social media best practices Archives | Young Marketing Consulting

Most social media marketing is the online equivalent of a billboard – something that people scroll past on the way to the content that they actually came to the site to see. But then again, there are exceptions.

Remember the ALS Association’s Ice Bucket Challenge that flooded your Facebook feed a few years ago? With $115 million donated through the Challenge during an 8-week period in 2014, that social media marketing campaign can be considered one of the most successful in marketing history. The key to that campaigns’ success was engagement. The Ice Bucket Challenge prompted action and it got people talking.

Your social media #marketing strategy? Simple: engagement.

In order to catch people’s attention, your social content has to be engaging for your potential audience. And while a 2012 study conducted by Forbes showed that 78% of respondents indicated that company posts on social media impact their purchases, not all industries are equal when it comes to the results they can expect from social media marketing. Engagement ratios, audience sizes, and follower growth rates vary across the board.

Social Media Guidelines for B2B Companies

First, let’s address a few points that often come up when we’re working with B2B companies on their social marketing strategy:

B2B social media audiences, and thus the potential for engagement, will be smaller. It’s the rare B2B company that has as many customers as Coke or Apple, so you shouldn’t expect millions of likes and shares when posting content. Your goal should be to reach the right people.
B2B social media interactions are generally a long way from becoming sales leads. The size of most B2B purchases means that there will generally be many steps in your target audience’s purchase evaluation, which means that “click to buy” type offers will fall on deaf ears.
B2B audiences lean more toward instructional or problem solving content. Most of the time, B2B audiences are looking for training, education, or help with a problem that just landed on their desk. So, as much as you might want to post humorous blogs, this type of content likely won’t perform well for your business.

Let’s dig a little deeper into our last point. Social media tracking software provider TrackMaven conducted research in order to highlight differences among B2B industries. Based on their results, we can conclude some key points about various industries:

Most engaging: Biotech, financial services, and engineering. These industries have mastered engagement, likely due to a combination of healthy debates and problem-solving content that is perfect for their audiences.
Least engaging: Software. The software industry actually has a high audience growth rate, but its content strategy clearly leaves its users wanting more. Why? Most likely, software falls into the category of services like utilities that customers generally only think about when something goes wrong. The odds of them choosing to interact with, for example, a payroll services vendor for anything other than a complaint are minimal.
Lowest audience growth rates: Motor vehicles and parts. At around 35% annual follower growth, this industry has the lowest audience growth rates of all the B2B industries observed. It can be argued that, for these industries a basic listening and informational presence could be enough.

B2B Tip: Maintain a LinkedIn presence but engage on Instagram. LinkedIn is used by 94% of B2B marketers, and most B2B companies have much larger followings on LinkedIn compared to any other social media channel. But, when you look at content engagement, Instagram takes the cake. B2B brands get 20 times more engagement on Instagram than LinkedIn.

B2B with a brilliant social media strategy: Intel

Intel faces a common B2B issue in that it has no direct contact with the users who ultimately buy its products. In an effort to make a greater connection with users, Intel has mastered social media by directly engaging its followers on multiple platforms, including Facebook and Instagram. According to Simply Measured, Intel’s social audience once grew by 175,000 people in a single month.

Intel’s secret? The company created conversations around a wide variety of content ranging from jokes about technology, to introducing new products or special offers, to participating in movements like the #ILookLikeAnEngineer campaign.

Social Media Guidelines for B2C Industries

As we did on the B2B side, we’re going to address a few common questions that we hear from B2C companies first.

Recommendations, Likes, and Ratings Do Have an Effect on Your Business: Word of mouth has been one of the most popular marketing tools since long before the internet, and the same holds true on social media. A recent study found that positive recommendations will boost consumer’s willingness to pay by 9.5%, while negative reviews will lower that same figure by 11%.
The Higher Your Price, the Farther You Are From Sale: A study by Western Kentucky University found that consumers make snap decisions for purchases under $20 advertised on social media, but the larger the purchase price, the longer they took to consider the decision.
It’s Impossible to Manufacture Consumer Passion: As we’ll see in TrackMaven’s B2C social media data below, industries that have little natural connection with their audiences struggle with consumer engagement.

Most engaging: The automaker industry is the model industry for engagement, which likely reflects the extreme enthusiasm its audience has for its products.
Best audience growth rates: Hospitality is in the sweet spot for follower growth. Given the industry’s intense focus on customer responsiveness and regular offers of deals, consumers likely see a direct tangible benefit of following these types of companies.
Least engaging: Telco, retailers, and consumer products. Not only do these industries have low engagement ratios, but their follower growth is lacking as well. In fact, food & beverage actually has negative follower growth (-.06%).These industries generally fall into the area where it can be extremely difficult to manufacture consumer passion for something like their phone service or toothpaste. Companies in these industries may choose to engage largely through coupons and discounts, rather than attempts at more significant engagement.

B2C Tip: Focus on creating casual, yet compelling content that speaks to your brand values. The goal of B2C social media marketing is typically to create brand awareness, not lead generation or direct transactions. Humorous, exciting graphics and visuals can help your campaigns go viral.

B2C with a brilliant social media strategy: GoPro

GoPro’s social media marketing and advertisements nearly all feature user-generated content. This strategy is not only affordable, but effective. GoPro’s YouTube channel alone has over 4 million subscribers driven by its passionate community.

