Last Updated on March 8, 2023 by Anthony
It is hard to imagine any other marketing channel with the potential reach social media offers. People all over the world utilise social media on a regular basis. They routinely engage with platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok. It seems obvious that brands should be utilising social media as a marketing tool. After all, you want to put your message where people will see it, right?
We can help with social media posts as a service. In the years we have been active in social media marketing, we’ve come to realise just how many small businesses and non-profit organisations don’t fully understand social’s potential. As a counter to that, we have developed this introductory guide to social media marketing for beginners.
It is our belief that once you understand social media’s potential, you won’t think twice about using it as a marketing tool. We will be here to come alongside you with professionally created social media posts capable of engaging your followers and spreading your message.
Billions of Social Users
Understanding the power of social media as a marketing tool begins with knowing just how many people use social platforms. Are you ready? As of the first quarter of 2022, more than 4.5 billion people actively use social platforms. That is more than half the world’s population!
Take a minute to let that sink in. At least half of the people you interact with on a daily basis use social media regularly. The number is likely much higher given that there are entire portions of the world that don’t have access to the internet at all, let alone social platforms.
Social media is an obvious marketing arena just due to its reach alone. Pound for pound, you can reach more people through social than any other marketing channel. The key to success is how you reach them. Sheer numbers alone do not necessarily equal marketing success.
People Trust Social Media Connections
Marketing is all about making connections, right? When you put your marketing message out there, you want it to connect with people. You want it to resonate. Most of all, you want your message to help facilitate engagement between your organisation and its target audience. Social media is capable of doing it in ways that no other marketing channel can.
To prove the point, let us look at a few statistics. They come from a Matter survey conducted in 2020 to gauge the impact of COVID-19 closures on social media consumption. More than 1,000 consumers were surveyed. Here is just some of what the survey revealed:
- 63% were spending more time viewing and posting on social media
- 50% were spending more time live-streaming social content
- 58% acknowledged noticing sponsored content more often.
The study clearly revealed that people were spending more time on social media and taking more note of the content they were consuming. But it gets better. Here are a few more statistics from the study:
- 38% of respondents said they are likely to trust recommendations from brands
- 61% said they are likely to trust recommendations from family members, friends, and social media influencers
- 82% acknowledged either purchasing or considering purchasing products or services based on posts from family members, friends, and influencers.
That about says it all. For right or wrong, social media users are more likely to trust family members, friends, and influencers than brands themselves. But don’t take this as a negative. Instead, take it as a challenge to utilise social media as a way to strengthen relationships with customers. Happy customers convinced that your organisation truly cares about them will recommend you to other people. That is where social media’s pot of gold is found.
Sharable Content Is Everything
It goes without saying that social media marketing is only as effective as the plans and strategies that fuel it. We consider all that ‘under the bonnet’ stuff. It’s still vitally important to successful marketing. But at the end of the day, what makes the connection with consumers is content. And in the social media realm, content must be sharable.
What constitutes sharable content? It is not just content that can be shared through reposting or copying and pasting links. Anything on social media can be shared that way. Rather, content is shareable because it offers something of value. Sharable content:
- offers information people want
- strikes an emotional chord
- resonates enough to be remembered
- provides its own reason for sharing.
Social media content does not need to be long and detailed. In fact, it probably shouldn’t be. If you wanted to share a piece of long-form content from your website on your social channels, you wouldn’t actually post that content on social pages. Instead, you would post a summary along with a link to the original article. You would want that post to be sharable.
Social Media Is a Conversation
Always remember that social media is essentially a conversation between parties. Therefore, social media marketing is about starting the conversation and then remaining part of it for as long as it continues. Well-crafted social media posts are your primary strategy for doing so.
The more engaging your posts, the better the conversation will be. And the better your conversations, the more effective social media marketing is. Do it well and social can generate returns as good as, or even better than, your other marketing channels.
Connotations is here to help. If you are in need of professionally crafted social media posts to bolster your social marketing strategy, we can provide them. Contact us to learn more about our approach to social media marketing and posting.