In 2018, a study found that your average adult spends around 142 minutes logged onto their social media accounts. By 2020, the amount of time people spent scrolling through their pages rose by 3 hours – and the number of people that are expected to access social media sites is only expected to climb within the next year. Social media marketing is critical for businesses to gain brand awareness, especially since consumers are spending less time out and about due to the pandemic, and more time browsing the web and shopping online. If there was ever a time to use social media to market your business, it’s now.
How to Get Started
First impressions are everything, and that doesn’t just stop at person-to-person introductions. How you introduce your business to the world will play a major part in determining your brand’s success on social media. Here’s some tips for starting out:
- Before you even start building your brand’s online presence, you need to build the framework for your goals. Establish your set budget for the project, what outcome you hope to achieve, and how you’d like your company or brand to be perceived by your audience.
- Research; and then when you’re done with that, research some more. Understanding your target audience and what they want is one of the most important parts of successful marketing. Figure out what age group you’re looking to attract, what social media sites this group typically uses, and what forms of media get their attention the most.
- Look at what’s trending in the present on social media and find a way to incorporate it into your marketing strategy in some form or another.
- Utilize any marketing tools that these social media sites offer. Almost every platform provides some type of cost-effective tool you can use to gain traction in marketing your brand. Make use of these tools whenever applicable.
Top Social Media Sites for Marketing
While it may seem logical to just splash your brand on every available social media outlet on the web, this method isn’t going to guarantee your success. Every social media site is different in some way and has its own viewer base. Which social media sites you’ll want to use will depend on what you’re selling and who you’re trying to sell it to. It’s important that you’re connecting to the same social media sites that your potential audience is. Additionally, you’re going to need to figure out what your offering consumers on social media and what site would facilitate your services best.
Facebook, with its 2.7 billion monthly users, is one of the more versatile forms of social media to market on – it’s a great place to connect with consumers, advertise your brand, receive a ton of feedback on your products, and even offers users an easier method of customer service.
Facebook also provides a lot of tools to help you market on the platform – live broadcasting, easy ad creation & placement, promotion tools, and an in-depth profile management system.
Facebook Age Demographics
- 26.3% of users are between ages 25-34
- 18.3% of users are between ages 35-44
- 15.3% of users are between ages 18-24
- 11% of users are 65+
Instagram has over a billion active users monthly and at least 500 million posts daily. Users typically scroll through their Instagram for around an hour every day, and businesses are quickly catching on to the site’s potential for marketing their products and services.
In fact, businesses-related Instagram profiles have been on the rise, with over 25 million businesses currently promoting themselves through the platform. If you’re considering using Instagram to promote your brand, however, it’s important to remember that this form of social media requires more of a hands-on approach than others – meaning if you want to attract new followers to your profile, you’re going to have put a lot more time into updating your page and consistently posting new content. Whether your posts are pictures of your latest product, reposts from fans of your products, or just some photos of you and your employees at work – staying connected with your target audience is a must if you hope to make it on Instagram, and many other sites for that matter. 83% of Instagram’s users have stated that the social media site helped introduce them to a new service or product they were previously unaware of.
Instagram Age Demographics
- 33.1% of users are between age 25-34
- 22.8% of users are between ages 18-24
- 17.7% of users are between ages 35-44
- 2.3% of users are 65+
Snapchat
Snapchat, originally known as “Picaboo,” is a social media site launched on mobile operating systems (IOS) in 2011. Though it’s had some ups and downs as far as its user base, the platform had grown to 210 million active daily users as of 2019.
Marketing on Snapchat is a bit trickier than your average social media outlet, but not impossible. For starters, since Snapchat was exclusively created for Android and IOS devices, any business profile you create will need to be managed through mobile rather than computer. This may not be an issue for most, but for those who primarily work with computers and don’t use cellphones as much, it may seem like a slightly more difficult platform to navigate. Additionally, the only public posts that can be made through the site are Snapchat stories or Live Snaps, which require a minimum of one video or photo to publish. Despite how it differs from the usual social media site, however, Snapchat is still a great place to gain brand awareness. One of the main tools you’ll want to utilize on Snapchat for marketing is Snap ads, which are 10-second videos, usually with audio, that can feature anything from a company’s call to action to the announcement of a new product. Sponsored geofilters are also useful – Snapchat users can visit a specific location, like a town where you’re hosting an event or one of your businesses’ branches and use a geofilter when taking photos at that location to highlight where they are, which in turn will be shared with their followers. Geofilters are great for engaging consumers and encouraging them to spread the word on your brand. Sponsored lenses are also a popular marketing tool on the platform since they allow users to add special filters on photos or pre-recorded videos that alters their appearance for entertainment purposes. There is an endless flow of videos being posted daily with people using filters to make themselves look like animals or fantasy creatures, so it’s not difficult to see how implementing this into your marketing strategy on snapchat could prove useful.
Snapchat Age Demographics
- 48% of users are between ages 15-25
- 30% of users are between ages 26-35
- 18% of users are between ages 36-45
- 5% of users are 56+
TikTok
TikTok, launched in 2016, is a platform that allows its users to record 15 second videos (up to 60 seconds if combined with the max amount of clips) and share them on their feed with followers and friends. One of the features that appeals most to TikTok’s users is the site’s endless supply of visual effects, music, and other editing tools. Users can share, “like”, and comment on other TikTok user content as well as follow pages and receive notifications when their favorite pages post content. The site has exploded in popularity in the last 3 years, with higher user-engagement than almost any other platform. At minimum, TikTok’s 800 million active users spend around 45 minutes browsing through the platform daily.
