8 best practices to ace your social media marketing

In today’s world, it shouldn’t be surprising that social media platforms like X, formerly Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook and a few others have emerged as the go-to platforms for businesses to connect with their target audience and promote their brand. 
 
From 2.7 billion in 2017 to 4.89 billion in 2023, the number of social media users continues to grow exponentially and is expected to reach around 6 billion by 2027. Indeed, social media is here to stay.

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And naturally, for businesses to establish social credibility in the digital world, acing their social media marketing campaigns becomes imperative. It helps brands develop a strong online presence, reach a broader audience, engage with customers, drive website traffic and achieve their marketing objectives. 
 
However, social media marketing can be challenging with the constantly changing algorithms and the need to create engaging content that resonates with your audience. 

This blog aims to highlight some of the best practices for social media marketing. These best practices will help teams build brand awareness and drive better engagement, traffic and conversions. So, without further ado, let’s jump right in. 

1. Define your goals and objectives at the outset

Before starting any marketing campaign on social media, one must clearly define their social media goals and objectives. This includes asking basic questions, like:

1. What do you want to achieve through your social media efforts — increase brand awareness, drive traffic to your website or generate leads?
2. What is my target audience and overall budget?
3. What is the competitive landscape like on social media?
4. What key performance indicators (KPIs) should be measured to track the efficacy of the campaigns?

A clear understanding of your goals will help you create a more effective and well-rounded social media strategy.

2. Understand your target audience

It’s crucial that you understand your target audience, as that’ll allow you to create compelling content that resonates with them. This requires knowing their demographics, interests and behaviors. 

Knowing your target audience helps you with the following:

• Relevant content creation: By understanding the target audience's preferences, interests and needs, businesses can create relevant and valuable content that customers can relate to. This can lead to increased engagement, loyalty and brand advocacy.
• Effective targeting: Knowing the target audience allows businesses to tailor their social media advertising efforts to reach the right people at the right time and deliver the right message. This can increase ad relevance and effectiveness and, ultimately, drive more conversions and sales.
• Improved customer service: Social media platforms are handy for customer service, and getting to know the target audience can help businesses provide better support. They can do this by addressing customers’ specific concerns and needs in a timely and helpful manner.

3. Select the right social media platform(s)

Each social media platform has a unique identity and culture, with specific conventions, norms and styles. Selecting the right platform ensures businesses align their brand identity and voice with the platform's culture and conventions, enhancing their credibility and trustworthiness. For example, if you’re targeting a younger audience to sell fashion accessories to, Instagram and TikTok have better chances of conversions than Facebook or any other platform. 

Overall, selecting the right social media platform is essential for the success of your social media marketing. It ensures businesses reach the right audience, invest their resources efficiently and stay true to their brand identity. Moreover, it also helps them achieve their marketing objectives and accurately measure their performance.  
 
Marketers must also conduct persona-based research as it helps them with deeper, more individualistic details. It’s also a great way to go when determining the social media platforms that are most popular among target audiences. This knowledge allows marketers to focus their efforts on the platforms where their target audience is most active, increasing their chances of engagement exponentially.  

Here's a sample customer persona to help you get a better idea. 

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4. Create a solid content strategy

A well-planned content strategy is instrumental in creating captivating content that connects with your target audience consistently and helps you achieve the following:

• Consistency in delivery: A content strategy ensures that social media posts are published consistently, with a defined cadence, tone and voice. This can help build a robust brand identity and establish credibility and trust with your audience.
• Relevance to the target audience: By aligning social media content with the target audience's interests, preferences and needs, you can create much more valuable content that’s highly relevant to your audience.
• Content optimization: A content strategy can help you optimize your social media content for search and social media algorithms, which can increase visibility, reach and engagement.

Must read: How to create a content plan

5. Use eye-catching visuals

Visual content is much more appealing than text-heavy content. So, use images and videos to create striking social posts that grab your audience's attention. Using visually pleasing images for your posts can help boost the comment rate on your LinkedIn posts by up to 98%.

Leveraging visuals effectively in social media management enables you to enhance your content's impact, increase engagement, strengthen your brand presence and create a memorable and engaging social media experience for your audience.  

