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Statistics show that in 2020, an estimated 3.6 billion people were using social media worldwide and this number is expected to reach 4.45 billion people in 2025. 

Are you looking to increase your brand awareness? Increase your website traffic or improve your audience interaction? Or you just want to get MORE out of your social media profile? Then you might consider penetrating this ever-growing market.

Social Media Marketing is the use of social platforms for marketing and it has quite a huge number of goals and uses.

The question is, how can you successfully penetrate this ever-growing market with everyone seeking for attention? In this post, you’ll find out the topmost platforms to use for your social media marketing and how to use them effectively.

Based on monthly active users, Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Twitter, and Pinterest came out top among the other social media platforms.

But then, deciding on which of these social networks to channel your efforts to can be quite confusing. 

Note that if you try to maximize all the platforms at once, you’ll lose out and end up more confused than before. Yes, unless you employ the services of a social media manager.

For this reason, the wise thing to do is to choose a particular platform, maybe one or two, and start working with those ones. We understand how important this decision is especially if you are just starting out, so here are a few tips for you to have in mind; 

• Firstly, have a clear goal. What do you want to achieve from Social media marketing?
• Define who your target audience is. Know where they would hang out and how they use social media.
• Be clear on the message you are trying to pass across to your target audience. 
• Have a good understanding of your industry to better decide which platforms would suit you.
• Know the purpose of each platform and go where your target audience is.

Your business type should determine your social media marketing strategy since these different platforms require different approaches. For example, if you are a digital marketing company, LinkedIn is a good place to connect and gain clients. But if you run a food business then you’d consider using Instagram, it’s a great place to showcase food pictures.

Having decided on which platform to use for your social media marketing, let’s find out how to effectively market on these platforms.

Facebook

Facebook has a huge audience with about 2.4 billion users every month. Quite a number! With an effective marketing strategy, you’d smash your goal excellently. 

An important step in marketing your business on Facebook is to create an official business page. And to do this, you’ll need to use a personal account to create the page. Endeavour also to add the relevant buttons and optimize the page for your industry keywords. If you need help with setting up your business page, our team is always available to help you.

“Facebook was not originally created to be a company, it was created to accomplish a social mission, to make the world more open and connected”.

–Mark Zuckerberg.

And this is just it. Facebook is first a place of interaction before business. It has a social and friendly environment and your target audience come there to relax half of the time. Consequently, a post about convincing them to spend their money is most times not appreciated.

So how do you sell to them without appearing like it? This is where trust comes in. The secret of marketing on Facebook is in building trust with your target audience. Understand their pain points and help them solve problems. They’d eventually get to love you and become loyal fans. That way, they’d reach into their pockets and buy your product or service like it’s a natural thing.

Facebook has a wide range of features that can help your business reach more people and make sales. From updating your stories, posting video contents, doing live videos to cost-effective promotions on your page.

Always remember to keep your tone light and friendly, be available to reply to your DMs, and post consistently to keep your brand top of mind of your target audience. 

Facebook marketing, in summary, is about 2 core strategies; 

Building trust to attract organic engagements and, running paid ads with highly targeted demographics.

Instagram.

Instagram is a visually-based platform And as usual, people go there to relax, be informed on the latest posts and all the rest. With this, attention span is greatly reduced and brands keep fighting tooth and nail to grab the attention of customers. 

To grow on Instagram and successfully market your business, you’ll need to build a loyal fan base. In doing this you need to be patient and build a real audience you can do business with. It would be useless to have high followers with very low engagements.

Engage other people’s posts as this tends to create a bond. As long as you are dishing out valuable content to your audience you’ll eventually gain the followers and engagements that you seek.

The first thing to do as a business person on Instagram is to create a business profile. This is so you can be able to view your profile insights and analyze how your content is doing. 

Your business profile should be well optimized with industry-specific keywords, add external links to your profile and you are good to go. 

Use relevant hashtags. There are three hashtags that you can use for your desired growth — Popular hashtags

 Niche-specific hashtags; that is your industry.

 Branded hashtags; that is your personal brand hashtag.

In using hashtags it is very important to do hashtag research, as some of the hashtags become dead over time, the maximum number of hashtags to use on each post is 30. But a finely targeted hashtag does not have to use all those space.

