SkinStacks utilizes face-scanning technology and the beauty brand’s Skin360 digital assessment to custom curate vegan, sugar-free gummies.
Originally posted on January 5, 2023 @ 1:41 pm
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SkinStacks utilizes face-scanning technology and the beauty brand’s Skin360 digital assessment to custom curate vegan, sugar-free gummies.
Originally posted on January 5, 2023 @ 1:41 pm
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Special packaging is meant to better familiarize consumers with Purple, a new mascot that will also appear in the brand’s Super Bowl commercial.
Originally posted on January 5, 2023 @ 12:41 pm
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Even brands indirectly associated with the pop star have benefitted, including the NFL and Pfizer.
Originally posted on October 6, 2023 @ 10:41 am
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More than three-quarters of the world’s population aged 13+ uses social media. A whopping 4.74 billion people are active social media users.
Social media marketing provides a unique opportunity to connect with this massive audience on the platforms where they already spend their time.
But what exactly does social media marketing entail? Is it right for your business? How do you “do” social media marketing, and how do you get started?
In this post, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know about marketing your brand on social media.
Bonus: Get a free social media strategy template to quickly and easily plan your own strategy. Also use it to track results and present the plan to your boss, teammates, and clients.
Social media marketing is the practice of using social media platforms and tools to promote a business and connect with existing and potential customers.
The intended outcomes can range from the somewhat abstract (like brand building) to the very specific (like selling products through social commerce).
At its core, social media marketing is about building relationships with your audience in the places they already spend their time online.
Unlike traditional advertising, social media marketing allows for two-way communication between individuals and brands. There’s also potential for building a sense of community, which creates brand loyalty.
Social marketers do a lot more than scroll through TikTok all day.
All in a day’s work
Shout out to all the social media managers juggling so many hats while keeping their social channels afloat. You’re all the true MVPs pic.twitter.com/7jtsbgkbhK
— Hootsuite (@hootsuite) December 8, 2022
Social media marketing activities can include:
Content planning and creation. This is the most visible component of social media marketing. It’s the art of creating appropriate types of content for each platform to connect with the audience there.
Content scheduling and publishing. This is the task of actually getting your content onto the appropriate platforms at the appropriate time.
Social media analytics. Using analytics tools to track how content performs, report on progress towards social media goals, and plan ways to improve overall response.
Social listening. Using social tools to keep a virtual ear to the ground, learning what’s being said about your brand and your industry. This is also a powerful tool for competitor research.
Community management. Connecting with followers to build a community online, then working to keep that community active and healthy by responding to messages and creating ongoing opportunities for engagement.
Social media advertising. Using paid tools on the social networks to get your content in front of a larger audience. This may include working with influencers or external content creators.
Social networks are the second-most-popular type of website or app, topped only by chat and messaging.
Source: Hootsuite’s Global State of Digital 2022 Report (October Update)
They offer incredible reach and opportunities to engage with an audience in ways that are simply impossible in any other marketing format.
Here’s what that looks like in terms of real benefits for any brand that gets social media marketing right.
From the smallest business to multinational corporations, every brand needs to stand for something if they want to connect with consumers. Social media gives you a chance to consistently show the personality behind your brand.
How do you differentiate yourself from your competitors? On social, you can participate in conversations, encourage engagement, and even interact with your audience in real time.
People naturally organize themselves into communities on social media. That might mean a Facebook Group or a hashtag like #DIYTok. When brands support and engage in these communities, they gain credibility with people who are naturally inclined to be interested in their products and services.
Providing helpful resources, information, or even entertaining content on social media helps people identify with your brand. They become loyal brand advocates who make repeat purchases and spread the word about your brand through their own social media channels.
Social media networks are an ideal platform for testing, as the feedback gathered through social media analytics tools shows you almost immediately what works and what doesn’t in your marketing.
This allows you to refine your marketing strategy very quickly, and reveals lessons you can apply to areas of marketing beyond social, too.
Social media marketing doesn’t always get credit for its contribution to the bottom line. Social media can drive customers to your website and generate sales leads. Social marketing efforts can even support social commerce sales, in which customers purchase from your brand without ever leaving the social platform.
