November 25th, 2024 - Beth
Read Full Post
Some people love it while others hate it, but no matter your stance on social media, it’s virtually impossible not to interact with it. In fact, the average person spends roughly 143 minutes per day using social media. As a result, for businesses striving for success, a social media presence is non-negotiable. A social media presence can’t be built from organic posting alone; depending on the platform, ads take up anywhere from 10-30% of social media feeds. These aren’t just random ads either – they’re specifically pushed towards people who have shown interest in similar products or services. It’s vitally important that businesses are visible to potential customers, and that’s where an effective social media campaign that goes beyond regular posting comes in.
If you’re to create an effective social media campaign, you must plan carefully, be creative, and be consistent.
While organic posting can’t be your entire social media campaign, this isn’t to say that it isn’t a crucial aspect. Organic posting allows you to create, grow, and maintain an engaged online audience for your business. This is otherwise known as social media community management, which focuses specifically on building relationships, fostering a sense of community, and interacting directly with followers and customers.
The beauty of an online community is that your followers and customers will feel connected to your business, which will encourage interactions and transactions. It’s important to enhance this feeling of community by monitoring and engaging in real-time; on social media, everything is so immediate, so it’s advisable to respond to comments, messages and mentions promptly.
Building an online community allows you to understand your target audience, including their age, gender, location, income, education, interests, values, behaviours, and so on. With this information, you’re able to make the best choices about their preferred social platforms and develop a content strategy and campaign message that appeals to them.
Social media advertising is the process of creating and running paid promotional campaigns on social media platforms to reach specific audiences, drive traffic, generate leads, and achieve business goals. Unlike organic posting, social media advertising involves using a platform’s ad management tools to create targeted campaigns that appear in users’ feeds.
While organic posting allows you to build and maintain a community, paid advertising helps you ensure that your brand reaches the people who might be interested in it. This can be achieved via precise targeting options offered by various social media platforms. With these platforms, you can narrow down by demographics, interests, behaviours, and more.
When using social media advertising, don’t forget to use different ad formats, including stories, in-feed ads, carousels, and sponsored posts to maximise your reach. As you do so, make sure to allocate funds wisely and test different ad creatives (A/B testing) to optimise ad performance. You can optimise ad performance by adjusting targeting, timing, or creative elements based on results.
Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing involves partnering with individuals who have a dedicated and engaged social media following. The idea is that these influencers will promote your brand, product, or service to their audience. Since they’ve established trust with their following, when they promote your brand, their authority is likely to drive awareness, engagement, and sales.
There are millions of influencers worldwide, each of which with a different niche, which is why it’s so important to collaborate with influencers whose audience aligns with your campaign. These collaborations can come in many forms, including sponsored posts, giveaways, reviews, and more; the type you choose will depend on your brand, platform, and audience. What’s more, you can track the impact of your collaborations via unique hashtags and affiliate links.
The importance of social media analytics
Although you can find yourself fascinated by the aesthetics of social media, just like any area of marketing, everything comes down to the numbers. That’s where social media analytics come in to tell you how your campaigns are performing. You might use Google Analytics, platform insights (e.g., Meta Business Suite), or third-party tools (e.g., Hootsuite) to track your campaign’s success using metrics.
Social media engagement
When it comes to social media analytics, the first thing you want to look at is engagement. This includes likes, comments, shares, and saves. Another part of engagement is reach and impressions, which tells you how many unique users and views your post or ad is getting. Lastly, pay attention to the click-through rate (CTR), which tells you what percentage of users are clicking your links.
Social media ROI
It’s all well and good if people are interacting with your social media ads, but if these ads aren’t generating profit, then there’s a problem. You can calculate your return on investment by assessing how many leads, sales, or sign-ups your ads have produced.
There are 5.17 billion people using social media worldwide, and depending on the platform, each user typically follows anywhere from 20 to 1000 accounts. As a result, it’s almost impossible to stand out by organic posting alone. More often than not, your post will get lost among a sea of others, and those who do see it may not even be interested.
With social media advertising, you can guarantee that your content is being seen and also make sure that it’s being seen by the right people. The perfect balance of organic posting and paid advertising ensures your business remains relevant online. There’s no escaping how important this online relevance is, yet so few businesses have the time to actively enhance their social media presence. That’s where VAST PR comes in with our Media Strategy and Marketing Consultancy services to advise on which direction you should take your social media campaigns.