Social Media Marketing: How to Get the Best Results on Each Channel
Marketing in social networks, today, is a must for brands. There is no way to stay out of the channels most used by people to interact with the world, therefore, it is necessary to know all the platforms to draw strategies and have the best results in each of them.
By Mumuksh Verma
Jan 1 2022 | 18 min read
The contemporary world is permeated with social networks . It is where many people get informed, see family photos, interact with friends, discuss the controversies of the day and, of course, follow the news of the brands they admire.
That is why Marketing in social networks is essential. Businesses that want to communicate and engage with their audience will need to be on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and most recently TikTok.
Each social network, with its particularities, audiences, formats and languages, offers different possibilities of action for brands. So, it is necessary to know the platforms and make a Marketing plan in social networks that is aligned with the objectives of your company.
Next, we will better understand how to sell on social networks and how to act on each platform. We will address the following topics:
- What is Social Media Marketing?
- Why do Social Media Marketing?
- How to do Marketing on social networks?
- The main social networks for Marketing actions
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- What is Social Media Marketing?
- Why do Social Media Marketing?
- Increase your audience engagement
- Increase the reach of your brand
- Humanize the brand
- Drive traffic and conversions
- Study your audience
- Target ads with precision
- How to do Marketing on social networks?
- Define your strategic marketing objectives in social networks
- Create a buyer persona
- Define the most appropriate social networks for the brand
- Plan organic and paid strategies
- Create unique and relevant content for the buyer persona
- Create an editorial calendar
- Monitor performance metrics
- The main social networks for Marketing actions
- Youtube
- Tik Tok
It is a technique that involves positioning actions , brand diffusion and even sales processes in social networks.
It is about finding your audience on social networks so that your brand is present in people’s daily lives. In this way, you become more known and relevant to your audience, increase interactivity with it, attract leads and generate more conversions .
While many people think that Social Media Marketing is limited to posting posts in the feed, there are many other activities involved:
- planning;
- content production;
- interaction with the audience;
- investment in advertising;
- monitoring metrics;
- constant optimization of the strategy.
These are the pillars that you have to cover to structure the presentation of your brand in social networks and obtain the best results.
Since its inception, social networks have become part of the Marketing plans of most companies. They brought a proximity with the public that had never existed before and that transformed the relationships between brands and consumers.
As a result, brands were able to see myriad benefits from participating in this environment and communicating directly with their audience.
Next we will tell you the main advantages of Marketing in social networks:
The big difference between social networks and other Marketing channels is the power to interact with people.
The consumer is passive in front of a television commercial or billboards, but on social networks, they can comment, share, send messages and interact in various ways, with just one click.
In addition, consumers remain close to the brand in their daily lives, when they navigate the platforms, thus increasing engagement with it and building stronger relationships.
As a result: a community is created around the brand.
There are more than 3.8 billion social media users worldwide. This represents almost half of the world’s population.
Source: We Are Social
During 2020 social networks had an increase of 15 new users per second, this is 1.3 million per day . Have you already imagined the scope you can have on these channels?
The staggering social media usage numbers show that one of the main reasons brands are on those platforms is so that more people get to know them.
And it is worth remembering that the Internet has no borders, so you can be better known by people from all corners of the world .
Social networks are opportunities to show behind the scenes of the company, making it clear that your brand is made by people. You can use a more friendly language, chat with users on equal terms.
In social networks, brands assume a clear position regarding values, attitudes and principles, which is reflected in their content. In this way they become less mechanical, more human and authentic .
Anyone who thinks that social media is just for brand building is wrong. So far, we’ve seen that they help increase reach, engagement, and humanization, but they also contribute directly to the more advanced stages of the buying process .
In the networks you can promote links from your website or ecommerce and promote the contents of your blog. There, they can already become leads or customers.
Some social networks already offer purchase possibilities on the platform itself, which increases the possibilities of sale. Therefore, followers are also real business opportunities.
The proximity that social networks provide allows you to better know your audience. You can talk to people, understand what they like, what topics motivate their participation.
The platforms provide valuable data about the audience that follows your brand, such as age, gender, location, title, interests, etc. Plus, follow-up mentions let you know what topic people are talking about and what they think about the brand .
Social media advertising platforms provide valuable audience data. Users may not realize it, but all the time they are offering information to platforms about what they like the most, what is happening in their life, the profiles they interact with the most and the websites they visit.