Your social media marketing team also supports (or sometimes provides) social customer service.
Source: Hootsuite 2023 Social Trends Report
Customers expect to be able to connect with your brand on social media for service and support. Having an easily accessible and responsive social care team can win back annoyed customers or provide the extra boost of confidence needed for first-time customers to complete a purchase.
There’s a social network out there to connect with every audience. These are our top picks, sorted by number of users.
Source: Hootsuite’s Global State of Digital 2022 Report (October Update)
Facebook is still the world’s most-used social platform, with 2.934 billion global active users. It’s also the “favorite” platform of the largest number of social media users. And it accounts for the vast majority (71.64%) of web traffic referrals to third-party websites.
Check out our guide to marketing on Facebook.
Instagram is the next-most-popular social network with 1.386 billion active users. It’s known to sometimes be a source of frustration for social media marketers because of its frequent feature updates and algorithm changes.
But the frustration is worth it, because nearly half (44%) of Instagram users shop weekly on the platform.
Learn more about how to market your brand on Instagram.
TikTok has skyrocketed seemingly out of nowhere to become an incredibly important social network for marketing in the last few years. It has 1 billion active users, a year-over-year increase of 14.6%.
And here’s an interesting fact – if we’d sorted this list by average time spent on the app, TikTok would have come out on top. Users spend an average of 22.9 hours per month on the platform, more than any other social network. That addictive quality makes it an important network for brands to understand.
We’ve got all the details you need to know in our post on how to create a TikTok marketing strategy.
LinkedIn is unique on this list in that it’s a social network specifically focused on business life. That means its 875 million members are primed for business discussions and purchasing research. It’s a critical platform for anyone working in B2B, or for any companies that hire anyone, ever.
Business to consumer brands can find success on LinkedIn too. We explain all the details in our post on LInkedIn marketing for both B2B and B2C brands.
Snapchat may get less press than TikTok, but it’s still an important platform with 576 million active users. It’s far from fading into obscurity – in fact, the platform is still growing, adding 38 million users from Q4 2021 to Q4 2022.
Snapchat is particularly useful for brands targeting an audience ages 18 to 24. We explain all the details in our post on how to use Snapchat for business.
Twitter has been in a bit of turmoil since its purchase by Elon Musk in October 2022. But social marketers still have the network’s 544 million active users on their radar, and its value as a marketing platform remains strong heading into 2023.
Twitter is especially useful for brands looking to participate in real-time trends and conversations, as we explain in our Twitter marketing guide.
Pinterest has the lowest number of active users on this list at 433 million. But it’s an important platform for social media marketing because of the way people spend time there.
The top reason people say they use Pinterest is to follow or research brands and products. The very top reason! That’s a key distinction from most of the other platforms, where people tend to focus on connections with people over brands.
Learn how to use this shopping-oriented usage pattern to your advantage in our post on using Pinterest for business.
Here are the most important social media statistics marketers need to understand in 2023.
Specifically, 2 hours and 28 minutes. That provides plenty of opportunities to connect with your audience on social platforms.
To be exact, 49.2% of internet users worldwide use social media to learn about brands and see their content. And it’s not just kids – even in the 55-to-64-year-old age group, 41.3% of women are seeking out brands on social media.
Social media is also an important vehicle for brand discovery: 27% of Internet users aged 16 to 64 discover new brands through social ads, and 43.3% use social networks as a primary source of information for brand research.
For younger users, social networks are the preferred source of information for brand research (50%), outanking even search engines (46%).
Source: Hootsuite 2023 Social Trends Report
The average person uses 7.2 social media platforms every month. That gives you the opportunity to reach them through multiple touchpoints. But it’s a better idea to use one or two platforms really well than to spread yourself too thin by trying to be everywhere at once.
TikTok’s ad reach grew 14.6% from Q4 2021 to Q4 2022, now reaching 945 million adults over age 18. Note that ad reach is an important statistic even if you only plan to use TikTok organically, as it can be used as a general indicator of how many people are using the platform.
The global audience for ads in Facebook Reels grew by almost 40% from Q3 2022 to Q4.
In order for your social media marketing to be successful, you need to understand who you’re trying to reach. This will involve some audience research.
