. The idea goes beyond just reaching each person of your target audience individually. The entire idea of social media marketing lies in the desire of the users to share things. ‘’When a person shares your brand’s content, they join the channel of distribution for your business.’’ – explains Margaret Adams, an expert content writer at a popular college paper writing service.

However, when it comes to a marketing strategy, there’s no straightforward answer to the question ‘how to do it’. All the solutions must be tweaked to fit the brand’s goal and idea, as well as the platforms they are used on. With such versatility of platforms and uses, there can’t be a one-size-fits-all answer.

For some businesses, one social media channel will create more effective results than others. It can be the opposite of a different brand. Also, some tools for marketing like text or images can work perfectly for one brand, and not work at all for another one. With that in mind, you need to tweak this guide to fit your business goals and needs. Needless to say, this will require some of your time and effort.

Creating a Successful Social Media Marketing Strategy in 2020

Now that we’ve covered the fundamentals of social media marketing, let’s explore the ways you can use it for your business’ benefit. Here are the most useful and effective strategies that brought tremendous success to social media marketing users in the past years, all intertwined in one 2019 guide.

Step 1: Set Objectives

Before you go into using any social media marketing technique, you need to establish what your goals are. Based on these goals, you’ll use the tricks we’ll describe below.

What do you expect to achieve with your social media marketing? Answer this question before you start, but try to be as realistic and flexible as possible. If you set unrealistic goals, your entire strategy can fail.

The right strategy will do all kinds of things for you. If you set your goals right, this will take you in the right direction, save you resources and time, ensure that you aren’t working for nothing, and help you establish key metrics.

Step 2: Decide on Your Target Audience

Your marketing strategy will never work unless you aim it toward a defined target audience. After determining why you need to use social media, you need to determine who your strategy is supposed to reach. Without this information, you won’t be able to track your progress, not to mention that you’ll be reaching people who might never be interested in what you have to offer.

Based on this decision, you’ll also know what social media channel to use. For example, Instagram is mostly used by teenagers and young people, which doesn’t really make it the right fit if your target audience is adults or the elderly. Users of Twitter are mostly aged between 18 and 29, which makes it a great platform for reaching the young people of today.

Determine your target demographic to know where to begin, and also what to produce. Everything depends on this, including your tone, language, the time when you post, but most importantly – where you post.

Step 3: Analyze the Market

You shouldn’t copy the competition per se, but using their effective ideas is certainly a good starting point. Check out the competition to see what platforms they use and what works for them. Check the content they are publishing and see where your target audience responds best. Based on the information you get from successful competitors in

your field, you can learn plenty of useful things for your strategy, such as what hashtags are commonly used, what the right tone of voice is, when people respond best to content, or how to create an effective call to action.

Step 4: Create Your Pages on the Selected Platforms

With all that data you’ve collected by this point, get started. Create a page on the social networks that you believe are the most effective and valuable to your brand. Try to spread your business on more networks, but keep in mind that you must be consistent with your content on each and every one of them.

That being said, you must know your schedule and abilities before you create a profile on a platform. This doesn’t just include your budget, but also the frequency with which you can post content, how fast you can respond to messages, etc.

Consistency is crucial in social media marketing. People don’t respond well to businesses that don’t update their social media platforms for weeks or months. So, set a plan in place and think about it – how many platforms can you manage?

You should definitely aim to use more than one platform. If you don’t have the time, you can hire a custom essay papers writer to handle some of your content writing projects.

Step 5: Create Separate Plans

Each platform you choose to use will require a different approach. You definitely want to share the same message and promote your business on all platforms, but the methods you use to do this will vary from one platform to the next one.

For example, Instagram works with images and videos, while Twitter requires short, yet insightful content. Facebook is great for ads and combination of content types.

Based on the knowledge you have in terms of the use of social media platforms, you should outline separate marketing strategies for different social media channels.

When you do so, try to answer the following questions:

•  What tone or language should you be using for this platform?
• Do you want to be perceived as formal or informal on this platform?
• Should you use hashtags? If yes, which hashtags should you use? Are there some hashtags you should be avoiding?
• How often should you respond to messages or comments? At what time are people most likely to see and comment on your post?
• When is the best time to publish your content on this platform? When do most people from your target audience use the platform?

Keep in mind that these questions are just examples of what you should be considering when you create a plan for your social media marketing. In this step, you should be as specific as you can. With the help of this plan, you can create and publish your content on each platform, forever.

Step 6: Create Your Content

Now comes the actual content creation part. Many people skip the previous steps and go right to this part, which is the biggest mistake you can make. Without a focused approach and a set strategy, you can’t expect your content to work.

Start planning and working on your content. Make sure that you fit the content type to the platform you are using. You’ll know exactly what to use on each platform if you went through the previous steps. Some of the ideas are: text or articles, photos, videos, live streams, graphics, stories, etc.

Step 7: Start Posting

When it comes to posting your content, there are two main things you must pay attention to:

• When you post your content on each platform
• How often do you post content on each platform

A successful strategy will depend greatly on how frequently you post original content. However, in an attempt to be consistent, many brands rush into publishing bad, stolen, or ineffective content. If you can’t do this on your own, ask for help instead of ruining your entire strategy.

The best idea nowadays is to use a calendar and tools to schedule your content. This way, even if you don’t have the time to post regularly, you can spend your free time creating content and simply schedule it to appear later. But, whatever you choose to do, make a schedule, and stick to it.

Step 8: Track Your Success

You’ll never know how well you planned and executed your strategy unless you track your success. As we mentioned, there isn’t a rule as to how you can create a great marketing strategy. Since this depends greatly on your business and target audience, you should constantly track your metrics.

This is very simple and highly possible nowadays and will serve as the best guide to what you need to change or keep doing. By using tracking key metrics, you can see your success in terms of engagement, impressions, and reach, as well as narrow down your target audience with the help of gender, age, and location.

No matter how long you’ve been using social media to promote your brand, you should know the best practices every year brings. Follow our steps to boost your presence across social media and engage more people to use your business.

Author byline:

John Trogdon works as a managing editor at Awriter. For 8 years he has been a successful writer and content creator. John is a regular contributor to publications on writing, marketing, and media. Find John on Facebook and LinkedIn.