Prioritizing Social Media as a Business Strategy

Social media must play a role in any organization's business strategy.

It doesn't matter if your business is business to business (B2B), business to consumer (B2C), in retail, in tech, or in a brick and mortar store. At MarketBeam, we understand that building a social marketing strategy can be daunting.

You're probably considering which social networks you should prioritize. What types of content should you share? How should you measure success?

Over the past eight years, you have likely experienced behavioral shifts in how you engage with social media.

Unsurprisingly, 69% of Americans use some form of social media, according to research performed by the Pew Research Center. Of course, we expect young adults to be the most tech savvy and make up most of the social media community. Comparatively, 78% of American adults ages 30-49, 64% of adults ages 50-64, and 37% of adults ages 65+ also have at least one social media network.

Since so many consumers are using social media, are you leveraging this outlet to reach your customers?

Which Social Networks Should You Focus on?

An average American has at least three out of the eight dominant social media networks amongst Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, Snapchat, and WhatsApp. So, which network or combination networks should you prioritize?

First, we suggest meeting your customers where they congregate.

It's important to focus on where your customers interact, which may differ from where your end users gather.

Perhaps you run a marketing agency whose clients are predominantly in the activewear and outdoor lifestyle industry.

While your clients' end users love hiking, rock climbing, and displaying their adventure-seeking photographs on Instagram, as a marketing agency, you are a B2B. LinkedIn is likely a better channel to advertise your business compared to Instagram, which targets your clients' B2C.

We also recommend implementing an omnichannel social marketing strategy that can help you to achieve the results you desire while leveraging your content curation efforts across multiple social channels.

Many businesses see the best results when LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are leveraged. LinkedIn is optimal to leverage influencers, professional relationships, or partnerships, whereas Facebook Messenger and the integration of bots into advertising allows marketers to flex their creative muscles beyond text and video-based communication.

What Types of Content Should You Share?

Now, more than ever, marketers have so many types of multimedia content to reach customers. As Gartner's research suggests, "emerging technologies are infiltrating social networks." As such, some of the most noteworthy technologies disrupting how marketers reach consumers are VR, AI, and intelligent home assistants like Amazon Alexa. You can utilize these technologies to deliver content to your audience.

Here are a few ideas of what types of content you can share with your networks:

• Videos or images
• Product updates
• Press releases
• White papers, case studies, survey results
• Blog posts
• Customer testimonials
• External links to industry content
• Job postings or volunteer opportunities
• Event invitation to a Meet Up, conference, or webinar

How Do You Measure Success?

Success is commonly measured by obtaining a certain follower base. Perhaps you're trying to achieve a desired number of likes or shares.

At MarketBeam, we measure success differently. We measure success based on engagement. We define engagement as a combination of the number of click throughs and shares that occur across your target audience.

Due to the rise of tracking user engagement, as Gartner recommends, "unifying first-party and social data" is critical to a social marketing strategy. Recent changes in consumer privacy protection make this slightly more challenging for marketers to navigate. It is possible to connect social IDs to customer records to generate a more complete picture of your customer's profile.

Above all, what matters the most is: do you have the right people sharing the right content across the right social channels?

This article was originally published on MarketBeam.

MarketBeam is an AI-driven, personalized social marketing platform that utilizes untapped executives' and employees' social networks to increase reach, elevate brand, and nurture leads dramatically beyond the usual corporate channels. Gamification encourages content sharing on social networks while building executive branding and individual employee thought leadership. AI-driven analytics constantly learns and identifies top influencers, popular content, and social networks to maximize marketing ROI.

Opinions expressed by the author are not necessarily those of WITI.