You can start your research by understanding the different demographics of each social platform. We’ve done a lot of the work here for you, comparing the key demographic details you need to know:
Facebook demographics
Twitter demographics
Instagram demographics
Pinterest demographics
Snapchat demographics
LinkedIn demographics
TikTok demographics
But this is just the starting point. You need to understand your specific audience, so you can get a clear picture of how to tailor your social media content, which platforms to use, and how to develop your brand voice.
As you come to understand who you want to reach, it can be helpful to develop audience personas.
Everything you do on social media should be underpinned by a solid strategy based on realistic social media goals. Each of those goals will be tied to measurable data in the form of key performance indicators (KPIs).
For inspiration on what kinds of goals to set for your social media marketing efforts, look to the advantages of social media outlined at the top of this post. For example, you could aim to:
Increase brand awareness
Improve community engagement
Drive online sales
We’ve got a whole blog post filled with examples of social media marketing goals, if you need some help getting started.
One critical element of goal setting is determining how you will track and measure your success. That’s where KPIs come in.
Fortunately, social media analytics make it quite straightforward to track and report on your social media performance. For details, consult our post on everything you need to know about social media analytics.
Creating effective social content takes planning. Rather than creating your content on the fly, take the time to map out your posts in advance. This allows you to be strategic and consistent in your messaging across platforms.
Creating and scheduling content in batches allows you to make much more effective use of your time. Instead of interrupting your work multiple times per day (or night) to post on social, you can create content in dedicated blocks of your workday, then schedule your posts to go live on the right networks at the right time. A social media marketing dashboard like Hootsuite will help you schedule all of your posts in one place and keep a bird’s eye view of your content strategy at all times.
This advance planning also allows you to bring multiple people into the content creation process, so you can access more skill sets or just have a fresh set of eyes look at your captions before you post.
Social media marketing is unlike marketing on any other platform. It’s a two-way street, with communication flowing from the brand to consumers and consumers back to the brand.
So, it’s important to get your community involved in your brand. You could try a social media contest, or use a branded hashtag to collect user-generated content to share on your feed.
Above all, make sure to respond when your followers engage with your content. Answer comments, thank particularly active users, and be sure to stay on top of your DMs.
Social media is an incredibly effective platform for competitor research. You can see what your competitors are doing in real time, and even listen in on the conversation happening about competitive brands.
Social listening is a great jumping-off point for your competitor research. Using automated tools, you can track mentions of your competitors, even when they’re not tagged. You can see what’s working for them, and what strategies might backfire.
This is extremely valuable information as you develop your own social marketing strategy. You don’t want to copy your competitors, but you can certainly learn from their successes and mistakes. You can also learn about new promotions, products, or company shakeups in real time.
Hootsuite Academy offers social media training and certification through online courses taught by professionals in the marketing and social media industries. More than half a million people have taken courses through Hootsuite Academy, and more than 1,000 universities are enrolled in the programs.
Once you pass the exam for a Hootsuite Academy program, you receive a digital certification you can display on your LInkedIn profile to highlight your expertise.
The social platforms want brands to find success with their tools. To that end, many of them have created their own social media marketing courses along with training and certification resources to help businesses and social media marketers learn how to use all of their features.
Meta Blueprint
Twitter Flight School
TikTok Business Learning Center
Pinterest Webinars
This three-month online program takes you from the fundamentals through to immersive projects that help you understand how digital marketing really works. You get access to a mentor and career support.
Insider Intelligence is known for its forecasts and analysis. Full access requires a subscription, but you can gain plenty of insight from the freely accessible articles and podcasts.
In particular, their daily Behind The Numbers podcast is packed with digital marketing insights, and is available wherever you get your podcasts.
Gary Veynerchuk accepts questions on Twitter using the #AskGaryVee branded hashtag, then answers some of the most pressing in every episode.
If you’re an audio learner, there are plenty of podcasts to help you develop your social marketing skills. We’ve compiled a list of some of our faves.
Whether you join in the weekly #TwitterSmarter Twitter chat or listen to the podcast, you’ll gain important and up-to-the-minute insights on how best to incorporate Twitter into your social media marketing strategy. Host Madalyn Sklar is a top expert in the Twitter space, and regularly participating in #TwitterSmarter will help you, well, do Twitter smarter.