Looking for more tips and trips on social media? Why not contact Young Marketing Consulting to discuss your needs?

Last week, we covered our first round of social media best practices for 2016. In that piece, we looked at the three most popular social media sites: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, to discuss how brands can best reach their audience through these platform. This week, we’re diving a bit more deeply into what were once the “newer” social media networks: Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube. These social media platforms are much more visual than their bigger and more widely-used brethren, but they still pack a marketing punch that savvy marketers can exploit. Welcome to our overview of six (more) social media best practices for 2016.

Instagram Best Practices

First, a caveat: Facebook owns Instagram, and many of our Facebook feeds are already regularly interspersed with Instagram posts. Over time, the two channels will no doubt converge more and more. But for now, Instagram remains different enough that we believe it warrants its own inclusion in a discussion of social media best practices. And that reason is that Instagram stands alone as the epitome of the “lifestyle” feed – pictures with short descriptions that give a brief window into the lives and aspirations of its account holders. But not every brand is suited for this space, and for that reason we offer our two best practices for Instagram marketing.

Tell an Emotional Story Without Words: Words are few and far between on Instagram (except in the post comments), and so you’ll only have imagery to tell your brand’s story. For that reason, an Instagram best practice is to become crystal clear on the need state your product or service solves among your target audience, then build your visual story around moments where that need state is met. It’s one thing to post a coupon for a can of pet food, it’s another to show a contented pet snoozing in its owner’s lap. People will connect with images that speak to their shared experience, and in order to do that you’ll need to tap in to what they actually want, rather than a traditional marketing or sales offer.
Do the Hard Work to Create a Following: Social media marketing is always a conversation, and the best social media marketers are adept at sharing and promoting others so that those individuals return the favor. Be sure to use relevant and trending hashtags related to your posts, engage with your audience by following them and commenting on their posts. Promote your Instagram handle on Facebook and other social media. Link your posts to your Facebook and Twitter to reach a wider audience. But more importantly, talk to people. Have fun with contests and sharing. Your goal is to let others share and participate in your brand experience, and the best social media marketing practices draw other users to your conversation by rewarding them.

YouTube Best Practices

Almost one-third of all internet users in the world spend time on YouTube. With hundreds of hours of video uploaded each day, backing by Google’s aggressive content marketing/Google Play efforts, and auto-play features whisking users from video to video, it’s conceivable that YouTube will replace broadcast television in the next few years. The platform has been a resounding success, but that success makes it even harder for marketers to be heard. The following best practices for YouTube may help you get a leg up against the competition:

Stick With Content Formats That Work: While anyone who’s ever uploaded a video has no doubt dreamed of seeing millions of views, the reality is much different. With estimates for the typical number of YouTube views beginning with a few dozen, our first YouTube best practice is to stick to video formats that are proven to be strong search and share draws. These formats include how-to videos, reviews, vlogs, and, of course, comedy. Social media marketing can be difficult on YouTube if your brand does not easily lend itself to these formats, and so we encourage you to consider the return on your videos versus the effort you’ll be making. Posting regular content on Youtube can be time consuming, and if you’re not able to grow your audience it may be more time-effective to post responses or Q&A videos rather than original content.
Adjust Your Uploads to be More Easily Recognized in Search: Our second YouTube marketing best practice is to always keep in mind that the primary reason you’re posting content is to help your target audience find you. So a video with little description and the title “hilarious” won’t get you very far. But adding video transcripts and adjusting the titles of videos to include keywords should boost your views and engagements. YouTube is currently the second-largest search engine in the world after Google, and a best practice is to follow the same SEO practices you use on your business’s website when posting content.

Pinterest Best Practices

Pinterest is the social network of the craft and hobby enthusiast. You’ll find more recipes, handicrafts, and jaw-dropping wardrobe ensembles here than in any catalog, and this cornucopia of craftiness is one of Pinterest’s primary draws. More than any other social network, Pinterest represents 21st century window shopping, and can be an ideal social media marketing vehicle of used properly. Let’s take a look at two Pinterest best practices for marketers.

Post Original Visuals: While this can be considered a standard best practice for all social media, nearly 80% of Pinterest’s users do not post any original content. Those brands that do will be ideally positioned to spread their content with so little market competition. Of course, Pinterest isn’t for every business out there. If you struggle to find original content to post that doesn’t have strong shareability, Pinterest probably isn’t the place for you.
Capitalize on Pinterest’s Homemade/Catalog Nature: What happens when someone stumbles across your original Pin? If they’re interested, they’re going to want to know how to create what they’ve seen or where to buy it. The best social media marketing on Pinterest begins with the Pin, understanding that a Pin is the initial invitation to bring your followers into your brand’s world. Your Pins should link to how-to tips, blogs and vlogs describing other ideas, and a whole world of tips and tricks for those enthusiasts who are constantly in search of new ideas. A social media marketing best practice is to keep your followers engaged, and the more content you link to from your pin, the more you’ll keep them coming back.

So that’s our list of six (more) social media best practices for 2016. Remember, the most effective social media marketing strategy entails choosing the right platforms that will help best reach your target audience. If you follow these tips and still don’t see the results you’d like, it may be time to try a different strategy or platform. Or you could contact Young Marketing Consulting, and we’ll be happy to sit down with you and discuss all your social media marketing needs.

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