40 tips on How to Advertise Successfully on Social Media in 2018 Part Three!
11) Post consistently
A good Social Media content strategy needs to be consistent, thus you need to evaluate when your target audience is online. For instance, mothers might not browse Twitter much when they’re picking kids up from school, LinkedIn followers might spend less time online during the 9 to 5 and so on.
According to a research, the best times to post on social media are these:
- Facebook: Wednesday through Sunday in the afternoon.
- Twitter: Weekdays in the afternoon or the evenings.
- Pinterest: Any day of the week in evening.
- LinkedIn: Tuesday through Thursday at 5 p.m.
- Instagram: Monday through Friday at 2 a.m. or 5 p.m.
This goes the same with the ads. Facebook ads are allowing you to choose the optimal time when your post should be actively running. Use it!
12) Keep ahead of evolving Social Media
Social will continue to be an evolving media, so the challenge will be staying on top of the rapidity of change. The need for social media marketing specialism is as strong if not stronger every year. What is needed are killed people that are immersed in the world of social from insights, to creative and paid. With that being said, don’t be afraid to try out new things. Things that have never been done before. Afterwards, inform the marketing community of your results. AGain even if you fail, we can all learn something from it.
13) Center Social Media advertising around the consumer’s needs and desires
84 percent of millennials do not trust traditional advertising, so it does not make any sense to create content that is written from a selling point of view. People do not like content that is not relevant to them. Instead, content that is personalized and based on user personas is more likely to be read and shared. With buyer personas, you get an exact answer to what your audience wants instead of guessing it. It is much better to prepare content that solves users’ pain points.
14) Personalize the relationship — make the consumer your brand ambassador
“In 2018, personalization and brand experience will have been taken to their logical extremes: consumers will have far more control over the relationship — in fact, brands will be paying them to advertise in their social ‘space’. Consumers will be involved more closely in product and service development, to the point of co-creation.” — Jemima Gibbons, Social Media Strategist and author of ‘Monkeys with Typewriters’
15) Be honest with reviews
Everyone reads reviews. They search for your social media profiles. They Internet stalk you because they want to know everything they can possibly know about you before they come to your business. Transparency in reviews adds to your business credibility — having 1 negative review to 20 positive ones humanizes the way your company does business.
And, the Internet is catching up. People can leave reviews on your social pages and profiles. Google recently added an extra layer of verification and trust to home services businesses with its Local Services Ads.
16) Respond to comments
Regardless of whether the comments you receive on your blog posts, for example, are positive or negative, you shouldn’t shy away from responding. It would be at least courteous to acknowledge a pleasant reaction your words have garnered, showing your readers you value their input. Moreover, negative comments should spur you to take action and your reply to such a comment will display a willingness to resolve the problem in question.
17) Build meaningful relationships with influencers
“The key trend for social media in 2018 will be influencer marketing. With the continued democratization of content publishing, traditional marketing channels have less influence while social media users and content creators have more. Anyone can yield influence and thus, as social media becomes more and more pay to play, every business need to incorporate some type of influencer marketing strategy to become more effective in their 2018 marketing. The trend towards brands leveraging user-generated content is one example of this, and if you are going to curate content to represent your brand, why wouldn’t you use that of an influencer?” — Neal Schaffer, Social Media Strategist and the author of ‘The Business of Influence’
18) Make your employees’ social media accounts extensions of your company image through personal branding
“Every employee is their own brand but also an extension of your organization. As social culture in the workplace expands, I think we’ll see an increase in company-wide involvement and storytelling across social media in 2018. 64% of millennials believe that social media is one of the most effective channels for connecting with brands (Source: Microsoft) but messages are re-shared 24 times more frequently when they’re sent by employees instead of the brand itself.
Trust between customers and brands is deepened when there is a face and a story behind a brand, which is often where influencer marketing comes into play. Don’t disregard influencer marketing opportunities, but look for leaders throughout your organization, from top to bottom, who can deepen trust with your audiences by educating and entertaining.” — Katy LaLanne, Content Marketer, Sendible
19) Post ephemeral content to gain more authenticity and probe your target audience to take quick action (Snapchat/Instagram Stories)
We are seeing many brands using their Instagram profile for their best, high-quality content and stories for more real-time content. Because of the nature of stories (they last for 24 hours, after which they disappear forever), content is lost within hours, marketers gain from the audience taking quick action.
20) Rely less on automation and avoid repetition
The best way to overcome the limitation of time is by automating some of your processes — and marketing is one area ripe for automation. However, even if you do find a tool that can automate many components of marketing at once, it should by no means drive you to neglect the creative and engaging side of your job. Moreover, steer clear of automating all of your Social Media advertising steps, so that you can avoid repetition of content and cross-posting.
