Social media marketing has become an essential part of any company’s advertising campaign. With the wealth of benefits it can have, a business could miss out on a significant amount of sales without it. The dos and don’ts of social media marketing, however, can often seem complicated. That shouldn’t necessarily be the case, though, as it can be much easier than you might think. But what is it that you should do? Should you constantly post on your Facebook and Twitter? Should you be strategic with clever, well-researched comments on Reddit? Is Hacker News a legitimate platform to promote your brand, or will they burry your efforts in no time? Is BlueSky worth the effort? Should you go all-in for video-driven content on YouTube and Tiktok? Are the influencers the way to go for B2C services and products? As you might expect, there are a few things to keep in mind.
What to do
Set objectives
Outside of establishing your social media accounts, the first thing you should do is set clear goals and objectives. These will depend on how your accounts are currently performing but also on the audience and the platform. While most marketers will look to increase engagement and traffic to their website, some will be interested in creating genuine communities with useful engagements, and others will try to obtain more brand exposure. These goals can vary in execution and detail, depending on what you want to get out of your social media marketing campaign.
Measure impact
You’ll also want to measure the return on investment. Tracking and analysing your traffic, where this makes sense, but also looking at the data provided by the platforms themselves and, of course, making intelligent correlations between the brand mentions, keyword search volumes, branded search, organic visibility, Google search impressions, and even sales data. If we suddenly see a spike in enquiries on the website, and the only campaign we ran was on Reddit and BlueSky, an investigation is in order; most likely it’s a result of those efforts, but we need to confirm this by asking the leads where did they hear about us and how did they found us. Maybe it was something else altogether – an influential speaker or entrepreneur who is a client mentioned our website to their friends in positive terms, some of which reached out to us.
Review and update
You should try to be adaptable and change your strategy when this is needed. If, for example, you learn that some obscure forum for hobby Raspberry Pi projects mentioned your software or hardware as a good solution for one of their challenges, and that drove a serious increase in brand visibility or website traffic, you should consider creating an account there and spending a whole lot more time on the board listening to the needs of their members and speaking to them in a transparent, down-to-earth manner where you make it clear that you’re a business but that you’re here to help rather than sell because you know how important it is for your audience to understand your product or service if you want it to become successful.
Depending on the vertical, platform, age group, language, geographic region, and other factors, your campaign could focus more social media and less on other aspects; but audience research is always a smart idea.
Be consistent
You also want consistency across all of your marketing campaigns as a priority, regardless of their medium. Having one team member saying that your service supports a specific feature and another team member contradicting that on a separate platform, it both looks bad and it’s bound to create confusion and impact the success of your efforts as a whole. Likewise, playing the snarky card on TikTok and being coming across as arrogant on Instagram won’t be that helpful.
Produce good content
Whether it’s videos, texts, research-driven storytelling, advertorials and market research conclusions, there is no question whatsoever that the content needs to be good and useful in order to drive results. We read about the impact of AI in Google search results and other platforms, and how content is not king any more, but this will never be true: high quality content will always drive results. If the quality of the content would not matter, books, films, music and the whole array of visual arts would stop selling and creating impact. This is obviously not the case. A good story can make people wish for and do things.
Work with your colleagues
Encouraging your colleagues to speak about the company and its services on their social media platforms might still work for some niches and platforms. It is still a fairly common practice on Linkedin, for example. However, as of lately, there has been a shift in this regard; not all employees are happy to promote their employer, especially when the relationship between them and their employer is not excellent. This may be due to an unsound foundation – often a problem in the United States, where employers have a much higher degree of leverage over the employees – that will make employees withdraw their trust in the company, and become less willing to act as advocates. To address this, it’s essential to foster a culture where employees feel valued and respected. Building trust involves open communication, fair treatment and remuneration (serious equity seems to be a thing of the past nowadays) and ensuring that their voices are genuinely heard. When employees genuinely feel positive about their workplace, they’re more likely to share their experiences voluntarily, creating authentic and effective advocacy for the company.
In a market where employers are not only interviewing the potential employees but are also being interviewed by them, employer branding can make the difference between success and yet-another-company that failed.
What to avoid
The dos and don’ts of social media marketing can contain quite a few things to avoid (or not); again, it very much depends on the audience, platform, vertical, and more.
Don’t chase the clicks
A notable bad approach is using engagement clickbait. Not only are these against many platforms’ rules, but they also look scammy and unprofessional. You may end up stirring the wrong type of engagement from your audience and beyond, finding yourself in the middle of a corporate scandal and dealing with a crisis situation.
Go after quality over quantity; good, relevant, brand-strengthening messaging and engagements rather than high number of messages and engagements without contributing to anything in particular. Social media can be a good channel to achieve some things – obtain traffic, for example – but not others: convert website visitors into leads.
Missing a clear strategy
Random or inconsistent posts dilute brand identity and confuse your audience. Lack of planning and team coordination leads to missed opportunities for engagement and ROI, but can also open the door for public ridicule once mistakes and inconsistencies are noted by the public.
Ignoring negative feedback
Existing and potential customers – as well as the general public – expect responsiveness and accountability on social platforms. Companies are run by people and people make mistakes; this doesn’t need to be an issue, it’s only human to make mistakes. However, when your audience complains about things, failing to address those or the deserved criticism can damage a brand’s reputation.
Besides, often the complaints are legitimate and they represent an opportunity to improve your services or products; client are basically test-driving your solutions and providing free feedback. You should consider it at the very least.
Overloading with promotional content
Everybody hastes being bombarded with content, regardless of whether it’s good or bad. Even a good joke can turn into a bore when it’s repeated ad nauseam, or if the chain of jokes never stops. Breaks can do wonders.
Constantly pushing products/services makes your account feel sales-driven and insincere (or desperate), which can lead to profile unfollows or low engagement, especially in B2C verticals. Rearch your audience, their interests and when they’re most likely to be online or read your status updates, but also try to put yourself in their shoes. We all have a million and one things to do, we can’t be reading your statuses every hour.
Wrapping up
As simple as the dos and don’ts of social media marketing might be, they’re quite effective. Time has shown that all of the above have practical benefits for your company. They will take time, though, and a lot of effort.
The best things never went to people who sat back and waited, so it’s worth spending the time on it now; you can enjoy the fruits of your campaign in the future. You may also be interested to know what was the netiquette for social media back in 2011.
This article was written by GlobalCom team in collaboration with Alan Jones.
The article was updated on .