Brands are no longer built solely on traditional marketing techniques. In order to build a successful brand, you need to have a strong presence on social media. It ties into how accessible information is and how quickly it can be disseminated these days. If you want to build a brand, you need to be where your audience is spending their time—and that’s on social media.
Building a brand requires building connections and relationships. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter give businesses a way to connect with their customers and followers in a more informal setting. This allows for two-way communication and an opportunity to build relationships of trust and loyalty.
Trends In Social Marketing To Build Brand
Different platforms require a different approach and a tailored strategy based on the platform’s strengths and the brand’s audience. That being said, there are some trends in social marketing that can be used across all platforms to build a strong brand presence.
1. Focus on Quality Over Quantity
In the past, the common wisdom was to have a large presence on as many platforms as possible. This is no longer the case. It’s now more important to focus on quality over quantity. It’s better to have a strong presence on one or two platforms than to have a weak presence on many.
2. Alternating long and short-form content, including live audio chat rooms
One way to keep your audience engaged is to alternate long and short-form content. A mix of videos, infographics, blog posts, and other types of content will keep people interested. And, you can tailor the length of each piece of content to the specific platform. For example, Instagram is great for short videos and pictures, while YouTube is better for longer videos.
You can use long-form content as weekly posts and split them into several short-form videos in the form of Shorts or Reels that you can post every day. This will give you a varied content strategy that keeps your audience engaged.
Live audio chat rooms are also a great way to connect with your audience. You can use them to answer questions, give advice, or just have a conversation. This is a great way to build relationships with your followers.
3. Customer service is becoming integral to lasting relationships with customers
Social customer care is a term used to describe the customer service interactions that take place on social media platforms. Social customer care is a term used to describe the customer service interactions that take place on social media platforms: 77% of consumers have used social media for customer service in the past year (according to Sprout Social).
This stat should come as no surprise. After all, social media offers customers a convenient way to reach out to brands with their questions and concerns. Customers expect brands to respond quickly to their inquiries and complaints on social media. In fact, according to Sprout Social, 42% of customers expect a response from a brand within 60 minutes.
This means that brands need to have a system in place to quickly triage social media messages and route them to the appropriate team member for a response. Additionally, brands should consider using automation where possible to help speed up the process, such as auto-responders that acknowledge receipt of a message and provide a timeline for a response.
4. A social listening strategy is a must
Social media listening allows brands to more closely keep in tune with their customer’s changing preferences and needs. Additionally, social media listening can help brands identify and track potential issues before they become a full-blown crisis.
Post the pandemic, this has become even more important, as social media is one of the main channels through which customers voice their concerns and seek customer support. Google search demand reported an increased 22% of social listening searches in the last year.
Popular Campaigns & Impact
How Social Media Tools Help Us
Think about it – without social media, how would you connect with your customers? You’d be limited to traditional marketing methods like print ads, TV commercials, and radio spots – all of which are expensive and have no guarantee of reaching your target audience. And if businesses regularly need social media, then there is the necessity for social media management platforms.
Social media management platforms are essential for the reason that they make it easy to connect with customers and create relationships. Social media is all about engagement, and the social media management platforms allow businesses to do just that. They provide the tools necessary to share content, interact with customers, and measure results. We can categorize social media tools into the following categories based on their features and functionalities:
Curate Content
Curating content is the process of sifting through all the information available on the internet and selecting the best pieces to share with your audience. Content curation is an important part of social media management because it allows you to save time by finding and sharing high-quality content that your audience will appreciate.
There are a few different ways to curate content, and the best method will vary depending on your needs. For example, if you’re looking for content to share on your blog or website, you might want to use a content curation plugin like Storify that allows you to easily create and share story-like collections of content from multiple sources.
Benefits:
- Source of high-quality resource material: When you curate content, you have access to a wealth of high-quality resource material that you can share with your audience. This can help to improve the quality of your own content, as well as provide valuable information for your readers.
- Easier and faster than creating original content: Creating original content can be time-consuming and difficult. Curating content is a much easier and faster way to create interesting and informative blog posts or articles.
- Content curation can help you build a following and grow your online presence: When you curate content, you are essentially sharing information that is valuable to your followers. By doing so, you are helping to build a community of engaged and interested individuals who are more likely to follow you and share your content with others.
Scheduling & Managing Content
Once you’ve found some great content to share, the next step is to start scheduling and sharing it. The catch here is that different social media platforms have different active or peak times for the audiences using them.
If you want to make sure your content is seen by as many people as possible, you’ll need to find out when those peak times are and share accordingly. Planning and scheduling tools allow you to queue up content in advance and automatically publish it at optimal times. This can save you a ton of time, especially if you’re managing multiple social media accounts.
Businesses can design and bulk schedule content all at once. This allows them to focus on other tasks, safe in the knowledge that their social media activity is taken care of. Tools like this also make it easy to track your performance over time so you can analyze and improve your results. This also gives them time to update, modify, and create more content depending on continuing analyses.
Benefits:
- Providing resources to your team: If you’re managing a team, it can be difficult to keep everyone on the same page. A content calendar provides a central place for all your content, so everyone knows what’s been published and when new pieces are due. This can be especially helpful if you have team members in different time zones or working different shifts.