This textbook by social media strategist Dave Evans, founder of Digital Voodoo, offers practical tips on how to establish a social media strategy and increase engagement with your social followers.
This book also gets into the details of how to connect social media throughout your organization. Rather than focusing only on the social media team, it explains how to use social media for customer service, employee engagement, and even product development.
If you want to dive into the latest academic research on social media marketing, Google Scholar is the place to start your search.
Some interesting reads include:
Friedland, The Next Step in Social Media Marketing?
Saravanakumar & SuganthaLakshmi, Social Media Marketing
Mason, Narcum & Mason, Social media marketing gains importance after Covid-19
So, is social media marketing right for your brand? Let’s look at a few of the arguments for and against.
Connect with your audience where they already spend time online
Low barriers to entry – it’s free to create a business account on all major social platforms
Create brand loyalty
Expand your audience
Get audience feedback that can apply to all areas of your business
Learn about your audience through social analytics
Refine your strategy with real-time testing
Requires some time to do it right
Initial follower growth can be a challenge
Potential security risks if not managed correctly
For most businesses, the advantages of social media marketing far outweigh the risks. If your audience is already on social media, they expect to find you there. Without an active social media presence, you’re missing out on an important way to grow your brand.
Fortunately, it’s easy to get started. You don’t need to do everything all at once. The first step is building your social media marketing strategy.
Social media marketing is the practice of using social media platforms to promote a brand and connect with customers.
The intended outcomes can range from building brand awareness to increasing sales.
If you’re a complete beginner, start with research. Identify a few competitors, find their social accounts, and take note of what seems to be working for them. Then, create accounts on the social platforms that best fit your audience demographic and start creating your own content. Post consistently and closely watch your performance stats to get an understanding of which strategies are the most effective — and do more of what works.
Important social media marketing skills include copywriting, graphic design, community management, marketing strategy planning, and performance analysis.
Manage all of your social media marketing from one place with Hootsuite. Create and schedule social posts, interact with your audience, track your results, and keep an eye on competitors from one easy-to-use dashboard. Try it free today.
Do it better with Hootsuite, the all-in-one social media tool. Stay on top of things, grow, and beat the competition.
The post What Is Social Media Marketing? [Complete 2023 Guide] appeared first on Social Media Marketing & Management Dashboard.
Originally posted on January 4, 2023 @ 9:40 am
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Instagram is the top media platform for building relationships with brands, according to a Meta-commissioned Ipsos study. And half of Instagram users say the platform helps them discover new brands. Even better for brands, 44% of users shop weekly on the platform.
If you’re not using Instagram for business purposes, those potential new customers might never find their way to your products or services.
Here’s how to use Instagram for business growth in 2023.
Bonus: Download a free checklist that reveals the exact steps a fitness influencer used to grow from 0 to 600,000+ followers on Instagram with no budget and no expensive gear.
You need to create an Instagram account first, then convert it to a business account. If you have an existing personal or creator account you want to convert, that works too. It’s free and anyone can do it.
You can have up to five Instagram accounts, so go ahead and keep your personal Instagram account personal if that’s what you prefer.
From your profile, tap the hamburger (three lines) menu icon in the upper-right corner.
Tap Settings. Some accounts may see Switch to professional account on this menu. If you do, tap it. Otherwise, tap Account, then tap Switch to professional account.
Tap Continue (you may need to tap it multiple times as Instagram previews the available features of a professional account).
Select a Category and use the slider to choose whether to show it on your profile, then tap Done.
Choose Business (unless it makes sense for you to choose Creator), and tap Next.
Use the slider to opt in or out of promotional emails from Instagram for professional accounts, then tap Next.
Add or edit relevant contact details, then use the slider to choose whether to show your contact information on your profile, then tap Next (or tap Don’t use my contact info to skip this step).
If you plan to connect your Instagram business account with a Facebook business page, follow the prompts to connect your account to your Facebook Page. This is technically optional, but it’s necessary in order to use Instagram shopping features or run ads on Instagram.