Therefore, platforms offer this data to advertisers, who invest money in targeted ads and gain the power to reach the audience they want. In this way, advertising investments become much more efficient and generate more profitability.
For a long time, brands were seen as outsiders on social media. After all, these platforms were created to connect people, not companies.
However, brands – in addition to being part of people’s lives, who like to know everything about them – are very well received because, by investing in advertising, they monetize the business model of social networks.
Today, social networks do not exist without the presence of brands. However, only companies that understand this environment and plan their operations can be successful. They need to define a social media strategy to achieve their Marketing objectives.
Next, you will see the main tips so that you can carry out high-performance strategic planning for your social networks.
The first step in planning an effective social media strategy is defining your goals. Social networks help your company to achieve different objectives. Generally speaking, you can target:
- increase the reach or recognition of the brand;
- increase brand engagement;
- drive traffic to the website, blog or ecommerce;
- generate leads and subscriptions;
- increase sales;
- build a community for the brand;
- provide customer service;
- monitor brand conversations.
Choose one or more of the goals we’ve mentioned to start your social media planning. They are the ones who will guide your decisions.
When you set your goals, you need to know what metrics or KPIs to monitor to see if you have followed the right path. If you want sales, for example, you need to track conversions on your site. Therefore, consider that aspect in your planning.
The buyer persona is also one of the pillars of Marketing in social networks. Maybe you already have a defined target audience for your Marketing strategies, right? You know what:
- you need to talk to people of a certain gender;
- in a certain age group;
- who live in a certain place;
- that they have certain habits in common, for example that they enjoy sports.
But you already know:
- How do you talk to these people?
- In what channels do they get informed and interact with others?
- What formats do they use to consume content (texts, videos, audio, etc.)?
- At what times of the day do you use social media?
- What are their interests that you can help with?
- What are your needs and questions in life?
- How can your product and your experience be useful to them?
These are the questions that this fictitious profile, prepared based on the information of your real clients, will answer you. It is with the buyer person of your company that your content will be communicated with.
While the target audience is important to drive your Marketing decisions, it is superficial, generic, and does not delve into human behavior.
However, in social networks you interact with individuals and you need to know them more thoroughly to establish real communication. This is precisely what the buyer persona is for.
Currently there are several social networks, but the brand does not have to be in all of them.
Managing multiple profiles at the same time is exhausting, requires time, staff, and resources. It is also often ineffective, because your audience may not even be on certain social networks. So in the end, you might not do well on any network.
You must analyze which social networks are the most appropriate for your business, your audience profile, your Marketing objectives and the capacity of your team. Later on we will learn about the characteristics of each social network, among the main ones, so that you can see which ones align with your strategy.
Most social media started with just organic posts. It was enough to create any type of content for the page to reach a good part of its followers.
However, the platforms began to fill up with users, which caused changes in the algorithms of the networks, especially Facebook. From there, they began to prioritize the most relevant posts for each person on their feed.
In this context, the brand’s publications were left behind, with the understanding that the publications of friends and family would be much more relevant. So anyone who wants to increase their organic reach should invest in advertising.
That’s the recipe for financial growth for social media platforms. And who does not enter the game has a limited scope.
Therefore, those who want to be successful in social networks today must reconcile organic and paid strategies.
- Organic publications are those recurring, in the day-to-day of the profile, that keep the closest users informed and involved.
- Paid posts, on the other hand, are one-off – they target specific audience segments to achieve certain goals.
The combination of these two types of strategies is important because one supports the other. Organic posts add consistency to brand presence and attract followers, while ads deliver quick results and attract new audiences.
The creation of relevant content is the main way to avoid the reduction of the organic range. After all, it is the most interesting posts for each person that the algorithm shows in their feed. For this reason, brands must publish content that attracts the attention of their users.
Well, you already know the profile of the buyer persona, you know what kind of language to use, what topics to address and what goals to achieve. Therefore, content production should always target these strategic elements to have more reach and gain audience engagement.
The contents of social networks must be original, aligned with the person and adapted to the characteristics of each network. They can educate, inform, entertain, and advertise deals.
What is not interesting is talking about products and discounts all the time. As much as there are people interested in this, it can be tedious. That’s not all that people want to see on social media.