While it may not be obvious at first glance, there are a plethora of marketing opportunities through TikTok as well as marketing tools that you can use through the platform. Using hashtags, for example, in your video descriptions can be a quick way to gain some attention – and if you’re unsure of what hashtags to use, a quick TikTok search for hashtags accompanied with words related to your business can help you decide. Creating TikTok ads is another way to acquire some brand awareness fast. TikTok offers two types of advertising: Behavioral ads and targeting ads. Behavioral ads seek out users based on their average behavior on TikTok within a 1-2-week timespan, while targeted ads allow you to choose who your ad will be shown to based on location, gender, interests, and age.
An additional way you can get brand awareness through TikTok is partnering with a popular influencer on the platform that will help promote your products or services, and there’s even a Creator Marketplace you can join that lets you look over influencer metrics to help you decide who would be best to promote your brand based on their average audience. To see your own stats on TikTok, you can also upgrade to a pro account for no additional charge.
TikTok Age Demographics
- 32.5 of users are between ages 10-19
- 29.5% of users are between ages 20-29
- 16.4% of users are between ages 30-39
- 13.9% of users are between ages 40-49
- 7.1% of users are 50+
When Twitter launched in 2006, its sole purpose was to allow users a quick option for updating followers and friends with a brief “Tweet” on what they were up to at the time, usually accompanied by a picture or video. No one knew at the time that it would one day evolve into a powerful marketing tool for businesses to promote their brands. Similar to TikTok, users can search hashtags under the “Explore” tab on the site to see what’s trending with that specific tag and tags similar to the one searched. Users that view your tweets can either like, comment, or retweet your post, effectively promoting your page and Tweet. You can also create polls through the platform, which can be useful when looking to get a better grasp on what type of content your audience wants to see from you. There’s also the option of using paid Twitter ads to promote your business. Ads will appear on users’ timelines who share similar interests as your target audience. Twitter ads are not free, however, and you will be required to pay a monthly fee as long as your ads are present on the platform.
Twitter also has some pretty useful tools for managing business pages, such as TweetDeck and Tweriod. TweetDeck is a free management tool that allows users to manage multiple Twitter accounts as well as organize tweets, monitor mentions, set up scheduled Tweets, and manage messages. As for Tweriod, this is another great tool that allows you to see what times are best for posting on Twitter, meaning when your target audience is most active. While you can get a free report on Tweriod that analyzes up to 1000 followers, you’ll need to pay a small fee if you want an additional one-off report that analyzes more than this, usually between $5 to $20 USD depending on how extensive you want the report to be. Alternatively, there is also a monthly subscription option that ranges from $3.99 to $15.
Twitter Age Demographics
- 28.9% of users are between ages 25-34
- 28.2% of users are between ages 35-49
- 21.6% of users are between ages 18-24
- 12.3% of users are 50+
- 9.1% of users are between ages 13-17
YouTube
YouTube is a platform that allows users to post videos in a variety of niches as well as watch an unlimited number of videos for free. YouTube has become so popular since its launch in 2005 that many users have made a career out of posting videos on the site. While it doesn’t work quite the same as the other social media outlets we’ve covered previously, YouTube is still a great place to market your brand. In fact, it’s projected that internet traffic from videos will make up around 82% of consumer traffic by the year 2021. During primetime hours, YouTube sees more viewers than any cable network on television.
YouTube requires more effort than other social media platforms since you’ll need to produce videos for your channel, but having quality visual content that markets your brand, and can be viewed by YouTube’s 2 billion active users at any given time, can give you a real edge on the competition. As for available marketing tools, the YouTube certified “TubeBuddy” tool is a download-free extension that can help you not only manage your business channel, but also allows you to test tags, descriptions, and titles to see what will improve your content on the platform. Additionally, the extension can track your analytics and compare it to competitive channels. TubeBuddy offers a paid service for advanced features, but the majority of useful management options can be accessed free of charge.
YouTube Age Demographics
- 77% of users are between ages 15-25 and 26-35
- 73% of users are between ages 36-45
- 70% of users are between ages 46-55
- 67% of users are 56+
What Content Works Best for Social Media
What you post on your company’s social media pages will depend on several important factors, such as what you’re trying to market, the age demographic you’re trying to market it to, and what platform you ultimately decide to invest the most effort into marketing on. Sites like YouTube, for example, cater to a wider age demographic and the most popular brand-focused content usually involves either tutorials, Q&As, or product presentations. On the other hand, social media outlets like Twitter tend to focus on short, text-based posts accompanied by photos or short videos.
Regardless of how and where you decide to seek brand awareness, remember one important factor about social media as a whole – people go to these sites to be entertained. Whether they’re sharing something they like in a post, staying connected with friends, or just absent-mindedly scrolling through memes as a means to decompress after a long day – people don’t visit these sites to be presented with boring adverts or read uninspired posts, they log into their social media to entertain themselves. They want something visually appealing or fun to distract them for a while. So, whatever site you decide to use, just ensure that the content you’re releasing is going to get peoples’ attention for all the rights reasons.
Why Hire a Marketing Agency for Social Media Marketing?
Marketing on social media takes a lot of hard work, extensive research, and careful planning to succeed. If you’re already up to your elbows in work managing a business, trying to juggle a social media marketing campaign on top of everything else may lead to less productivity in the workplace, a lacking campaign, and unnecessary mental strain on you.
There’s no need to burden yourself with more day-to-day stresses when a good marketing agency can help you develop the right strategy for your company, create a great marketing campaign around your business, and get your brand’s name out to the right people. If you’re looking for expert marketers who know what it takes to make it big on social media and beyond, call Olive Group today or reach out to us via email and schedule a meeting.