Should social media marketing be the main focus of your marketing strategy in 2022?

Using social media platforms to connect with your audience is still imperative to build your brand, increase sales, and drive website traffic. This involves publishing and sharing valuable content on your social media profiles, listening to and engaging with your followers, analyzing your results, and running social media advertisements.

SixDegrees.com was the first social media site utilizing basic functions such as setting up a profile page, having connection lists, and interacting with other users. Since then social media has matured far beyond being just a place to broadcast content. Businesses are sharing their content on social media to generate traffic to their websites and increase sales.

Social Media Strategy in 2022: The When The Why And The What

As we are on the cusp of a new year, the latest social media statistics from last year have shown that the current market potentials are increasing. According to Statista, there are 3.78 billion social media users worldwide in 2021 and this number will increase to almost 4.41 billion in 2025. With estimates of continuous growth, this encouraging new data will help enhance your marketing strategy and the interactions of your business with the social media community.

When starting out with your social media strategy, it’s better to pick platforms where your target audience usually hangs out, rather than to be on all platforms simultaneously. It’s important to maximize the resources, especially for brands that do not have unlimited marketing resources.

And this doesn’t have to be set in stone forever — you can always change your social media strategy according to how your posts perform.

To help you create a great social media strategy, here are several ideas on creating a social media strategy and social media marketing plan.

Planning and Publishing

Social media marketing for small businesses usually starts with having a consistent presence on social media. By being present on social media platforms, you give your brand an opportunity to be discovered by your future customers.

Publishing to social media is as simple as sharing a blog post, an image, or a video on a social media platform. It’s just like how you would share on your personal Facebook profile.

However, you will want to plan your content ahead of time instead of creating and publishing spontaneously. Aligning your publishing schedule with your company’s goals will greatly increase the effectiveness of your SM campaigns. For example, if your brand awareness KPIs seem to be somewhat slacking, schedule more posts that will drive engagement during a certain period.

In short, you need to publish engaging content that your audience likes, at the right timing and frequency.

Listening and Engagement

As your business and social media following grows, conversations about your brand will also increase. People will comment on your social media posts, tag you in their social media posts, or message you directly.

You can manually check all your notifications across all the social media platforms but this isn’t efficient and you won’t see posts that didn’t tag your business’s social media profile. You can instead use a social media listening and engagement tool that aggregates all your social media mentions and messages, including posts that didn’t tag your business’s social media profile.

By tracking your mentions, you can understand what your audience thinks about your brand. This will allow you to adjust your strategy to include content that adds value to the customer. This can be advice on using your products or, more generally, on using the types of products that your company offers. Content like this will surely be shared by your audience, commented on, or get more engagement in other ways.

Analytics and Reporting

Whether you are publishing content or engaging on social media, you will want to know how your social media marketing is performing.

The social media platforms themselves provide a basic level of such information. You can find out when to post by learning when your audience is most active. Furthermore, analytics can also show you what types of posts are performing better than others in terms of engagement, which will allow you to make adjustments.

A major aspect of engagement SEO is monitoring analytics. These tasks drive true business value and create the high-quality, popular, relevant content that search engines are keen on delivering to users.

To get more in-depth analytics information or to easily compare across social media platforms, you can use the wide range of social media analytics tools available.

Conclusion

You now have an overview of the “The When, The Why, And The What Of Social Media Marketing.” But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The more data you collect and the better you know your audience, the more effective your social media campaigns will be.

Figure out where your target audience is and get active on that platform with your best advertising and content marketing strategies.

Author’s bio: Matija is a marketing and tech enthusiast, both on and off work. You can never bother Matija with “just one more question” when it comes to marketing. He likes to get scientific about marketing, performing research on various related topics – sharing his insights and interpretations with like-minded enthusiasts.

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