Using Social Media for Inbound Marketing
Tired of putting out marketing messages that get ignored? Inbound marketing on social media offers a smarter approach. By creating high-quality content that addresses your audience's needs and interests, you can attract customers who are genuinely interested in what you have to offer. This approach fosters meaningful connections, builds trust, and ultimately fuels business growth through the power of social media.
Why does your business need a social media promotion strategy?
You’ve probably heard the phrase, “fail to plan; plan to fail.” Strategic planning is the root of successful social media marketing. Be sure you have a solid foundation in place before you start your social media marketing efforts.
The first step is understanding your target audience and creating a buyer persona. Equally important is understanding your overall business goals and objectives and having your social media goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) aligned to your overall business goals.
Too many social media marketers jump into the content creation game without understanding their customers, business goals, and social media KPIs.
There are many benefits to having a social media strategy. It will help you:
Expand your other marketing efforts so that your content has the chance to be seen by a broad audience, and hopefully, the right audience.
Build brand awareness. Gone are the days when your only way to build that same awareness was through billboards or magazine and television ads. You can bring your brand content directly to your customers, partners, and prospects with social media. Now you can be where your audience already is.
Social media is one of the most powerful ways to connect with your audiences. Sprout Social reports that “When consumers follow a brand on social media, 67% of consumers are more likely to spend more with that brand, and 78% say they will visit that brand’s physical retail store.
This is especially true among millennials: 84% said they were more likely to buy from a brand they follow on social media compared to a brand they don’t follow on social media.”
Social media helps you attract buyers to your products and services, and it gives you the ability to directly have conversations with those individuals at the time and place of their choosing.
It sounds like a lot of opportunities, doesn’t it? In fact, social media is, in many ways, the ultimate way to do inbound marketing. That’s because it’s a one-to-one medium, which gives you and your company the chance to market in a direct but very human way.
To build your social media strategy, you’ll need to be able to:
- Explain each social media channel and how each one is best used for social media promotion
- Understand the impact of social listening and engagement
- Develop a social content strategy for your social media plan
- Identify ways that metrics are crucial to understanding the success of your digital efforts
- Integrate social media into your other inbound efforts, including your website, conversations, and blog posts
Social platforms can be overwhelming, so it’s best to prioritize your platform so that you can obtain quality versus quantity. By choosing one platform first and testing and honing your message and process you can evaluate where to best spend your time, money and energy.
THE SOCIAL MEDIA CHANNELS EXPLAINED
Each social media channel attracts a slightly different audience, is used in a very specific way, and appeals to a type of media. Regardless of the platform selected, it’s important to implement personal touches which may include:
- Tagging colleagues, clients, vendors and influencers related to the brand
- Engaging in other related conversations based on topics
- Using hashtags that align with your larger messaging pillars
- Using a combination of tactics in single messages which include tagging, sharing, and reposting
- Use trends to align with your larger company messaging when able
Here’s a breakdown of each social channel and the value you’ll get from them:
Facebook—With over 2.45 billion users, Facebook is the undisputed king of social media sites. Millions of companies use Facebook Business Pages to share organic news, events, and talk to customers.
Their advertising tools are some of the best to target your ideal buyer, and their groups are an excellent way to build a captive audience, which in many ways may prove more fruitful than other ways of reaching your customers.
YouTube—With over 2 billion users, YouTube is the second largest social network and, interestingly enough, it’s also the second-largest search engine in the world — behind Google, of course.
To give you a sense of its importance, more than 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, and almost 5 billion videos are watched on Youtube every single day.
On mobile, YouTube reaches more 18-49-year-olds in the US than any cable network. This is important, because television is a very different thing today than it was a couple of years ago. In fact, by 2025, half of viewers under the age of 32 will not subscribe to a pay-TV service.
Instagram— Facebook owns Instagram; however, the audiences and purposes are slightly different. With 1 billion people using Instagram every month, it’s the third largest social media platform and the fastest growing.
Instagram is a photo- and video-based social network, and users follow individuals and brands to be delighted by interesting visuals. According to the Pew Research Center, the biggest demographic group are males between 18 – 24 years old, while 75% of all users are aged between 18 and 24.
Stories disappear after twenty-four hours for viewers but remain stored in an archive for you to see or repost again. Over 500 million stories are posted every day, and one third (1/3) of the most viewed Instagram Stories are from businesses.
X (Twitter) —X, the popular microblogging network. X is the ultimate by-the minute news network. It’s a place where you can see what’s happening in that very moment around the world, whether it’s someone feeling an earthquake in China or watching a football game in Boston.
Users share messages of up to 280 characters, called “tweets,” which can include photos, videos, links, and animated .gifs. To give you a sense of the volume of information shared, more than 500 million tweets are sent every day.
X is a fantastic place to discover what’s trending with your industry, customers, employees, partners, and prospects. You should be sharing content frequently — more frequently than on other platforms, in fact — and you should be engaging regularly with your audience.
X reports that 80% of their advertisers’ inbound social customer service requests happen on X. It’s also a place where people frequently express both pleasure and dissatisfaction about products and services, making it a channel your business can’t afford to ignore.
X also owns Periscope, a live streaming video channel. Over 350,000 hours of live video are streamed on the network every day.
LinkedIn—LinkedIn is the platform most business-to-business, or B2B, marketers are familiar with. It used to be a network primarily used for recruiting, but these days it’s also becoming a platform to find the latest news and to stay networked with people all over the world.
Now users can share status updates much in the same way as they do with Facebook, with photo or video posts that can be shared, liked, and commented on.
There are several reasons to use LinkedIn. It’s a great way to look up individuals you might be meeting with or to find out more about a prospect you’re interested in reaching out to.
Additionally, it’s a great place to build thought leadership, offering value through targeted advertising, networking in groups, and sharing content that will drive links back into your website properties.
TikTok—Launched in early 2018, TikTok already has 400 million users. The parent company, Chinese-owned Bytedance, acquired Music.ly, an app for lip-synching songs, and merged it into TikTok.
The newest player on the social media field fills the gap left behind after X purchased Vine and incorporated it into their Periscope service, stripping it of the popularity it had with its 15 second videos, which can be strung together to make viewing of up to 60 seconds possible.
TikTok is a fast-paced app. The second you log in, you see a video at the top of a feed that’s algorithmically curated around your interests. If you enjoy the video you’re watching, you can follow, comment, and like the content directly from the video post.
The average user spends 52 minutes per day on TikTok. And brands are starting to get into the mix with advertising and organic posts. TikTok now offers five advertising tiers aimed at big brands, but if you have amazing content, there is still a lot of organic potential to gain from the platform.
Inbound marketing on social media is a marathon, not a sprint. But with consistent effort and valuable content, you'll cultivate a community of engaged followers who become loyal brand advocates. This organic growth fosters trust and fuels long-term success that goes beyond fleeting trends. So, ditch the outdated methods and embrace the power of inbound marketing – watch your social media presence blossom into a thriving hub for your brand!