Post consistently. Instagram analytics favours brands that post often, at least once a day, you could post twice or more depending on your audience base. So you’ll need to carry out experiments to determine what works for your brand. Always have your audience in mind when creating content for them.

Have a visibility strategy. Instagram analytics favors stories more and there’s no limit to what you can write or post on your stories. For that reason, you can make use of that feature to actively promote your human side as a brand. Engaging other people’s post especially top people in your industry will put you right in front of your target audience.

Instagram favours brands with high engagement so it is ideal to post when your target audience can actively engage your posts, and as you reply to these comments it increases the post’s activity and also the rate it appears on your audience feed.

Always add a call-to-action. What do you want your audience to do? Tell them and guide them to do it. You could ask them to like your post, share, or save it. 

Instagram paid ads: Sponsored posts on Instagram are of two types, stories, and feed ads. It is also cost-effective and highly productive. You can’t spend more than what you have budgeted, so it all depends on your budget.

Instagram is a great social marketing platform and there are tools that can help you on your journey. They include; Planoly for scheduling posts, Canva, and Adobe Spark Post for beautiful graphics, Content calendars, and Hootsuite for managing several accounts.

LinkedIn 

LinkedIn is a more professional platform ideal for B2B businesses. It’s a platform that connects you with people in your industry, keep you updated with industry news and development. LinkedIn is also good for freelancers and digital marketers, it connects you with potential clients and improves your chances of getting jobs and projects.

3 C’s for growth exists on LinkedIn, and they are; 

Connection; build strategic relationships in this platform. Don’t just send out and receive connections, understand and leverage on it. It is the first step to building a great network on LinkedIn.

Contribution; consistently share value and content and also engage other people’s posts. This gives you an opportunity to share your thoughts and positions your brand in front of your target audience.

Communication; before this, you have to connect and contribute. You should come off as someone that is interested in others and give value not just always seeking.

Running paid ads on LinkedIn totally depends on your budget, you can’t pay more than you have budgeted. LinkedIn lets you choose your ad pricing depending on your marketing goals. 

You can have CPC (cost per click), that is you pay when someone clicks on your ad.you can also choose CPM( cost per impression) you pay when your audience sees your ad. This is most efficient if you are trying to drive awareness.

Furthermore, browsing the questions section on LinkedIn and answering them in your posts helps you come off as a thought leader in your industry and earn trust.

Twitter.

Twitter is mostly a text-based platform with additional photos. Recent statistics show that twitter has about 145 million active users and with this number, there’s room for your brand to reach out to your target audience. 

Twitter streets can be good, bad, and quite busy and the key to growing on twitter is showing off the human side of your brand. That is humanizing the craft that you perform, carrying your audience along, share your challenges and things that you are working on.

As a brand that wants to use twitter as a marketing tool, you have to be clear on your purpose like we initially mentioned. This is because every platform has its unique purposes and the type of content that can work there. Twitter is mostly for short-form posts.

The first step for you to take in your twitter marketing strategy is to optimize your profile. This goes for all platforms anyway. Your audience needs to open your profile and immediately tell what you are about and from the tone of your description decide if they want to engage with your brand. 

Something else you should know is that it is paramount for you to also engage with your audience, retweet their tweets sometimes, it helps them know you also want to listen to them. 

That way they’ll do the same for you and you tend to gain their trust. Reply to your DMs and mentions. It is SOCIAL media so if you are not being social then there’s no need to be on Twitter.

Twitter is about relatability, so connect and join conversations about what’s happening outside your brand. Also, organize contests, and ask relatable questions to increase engagement and visibility.

Besides organically promoting your brand on Twitter, the paid ads are highly productive. You should also consider experimenting with your content pattern and time of posting, it will pay off in the long run.  You can also choose to promote tweets, your brand’s account, or a trend. It all depends on your purpose.

Conclusion

Most companies and businesses today have accepted and joined the world of social media marketing having understood its amazing benefits. Even companies with a high physical presence in a bid to reach more people and connect with their customers have also joined this movement. 

Just as we have initially implied, investing your marketing efforts in social media marketing is one step that you’ll be glad you took. More especially if you have invested effectively in the most suitable platform.

So tell us, which of these platforms have you decided to build your brand on today? Share with us in the comment section.