How a visual-centric strategy could your brand on the map 

To attract top talent across the globe, organizations can focus on promoting their work culture on platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook and their very own website. One approach is to share short video testimonials from current employees, highlighting the benefits and advantages of working for the organization. To top it off, organizations can emphasize their collaborations with prominent clients to establish greater credibility. 

However, marketers must bear in mind the following guidelines for using visuals:

• Use high-quality and visually appealing images to capture user attention
• Prioritize colors, fonts and design elements that align with the brand identity across platforms
• Use the brand logo subtly in the visuals wherever possible to increase brand visibility
• Ensure that the visuals are mobile-friendly and easily viewable on smaller screens

6. Schedule your posts in advance

Scheduling social media content helps you save time, maintain consistency and ensure a steady stream of content. How, you ask? It allows businesses to plan and create content in batches, ensuring a consistent presence.

You can follow the steps below to get started:

1. Plan your content calendar: After you finalize the topics, themes and types of content you want to share, create a content calendar.
2. Choose a social media management tool: Select a tool that allows you to schedule posts in advance. Use a social media automation tool to automate all your social media campaigns through a unified UI.
3. Determine the posting frequency: Ascertain how frequently you will post on each social media platform. However, ensure you do not overwhelm your audience with too many posts.
4. Schedule posts: As mentioned earlier, use your preferred social media management tool to schedule your content in advance. Make sure to define the date and timelines for each post that will be published. And don’t forget to insert the relevant content, captions and media.
5. Monitor and engage: Ensure you regularly monitor your social media accounts for comments, messages and engagement. Respond actively to engage with your audience to the fullest.

Following the steps highlighted above will help you effectively schedule content in advance, which in turn will result in optimizing your brand’s overall social media presence.

7. Engage with your audience

Social media is a two-way conversation. Engage with your audience by responding to comments, asking questions and starting conversations. You must post content your audience finds interesting, informative, entertaining and helpful. To keep things fresh and engaging, you can try mixing up the content type, such as images, videos, polls and stories. Here are a few best practices marketers can follow while responding to customers on social media platforms:

• Try to respond to customer inquiries and comments within a few hours, if not immediately. The sooner you can address their concerns, the better.
• Set internal goals for response time based on your resources, customer expectations and industry standards.
• Make it a priority to address time-sensitive or urgent customer inquiries as quickly as possible. For example, responding right away to a customer who’s seeking confirmation on their ticket’s flight cancellation status.
• Try to personalize the responses by addressing individuals with their names and responding in a friendly tone.

This will help you build a stronger relationship with your audience and create a more involved community. Marketers can also leverage platforms like Sprinklr Social to plan and automate customer conversations across 30+ digital channels through one platform.

8. Analyze your results

Social media marketing is not a set-it-and-forget-it strategy. You need to analyze your results regularly to see what’s working and what isn’t. Here are a few key social media metrics marketers must monitor after they publish their campaign.

1. Engagement rate: This is the percentage of the overall audience interacting with your content through likes, comments and shares. Marketers can consider comparing their results against industry benchmarks. For example, the average benchmark engagement rate for Instagram and Facebook is 0.60% and 0.15%, respectively. 

2. Click-through rate: It helps evaluate the effectiveness of your content in generating traffic to your website or landing page by measuring the percentage of users who click on a link or a call-to-action button in your social media post. 

3. Sentiment analysis: It helps analyze the sentiment (positive, negative or neutral) expressed by users in their comments, mentions or reviews related to your brand. 

4. ROI (return on investment): It helps you evaluate the financial return generated from your social media marketing activities. It compares the cost of your social media efforts to the revenue generated or cost savings achieved.  

The metrics listed above are some of the primary KPIs that help evaluate the efficacy of social media campaigns. To track them better, marketers should ideally use AI-powered social media analytics tools to track campaign performance. It helps gain actionable insights that help marketers make informed decisions.

To sum things up, social media marketing, when executed the right way, acts as a powerful tool for businesses to reach a broader audience, promote their brand and establish their presence. It offers businesses a powerful medium to engage with their target audience. 

Making the most of all the best practices highlighted above will help you develop an effective and engaging strategy that drives your team closer to achieving your marketing objectives.