In a world of technological advancement and innovation, social media has presented us with various opportunities and means to communicate and share content easily, effectively, quickly, and in real-time. As a brand marketer, social media is one thing you cannot overlook no matter how big or small your business is. If you are looking forward to excelling as a marketer on social media, then this is the ultimate guide to social media marketing.
Many social media networks have evolved over the years and provided platforms for marketers to reach out and connect with billions of social media users across the globe. Therefore, your ability to excel as a marketer on social media will push your brand and expand your market.
Top Social Media Networks
Some of the top social media networks in the world boast millions of active users which gives marketers a platform to speak to a wide range of users right on their mobile phones or computers. Some of the most common and most used social media platforms include Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, etc.
As a brand marketer on social media, you have to consider your brand and product as well as the type of people you intend to communicate with before choosing to market on a specific social media platform to ensure that your effort will most likely generate positive results.
Facebook which is considered as one of the pioneers of social networking has one of the biggest number of users reaching up to 2.7 billion active users. One thing about Facebook is that it has a cosmopolitan community which gives marketers the opportunity to connect with a wide range of people from entrepreneurs to the average consumer.
Instagram is one of the best places to build a brand and promote your products. It offers various features that are just great for marketing. Instagram Stories and IGTV are great means of promoting your business through visual content.
LinkedIn has become one of the most effective platforms where budding entrepreneurs and business professionals can communicate and connect with potential clients as well as carry out business-to-business marketing. If your priority as a marketer is to communicate with entrepreneurs, then the right choice for you will be LinkedIn as compared to platforms like TikTok.
- TikTok
TikTok is mostly seen by most marketers as just an entertainment website with fewer opportunities. However, if used correctly, you will find out that TikTok is not just a platform for teenagers to entertain themselves. Various brands advertise on this platform if their target audience is below 30-years-old. Yet, TikTok might not work for every business so it is up to you to ascertain whether your target audience can be found on this platform.
Social Media Marketing Tools
Though the existence of many social media platforms presents marketers with many avenues to promote their businesses, it’s not quite easy to do so. Having to interact with the community is not always an easy task. As a social media marketer, you have to constantly create and share great content that will make your audience want to buy your product as well as gain new followers.
To streamline this process and make social media marketing easier, a ton of marketing tools are being developed to increase productivity and effectiveness. Each social media platform comes with its unique features, rules, and requirements and as such, each tool is designed to perform one single or a group of related tasks from content creation, automation, analysis, etc. on that specific platform.
Content Creation Tools
It is much easier to communicate using visuals as compared to other formats through which information can be shared. Using photos and videos enables you to create a mark and stay in the minds of people. It is also very necessary to be up to date with current trends to be able to keep up with the never-ending competition in business.
This is where content creation tools come in. Most content creation tools like Canva come with very intuitive menus that enable even less experienced marketers to create attractive visual content to grasp the attention of users on the social network.
Scheduling Tools
As a social media marketer, you are likely to have several social media accounts on various social networks each demanding your presence and attention at all times.
Scheduling tools like Buffer enable users to schedule posts in advance, taking away the hassle of having to switch from one platform to another to post or share content with the community.
Automation Tools
Social media automation simply deals with the automation of the day-to-day activities of your brand on social media. As simple as it might sound, it is one critical aspect of social media marketing you don’t want to mess with. When done correctly, social media automation can give you more time to perform other equally important tasks like strategizing and developing ad campaigns.
For instance, an automation tool like AgoraPulse can help you make posts, share content and interact with your followers on the network even in your absence though it’s highly advisable to step in from time to time.
Analytics Tools
The only reason why you would put effort and resources into social media marketing or any other business in the first place is to see results. These results can enable you to make informed decisions to help build your business. Social media analytics tools help in keeping track and measuring the results of your efforts to better understand what works with which customer or platform.
There are a ton of analytic tools that you can use to measure the effects of your efforts on social media like Google Analytics and Ubermetrics.
Social Media Proxies
Over the years, many social media platforms have made huge investments into making their platform user-friendly for the average user, striving to make them want to utilize their network day in and day out. This is good in a way, but to a social media marketer some of these measures might turn out to make the work a lot more difficult than it is supposed to be. Instagram and Facebook for instance spend millions of dollars to develop algorithms to detect and ban accounts they deem suspicious or going against community rules.
Usually, an IP address will be flagged and banned when it is detected to be used by multiple accounts on the network. How? Once you log into the platform, your IP address is recognized and therefore it becomes suspicious if multiple accounts continue to log in with the same IP address.
Luckily, social media proxies can help you deal with most of these issues. Proxies offer users anonymity and help them go around most IP limitations. Residential and mobile proxies are the best in this regard, as datacenter proxies are easier to spot and ban because they are mostly registered to an organization. Social media proxies can also be used in combination with an automation tool or social media bot to make your work easier and much more effective.
Conclusion
Social media is a great place to build and expand your brand to attract more followers and generate leads. However, it takes the right tools to make social media marketing successful. As a marketer, you have to consider your products or brand as well as the type of people you intend to communicate with before selecting or deciding to market on a specific social media platform.
If you have more than one account as a marketer, I recommend that you get your hands on an automation tool to streamline your day-to-day activities, as well as the right type of social media proxies to prevent your accounts from getting banned. Always remember that no matter how big or small your business or brand is, social media marketing is something you cannot look down on and this is the ultimate guide to social media marketing that will help you achieve that dream.
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