Tap the X in the top left corner to close this window and return to your profile.
Learn more about the difference between Instagram business and creator accounts.
In 150 characters or less, your Instagram bio should describe your brand and showcase your brand voice. We’ve got a full guide to creating an effective Instagram bio for business (complete with templates), but here’s a quick video to walk you through the basics:
Also be sure to make the most of the other components of your Instagram business profile:
Profile pic: Most brands use their logo. Your profile photo displays as 110 x 110 pixels (cropped to a circle), but it’s stored at 320 x 320, so that’s the size you should upload.
Link in bio: Link to your website, your latest blog post, a current campaign or a Link Tree.
Contact information: If you didn’t add contact info during your account creation, you can do so at any time by tapping Edit profile. Instagram will then add a Contact button to your profile.
Action buttons: If relevant, you can add a button that allows customers to book or reserve appointments or to order food. To use this feature, you need an account with one of Instagram’s partners. Tap Edit Profile, then scroll down to Action Buttons.
Story highlights and covers: Instagram Story highlights are another way to maximize your profile real estate by providing more information about your brand or your products. Organize Stories into saved collections, then add some polish with Highlight covers.
To tag products in Instagram content, or to run certain kinds of Instagram ads, you need to create a product catalog. You can do this in Meta’s Commerce Manager.
Head to Commerce Manager and click Get Started, then select Create a catalog and click Get started again.
Select Ecommerce, then click Next.
If you have a shop on an ecommerce platform like Shopify or Big Commerce, click Connect a partner platform and follow the prompts to create your catalog. Otherwise, click Upload product info, name your catalog and click Next.
Click View catalog to open your catalog, then Add items to start adding products.
We’ve got a whole post on using Commerce Manager if you’d like more details on how this tool works.
Once your catalog is full of products, it’s time to turn on Instagram’s shopping features.
From your profile, tap the hamburger (three lines) menu icon in the upper-right corner.
Tap Settings, then Business, then Set up a Shop.
Tap Get started and follow the prompts to submit your shop for review.
Wait for approval. You can check the status of your shop at any time by going to Settings > Business >Shopping.
Once your shop is approved, go to Settings > Business >Shopping, select your product catalog and tap Done.
We’ve got a full blog post explaining everything you need to know about Instagram Shopping if you want to focus on this particular aspect of using Instagram for business.
A good social media strategy starts with a sound understanding of your audience.
Instagram’s audience demographics give you an overall picture of who uses the platform. For example, 18-34-year-olds represent the largest ad audience on the site.
Source: Hootsuite Global State of Digital 2022 (October Update)
However, that doesn’t mean your specific audience on Instagram will be made up of 18-to-34-year-olds. For example, looking at the audience insights for my own Instagram account, I can see that my audience skews older than the Instagram average:
Source: Meta Business Suite
You can find demographic information on your existing audience using Instagram Insights, Meta Business Suite, or Hootsuite Analytics. But if you’re just getting started using Instagram for business, you might not have a large enough following to gain meaningful insights here yet.
In that case, take a look at the demographics of your audience on other social channels and of your existing customer base. While this won’t translate exactly to Instagram, it should give you a sense of who’s interested in your business and what you have to say.
Understanding your audience puts you in a better position to create targeted content and business captions for Instagram that resonate. Since audience research is an important foundation for your content strategy, we’ve got a whole post dedicated to helping you find your target market.
Now that you know who your audience is, you need to determine what to share with them. Rather than posting random content whenever the mood strikes, you need to develop a content strategy that speaks to your audience and keeps them engaged, all while contributing to real business goals.
While you should certainly post some promotional content to get people excited about your products and drive sales, you also need to provide content that builds community and sparks engagement.
That might mean including user-generated content or other curated resources, sharing insider expertise about your industry, or joining in on a trending meme. (But tread carefully here – only join in on trends that are appropriate for your brand voice.)
Look for opportunities to develop themes or regular installments that you can build into a series. “Content buckets” allow you to check certain boxes without having to overthink creation. The more planning you do upfront, the better you’ll be able to produce regular content and respond to last-minute or unplanned events.
From Reels to Stories to posts, there are many options when it comes to Instagram content.