One tip is to follow the Pareto Principle or the 80/20 rule : only 20% of the content should talk about what the brand sells, while the other 80% should deal with topics in your area of expertise, answering questions about the buyer persona or simply provide entertainment.
But remember that it all depends on your audience. It’s worth running some tests on your profiles to see how your followers react to each type of post.
An editorial calendar helps organize and keep track of social media activities. It provides a forecast of the publications of the period (weekly, monthly, quarterly), as well as the activities of creation, post-programming, report production, among others.
In this way, brands manage to define and maintain a frequency of publications on social networks. This is critical so that the algorithms realize that the profile is active and continue to show posts to users.
In addition, the editorial calendar also helps to visualize whether the planned content is in line with the Pareto Principle, which we explained earlier. Over the course of a month, for example, you can predict 16 educational posts and 4 sales posts on Instagram, thus meeting the 80/20 rule.
Finally, you cannot do Marketing on social networks without paying attention to the indicators. It is necessary to make continuous improvements in the strategies to have more and more results. And that requires you to monitor social media metrics.
When it comes to defining the objectives, do you remember that we told you to also define the success indicators of the strategy? So, follow these numbers in social media reports to see if you’ve achieved your goals and how you can improve.
But put the vanity metrics aside , okay? We are talking about those numbers that impress and that we like to admire – such as the number of likes or followers on the profile – but that do not represent effective results or help to make better decisions. You can follow them, but you should focus on the KPIs.
Now, let’s get to know the main social media platforms for Marketing better. We will give you an overview of the main characteristics, the profile of the audience and the types of publications that are most successful on each platform.
Read on to find out everything!
Facebook is still the most used social network in the world: there are around 2.7 billion monthly active users. Therefore, it is one of the platforms with the greatest reach potential for brands.
There is much talk, however, that Facebook is being abandoned by the younger generations, who are currently on other social networks, such as Instagram and TikTok.
Although it has all kinds of audiences, Facebook today is more used by adults, that is, by Generation X (born between 1960 and 1980) and Millennials (born between 1980 and 1995).
But Facebook is not just a social network. It’s a great, feature-rich business platform for brands. It is possible to publish posts in different formats, receive messages and user ratings, broadcast in real time and create events, among many other possibilities.
If you produce relevant content, designed for your audience and with a defined frequency, you can increase your organic reach. However, it is undeniable that organic publications are limited.
In 2020, the average organic reach of Facebook pages in relation to the number of followers was 5.17%. In 2019, it was 6%, and that number was decreasing year after year. The percentage of pages that use payment methods has been growing, as you can see below.
Source: We Are Social
Therefore, to take advantage of the full potential of Facebook, it is also important to invest in ads. Facebook Ads is a powerful advertising platform, with multiple targeting features and campaign goals. It is even possible to advertise on partner sites, not just on the social network.
You can also develop a strategy for Facebook Groups , which bring together people with common interests. Consider creating a group for your brand or exclusive for special clients, or joining groups in your industry.
Look at some success stories of Latin brands conducting Marketing campaigns on Facebook .
Instagram belongs to the Facebook family and follows its success. It is one of the most popular social networks today, with more than one billion monthly active users .
If Facebook is getting old, most of the young people are switching to Instagram. In July 2020, more than two-thirds of Instagram users were 34 years old or younger.
The largest proportion of users are between 25 and 34 years old, with a slight preponderance of the female audience. It is the generation of Millennials who are looking for the mildest, most authentic, visual and dynamic content that Instagram offers.
Instagram was a social network only to publish daily photos or important events in the lives of its users.
Little by little it was acquiring new functionalities, the possibility of publishing videos and carousels in the feed, creating stories, making live broadcasts, videos for IGTV and, more recently, reels. And news comes up all the time.
One of the highlights of Instagram is its vocation for sales. Instagram has shopping features like tagging products in posts, and recently launched an exclusive tab called Instagram Shop to discover products on the social network.
On Instagram, it is also essential to consider the combination of organic and paid posts. While organic posts, stories and reels attract audiences, sponsored posts reach a new audience and help achieve specific Marketing goals.
Check out some success stories of Latin brands carrying out Marketing campaigns on Instagram .
YouTube is the most used social video network, according to the platform itself, there are more than 2 billion monthly active users around the world. There is no doubt that it is the world’s leading video platform.
Is that audiovisual content has a high potential for participation, that is why Video Marketing is becoming more powerful every year.
