Social media is not a trend but a necessity for your business. Its audience is growing exponentially. In the past 12 months, that number has grown by 490 million, an increase of more than 13% per year. Social media is used by 53.6% of the population in 2021. Accordingly, when businesses are looking for channels to reach their audience, social media would be a logical solution.
Here’s how SMM works and what it can do for a business. And these tips can be helpful for both: modern companies offering to play online Roulette NZ and old-fashioned offline grocery stores. Let’s break down the basics, put everything in its place and systematize knowledge.
How to Begin to Promote Business in Social Media
First, determine the purpose of your stay there, the platform where you will be placed, think of a unique selling proposition of your business, and only after that you can begin to take active steps.
You should start with the development of a strategy. It will help determine the main purpose of your social media presence. You need to:
- Conduct a competitive analysis. It is important to understand the level of competition, if the offer is in excess, then it will be more difficult to attract attention to your product. Form a unique selling proposition, that is, highlight your advantage from your competitors in what you are better at than the rest.
- Identify your target audience. Don’t skip this point, because this is the only way to understand how necessary the manufacturer’s product will be for potential customers.
Carry out the goals of your stay in social media. Decide on the format of the positioning. This will determine the design of the page and fill it with content.
After that, move on to defining the goal. Why do you go to social networks? What do you want to get results for? The most common goals are traffic and sales.
After defining the goal, think about how you will measure the degree of its achievement. It is necessary to define the performance indicators (KPIs).
So, with the strategy figured out, the next step is to choose a platform.
How to Choose a Platform for Your Business
There are many options: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok… Each platform has its own characteristics, complexities, rules, and chips. Don’t choose all these platforms at once. Most likely you won’t have enough power, time, or money. Choose one promising site, start with it, and then gradually connect the other social networks.
First, go where you are already welcome. Second, go where your competitors thrive.
Where You Are Already Welcome
The first and easiest thing that comes to mind is to check the metrics on the site. For example, through Google.Analytics in the “traffic sources” report, you can see how a user got to your site.
Where Your Competitors Thrive
Analyze your competitors. First, you’ll be able to assess where there is a good response to your offer, and second, you’ll be able to understand where there are no competitors yet and where you can get your piece of the pie.
Determine how to evaluate your competitors’ performance on social media in general. Use Google.Analytics. Add settings for geolocation and traffic. As a result, you’ll get a table comparing your company’s performance.
In the report, select the “Social” line and see how things are averaged across the industry. Pay attention to reports on user behavior on social media: the number of pages users view, time on site, and abandonment rates. Evaluate how you look in your industry. And if your competitors have been ahead for a long time, it’s worth taking proactive measures.
What Content to Post on Social Media
Now you need to think about content, because no one will join an empty community.
There should not be too much advertising content, it should be diluted with useful and interesting content. After all, people come to social networks in the first place to have fun.
Create a sample content plan for the posts you will be publishing in the community, and make a detailed plan for the next month so that you don’t start every day by coming up with a topic for a post.
Here’s what you can post on social media:
- Come up with unique content about your business.
- Search for information on the Internet. You can find articles and make them into short and originally written posts.
- Analyze your competitors’ pages. See what they are posting and what their audience is most interested in.
- Check out the topic books and pull quotes from them. In general, make a selection of books on a topic, it’s in demand.
Once all of these steps are done, you can start creating communities, decorating them, and filling them with information.
Popular Social Media for Your Business
Social networks are not only a platform for entertainment, in them you can find a lot of useful information, educational courses, work, etc. But most importantly, it’s a platform to increase a company’s sales.
What social networks are actively used now? Of course they are:
- Facebook.
- Instagram.
- YouTube.
- TikTok.
Facebook is the largest social network in the world, owned by Meta. Its audience, as of the end of the second quarter of 2021, is 2.8 billion monthly active users and 1.84 billion daily active users.
The distribution is 53.5% female vs. 46.5% male. Teens and young adults under 24 years old are the least. The audience is mostly solvent. Those with average income (41% of monthly reach) are the largest, followed by users with income above average (36.7%).
Instagram is one of the most popular social networks in the world, with about 1 billion monthly users. The platform’s app is the second most downloaded free app in the AppStore, and in Google query Instagram is in tenth place in popularity.
YouTube
The total audience of YouTube is more than 2 billion users. The platform is available in 91 countries and the interface is translated into 80 languages. The number of views reaches 1 billion per day.
Women dominate the platform, they’re about 52.2%, the remaining 47.8% – men. Most of the users are aged 25-34 years old with an average income of 38.9%.
TikTok
TikTok is a short video creation and viewing platform owned by Beijing-based ByteDance. Launched in 2018, the international version is the leading video platform for short videos in China and is becoming increasingly popular in other countries, becoming one of the fastest growing and most downloaded apps.
Most of the users of this social network are between the ages of 12 and 21 and between 25 and 34. This confirms that after all, this social network is not only in demand among teenagers.
The female audience is 56.3%, the male audience is 43.7% of the total number of users. Most often TikTok is accessed by users with average income (37.9%).