10 Useful Social Media Marketing Tips for Businesses in 2021

Successful social media marketing is crucial in today’s ever-changing business landscape. But you already know this. You also understand that social media marketing plays an essential role in building your brand, driving sales, solidifying customer trust, and establishing authority in your niche.  

What you might be interested in knowing is how to strategically go about achieving stellar results from your social media marketing campaigns.  

So, whether you’re about to begin your social media marketing journey or looking for new ideas to hone your existing one, the following tips will offer useful knowledge to help you win at social media marketing.  

10 Useful Social Media Marketing Tips for Businesses 

Publish the same posts across all your social media accounts 

If you’re using multiple social media accounts on various platforms, it’s wise to invest in a social media management tool like Sendible or Later. These tools help you manage your social media activities with ease. With these tools, you can schedule posts, track comments, monitor mentions, view key analytics, and sync posts across your accounts.  

Syncing content across all your social media accounts will help you remain consistent and attract quality followers on all platforms that match your target audience. For instance, if you are publishing a motivational business quote or a valuable blog post on LinkedIn, be sure to publish the same on your Facebook and Twitter handles.  

Use custom branded short links 

If you scroll through your Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn feed, you’ll come across several brands and individuals sharing content that includes cryptic, almost gibberish, short links like www.bit.ly/wfht or www.ow.ly/fgrpi. Not many marketers and entrepreneurs know that these rather complicated short links can be custom branded.  

By using a short name on new domain extensions like .icu or .bond or .cyou, your social media posts can be used to share content as well as reinforce your brand name.  

For instance, The Red Bond, an up and coming finance business, can use red.bond/finance-tips to share a blog post on finance tips and tricks. Similarly, Eye See You, an eyewear eCommerce website, can use eye.cyou/sunglasses to direct users to their new collection of sunglasses.  

RECOMMENDED: Why Every Finance Business Should Choose a .bond Domain Name 

Optimise old posts 

If you’ve already published a few posts in the past, it’s good to go back and tweak them for SEO or a fact check and republish them. Doing this will help you drive more followers and awareness with minimal effort on your part.  

It’s wise to optimise content that has worked well in the past. Optimizing blog posts, landing pages, and offers on your website is a great way to augment engagements without having to post something from scratch.  

Schedule posts smartly 

Time is a crucial factor to consider when publishing posts on social media. While you should publish posts first thing in the morning so it garners enough impressions and engagements during the day, it’s also advisable to publish posts in the evening. The idea behind doing this is to reach your target audience in different time zones.   

Use the aforementioned social media management tools to schedule posts to be published even when you’re asleep. This way, even if it’s 2 AM in your geographic location, your tweet or Instagram post about your new line of merchandise will reach audiences worldwide. 

Harness the power of hashtags 

Twitter introduced #hashtags as a smart way to search for content and topics. However, Instagram took the #hashtag trend to a new level when they allowed users to not only search for topics using #hashtags but also to follow #hashtags as topics of interest.  

Hashtags serve as a great tool to get more people to view your content and engage with it. However, it’s essential to know which ones to use for your post. For instance, #socialmedia has over 20 million posts on Instagram, whereas #socialmediastrategy has 935k posts, and #socialmediaforbusiness has 137k posts.  

It’s best to opt for slightly less-used hashtags so your posts can successfully reach the right people. You can also craft your own branded #hashtag to differentiate your posts with that of others.  

For instance, .cyou domains use #WeCyou to create their community on social media, as does .icu domains with #NowISeeYou and .bond domains with #StartMakingBonds.   

Use high-quality visuals and incorporate your brand 

Social media is a visual platform. From GIFS to videos to image posts, high-quality visuals are a must-have element to up your social media game. Easy-to-use tools like Canva are great for creating high-quality social media images, infographics, posters, landing page designs, etc.  

Be sure to use your brand colours, and don’t forget to insert your logo and company hashtag on every post. If you plan on posting short yet compelling videos every once in a while, Lumen5 makes for a smart and straightforward platform to create engaging videos with ease.  

You should also post infographics about your business or industry on LinkedIn, share a funny meme relating to your work on Facebook, or tweet a GIF about the project your company is working on.  

Check out .cyou’s social media channels. A quick scroll through their Instagram homepage will instantly give you an idea about their brand colors, tone of voice, types of posts, and an idea about what they represent.  

RECOMMENDED: 8 Design Essentials Your Website Needs to Have 

Start paid promotions 

One of the most effective ways to kickstart your social media growth is to indulge in paid promotions. Paid ads allow you to target a specific audience while running multiple campaigns. This helps drive engagements, followers, impressions, website visits, and even sales.  

An important thing to note here is that every paid promotion must have a definite plan or goal assigned to it. This makes it easier to track the success rate of that particular ad.   

For instance, if your paid ad is targeted towards getting people to buy something from your website, the ad should include a clear call–to–action button.  

The best part of social media paid promotions is that you don’t need to boost every post with hundreds or thousands of dollars. You can start small with $10 promotions and gradually increase your budget as you go along.  

Invest in influencer marketing 

Most young audiences listen to their mentors and idols. Four in 10 millennials trust the products and services endorsed by their favourite influencers on social media. This makes investing in influencers a worthy avenue to look into when building a strong online brand and generating sales.  

By collaborating with influencers in your niche, you can reach a wider, relevant audience.  

While more famous influencers can cost a small fortune, there are smarter inexpensive ways for startups and novice businesses to get influencers to spread the word for them. It’s wise for startups to collaborate with micro-influencers who are also on their way to cross a million followers.  

Secondly, it’s okay to do cold reach outs or send over freebies, merchandise, and even give influencers a free trial of your product or service. This will get them to notice your brand and vouch for you on their social channels.  

Thirdly, constantly retweet or share their posts and engage with their social media content to get their attention.  

Engage audiences with interactive content 

From Twitter polls to Instagram Q&As, there are numerous ways to get your audience to engage with your brand. Use interactive content to inform and educate your audience about your products or take their opinions on what they would like to see or read about.  

Study what your competitors are doing to engage with your audience or how other leading brands use interactive content to better connect with their audience.  

READ: 10 Clever Content Marketing Tips to Improve Your Small Business Website  

Embrace new updates and features 

 

Have you tried Facebook Live or Twitter Fleet or Instagram Reels or IGTV yet? If you haven’t, it’s wise to expand your social media marketing strategy to adapt these new features and updates. After all, you don’t want to miss out on reaching over 3.5 billion social media users worldwide. 

And since 91% of all social media users access social channels via mobile devices, embracing new updates and adapting to the new features is a great way to try something fresh and new.  

A dance video of your team to show your business’s fun side on an Instagram Reel is a great way to engage with your users’ people and give them an inside view of your team.  

Final thoughts 

Staying relevant on social media and constantly competing with your competitors can get overwhelming, even if you’re a social media pro. And with social media trends changing every second, you need a smart way to stay on top of your social media game consistently.  

The 10 tips mentioned above will help you win at social media marketing and enable your business to always stay on your users’ minds.  

Eshan is a Senior Marketing Specialist at ShortDot, the registry behind some of the most successful new domain extensions, including .icu, .bond, and .cyou. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.