- Building audience: Scheduling and planning your content in advance can help you build a following. Consistent publication can attract new readers and followers, who will look forward to your next piece of content. Planning ahead can give you time to research, brainstorm, and edit your work. This can lead to better quality content overall, This helps to build up brand awareness.
- Mix up original content: A good content strategy should include a mix of original and repurposed content. By reusing and remixing old content, you can save time while still providing value to your audience.
Create Content
There are numerous platforms that allow you to create different types of content, including videos, blogs, and infographics. There are even platforms that help you convert your blog posts into videos and others that help you create graphs and other manner of infographics for your social media posts.
These platforms make creating content easier than ever before, which is important because creating high-quality content can be time-consuming.
Benefits:
- Easier to create visuals: Platforms like Canva and Adobe Spark make it easy to create visuals for your content, even if you don’t have any design experience.
- Reduces time commitment: Content creation tools can help you create visuals in a fraction of the time it would take to do so manually. This means that you can spend less time creating content, and more time promoting it and engaging with your audience.
Hashtag Research:
Hashtags are a great way to connect with people who are interested in the same topics that you are. But how do you know which hashtags to use?
There are a number of different ways to do hashtag research. One option is to enter a keyword and see which hashtags are most popular, or another could be to look at the hashtag suggestions that pop up when you start typing a word into the search bar. These hashtag tracking platforms measure the social media reach of your hashtag campaign, social media engagement for your brand, and even spot top influencers that mention your hashtag.
This will allow brands to see what content is being talked about the most, as well as gain insights on how to improve their hashtag strategy.
Benefits:
There are a number of benefits that come with using platforms to measure your hashtag campaign.
- First, it allows you to see which hashtags are performing the best and generate the most engagement. This way, you can adjust your strategy accordingly and use the most effective hashtags in future posts.
- Additionally, platforms can help you identify top influencers in your industry that you can collaborate with.
- Finally, platforms give you insights into your audience’s interests and demographics. This information can be helpful in fine-tuning your content strategy and marketing efforts.
Social Listening
Social listening platforms are one of the most in demand marketing tools because they provide brands with valuable insights about their customers. By tracking mentions of your brand, you can see what people are saying about you in real-time. Additionally, social listening can also help you track competitor mentions, industry keywords, and more.
This type of data is essential for making informed marketing decisions and understanding how your brand is perceived by the public. There are a number of social listening platforms available that offer different features and price points. Some help to simply track brand mentions, while others offer more in-depth analyses like sentiment scores and detailed reporting.
No matter what your needs are, there is a social listening platform out there that can help you better understand your audience and make more strategic marketing decisions.
Benefits:
- Identify and track brand mentions: By using social listening, you can quickly and easily identify any time your brand is mentioned online—regardless of whether it’s a positive or negative mention.
- Make more strategic marketing decisions: With social listening, you can make informed decisions about where to allocate your marketing budget and resources. You can also use social listening to test out new marketing campaigns and quickly get feedback on their effectiveness.
- Understand how your brand is perceived by the public: Social listening can help you understand how the public perceives your brand. Do people see your brand as innovative? Reliable? Affordable? Use this information to adjust your branding and marketing strategy accordingly.
Influencer Management:
As your brand grows, you may find that there are individuals with large followings who are interested in promoting your products or services. These influencers can be a great way to reach a larger audience and extend the reach of your marketing efforts. However, working with influencers can also be time-consuming and difficult to track.
There are a number of influencer management platforms that can help you find, contact, and manage relationships with influencers. These platforms often have tools to help you track the performance of your influencer campaigns and measure ROI.
Benefits:
- Reach a larger audience: Influencers have built-in audiences that you can tap into. Additionally, influencers across various levels of influence have the ability to reach different segments of your target audience.
- Enhance your credibility and authority: When done correctly, working with influencers can help to enhance your brand’s credibility and authority. This is because people are more likely to trust the recommendations of people they know and respect.
- Increase brand awareness and recognition: Working with an influencer can also help increase brand awareness and recognition. This is because when people see that an influencer is working with your company, they’ll be more likely to check out your products or services.
- Track performance and ROI: When you partner with an influencer, you’ll be able to track your performance and ROI. This is because you’ll have access to data that shows how your partnership is performing. And, if you see that it’s not performing as well as you’d like, you can make changes to improve your results.
Automation:
These tools allow creating, posting, and analyzing content across many touch points but still saving the increasing amounts of manual labor time spent on repetitive tasks, giving you the time and data you need to create more engaging content and decreasing response time.
Data collection is essential to understanding social media performance and how customers interact with your brand. Automation tools help by reducing the amount of time spent on data entry and collecting customer sentiment from a variety of sources.
Benefits:
Decreased time spent on data entry: Automation tools can help reduce the amount of time your team spends on data entry. This frees up time for your team to focus on other tasks, such as analyzing data and developing strategies.
Improved customer sentiment data: Automation tools can help you collect customer sentiment data from a variety of sources. This allows you to get a more complete picture of how your customers feel about your product or service.
Conclusion
In conclusion, there are many reasons why social media is so important for businesses today. From helping to create brand awareness to building relationships with customers, it can be a powerful tool in any marketing strategy. As such, the value of social media tools to businesses should not be underestimated and should be utilized to its fullest potential. With the right approach and understanding, it can help businesses grow and succeed in today’s competitive market.