Therefore, YouTube must enter your Marketing if you want to draw a solid video content strategy. You can post corporate videos, interviews, tutorials, customer testimonials, broadcast live webinars, create series or branded content .
If you don’t want to create a channel, you can also include YouTube in your strategies by partnering with well-known YouTubers in your niche or creating ads for the platform through Google Ads .
Red Bull has a very consistent YouTube channel. The company itself has a production company to create the content, which involves the broadcasting of events and entertainment videos, always related to the sport and lifestyle of the brand.
Twitter may not be the largest social network, but it does have a loyal audience of 330 million monthly active users around the world. A curiosity is that the male audience is the majority: 62% of users are men.
Source: We Are Social
Twitter became popular as the 140 character social network. Currently, the limitation has already been raised to 280 characters and, today, publications go beyond texts and accept other types of media, such as photos, videos and surveys.
Anyone on Twitter wants to know the latest events, comment on the controversies of the day and participate in the hottest topics (the trending topics) in real time.
So, anyone who wants to do Marketing on Twitter must enter into this dynamic. You can publish brand news, participate in your niche affairs, attract a following to your website, and provide customer service, as many voice their complaints there.
Netflix is one of the best examples of Marketing in social networks, but on Twitter, in particular, it is where it stands out the most, bringing news from its catalog, participating in controversial topics, interacting with its followers and commenting on its films in a fun way.
LinkedIn has more than 660 million monthly active users . It is a very expressive number for a social network that has a specific purpose: it is a platform aimed at professional connections.
For companies wanting to do LinkedIn Marketing, it’s important to understand that the social media audience has that focus. Therefore, you can use LinkedIn to generate leads and customers (especially in the B2B market) or attract the best talent.
For this, you can, for example, show business success stories, give professional advice, introduce your employees and show what your organizational culture is like.
LinkedIn also allows direct contact between its users: you can use InMail messages to prospect clients or approach candidates for a position.
You can even use LinkedIn Premium paid tools like Sales Navigator to manage leads, post jobs, and recruit candidates.
Amazon, for example, uses LinkedIn to show behind the scenes of the company and its distribution warehouses. It is a way of humanizing the brand and showing the values that guide its culture.
TikTok is the fastest growing social network in 2020. Fueled by the coronavirus pandemic, the app was downloaded 76 million times in March of that year. It is estimated that today it has around 850 million monthly active users , only behind Instagram.
Source: Statista
Anyone who enters TikTok can perceive that the social network is dominated by Generation Z, born between 1995 and 2010 approximately. Young people love the fun and dynamic content of the social network.
To enter TikTok, brands must understand the language used there: it is the social network of short videos, dances, challenges, lip sync, filters, duets and, above all, creativity.
No video has to be perfect to go viral; they just need to be original and creative to be successful.
This year, new names of digital influencers emerged on TikTok and grew along with the platform. Many brands have already realized the power of these new influencers. In this list you can see the top 1000 influencers in Mexico .
Pinterest was always on the sidelines in the social media market. It was never the platform with the most users (it currently has 442 million monthly active users ), but it is loved by its mostly female audience (60%).
That’s because Pinterest really is different. For many people, while it has various interaction functions, it is not really a social network, it is more of a visual search engine.
Users use the web to create inspirational frames for their lives. They search for illustration references, save recipes for a special dinner, plan room decor, or research bridesmaid dresses.
That is why Pinterest is also closely related to consumption, since there people make purchase plans. According to Pinterest , 85% of users say that is where new projects start and 89% say they use it as inspiration to buy.
So brands can use Pinterest to post lifestyle-related pins that reinforce their personality and inspire users. But you can also use Pinterest in sales: pins can lead to the website or ecommerce, generate traffic and lead the user to buy what they dream of.
Westwing is a good example of a successful online brand. The brand itself is already inspiring, with lovely products for the home. On Pinterest, then, Westwing finds its audience, publishes product pins and leads them to its ecommerce.
We quickly show you the main Marketing platforms in social networks. Now it’s your turn to study your audience and see which social media works best. Don’t be afraid to test, evaluate and adjust.
The important thing is to align your strategies with the public and with the commercial objectives. So social media can deliver effective results in terms of reach, engagement, and conversions.
Now, download our Social Media Marketing Kit with guides for each platform and an editorial calendar to organize your planning. Seize it!