The best way to create a unified strategy is to schedule your content across all Instagram surfaces (and other social platforms) using a content calendar. Or, take it up a level and schedule all your content to publish automatically at the right time using a tool like the Hootsuite Publisher. Yes, you can even schedule Stories and Reels in advance.
The added advantage here is that you can create your content in dedicated blocks of time and schedule it to post at the best time for your audience. Even if that time is outside business hours, on the weekend, or in the middle of the night.
When you share content about your products on Instagram, tagging makes it much easier for people to learn more or buy. You can tag up to 20 products in a photo feed post.
Bonus: Download a free checklist that reveals the exact steps a fitness influencer used to grow from 0 to 600,000+ followers on Instagram with no budget and no expensive gear.
To tag products, create your Instagram post or Reel as usual. Then, on the final screen before posting, tap Tag products. You can tag products from your own shop or someone else’s, which creates great opportunities for collaboration and cross-promotion.
Source: @reitmans
In Stories, you can tag products using the Product link sticker.
Source: @allbirds
With an Instagram business profile, you have access to the platform’s built-in analytics tools to help you understand how well different types of content perform.
There are several other analytics tools available, including Hootsuite’s, that can track longer time frames, automate reporting and make it easier to compare Instagram metrics across other social media platforms.
No matter which tools you use, the important thing is to check in regularly to learn what kind of content resonates best with your target audience. You’ll start to see patterns about what generates the most engagement, as well as what kinds of social media content increase views beyond your existing follower base. (Hint: Try Instagram Reels.)
Use these lessons to hone your content strategy over time.
Success on Instagram requires you to engage with your followers rather than just blast content out and hope someone likes it. One important component of this two-way communication is monitoring your DMs for questions, comments, and customer service requests.
Instagram business accounts have access to a couple of DM features that make managing customer service easier on the platform. First, your inbox is divided into Primary and General tabs to make it easier to keep track of your messages. And second, you can create saved replies to commonly asked questions that you can access via keyboard shortcuts.
Hootsuite Inbox makes it even easier to manage your DMs by allowing you to assign messages to the appropriate team members. If you really want to take customer service on Instagram seriously, a tool like Sparkcentral allows you to integrate Instagram with your CRM.
It’s free to set up an Instagram business account, promote your business, and even set up an Instagram shop.
The only fees for Instagram business accounts are ad costs if you choose to run Instagram ads, and selling fees if you use Commerce Manager to allow your customers to check out and complete their purchase within the Meta platform.
So, there is no fee to use Instagram Shopping to tag products and direct users to your website to buy them. However, if you use Meta’s native checkout through Commerce Manager, you will pay the following selling fees:
$0.40 for shipments up to $8.00
5% for shipments of $8.01 or more
Instagram is waiving these fees until 11:59 PST June 30, 2023.
As you’ve seen in the Instagram for business tips throughout this post, Instagram offers many useful features for businesses. Some of the most important features only available for professional accounts are:
Instagram Insights for audience demographics and details about how your content performs
Instagram Shopping to tag products in your content
Instagram Direct features to better manage DM communications
But on the whole, Instagram for businesses works just like it works for creators or personal accounts. Create great content that inspires, informs, or entertains your audience to grow your following and build community around your account.
For most businesses, the benefits of using Instagram for business far outweigh the disadvantages. That said, there is one important disadvantage that’s especially important when using Instagram for small business development.
For micro businesses, it can be tempting to use Instagram as your entire business presence. But this puts you at risk if you ever have an issue with your account, like being hacked, locked out, or blocked. It’s a good idea to also have a website you control where you can continue to make sales and grow your audience if there’s ever a problem with your Instagram business account.
Save time managing Instagram for business using Hootsuite. From a single dashboard, you can schedule and publish posts directly to Instagram, engage your audience, measure performance and run all your other social media profiles. Try it free today.
Grow on Instagram
Easily create, analyze, and schedule Instagram posts, Stories, and Reels with Hootsuite. Save time and get results.
The post How to Use Instagram for Business in 2023: 6 Pro Tips appeared first on Social Media Marketing & Management Dashboard.
Originally posted on January 5, 2023 @ 9:40 am