Top 5 Tips for Marketing on Social Media

In times of crisis, it is especially important not to go dark on social media and keep talking to your customers. Customers need connection and empathy now more than ever and social media is the perfect way to communicate to your ex-customers, current customers and potential customers what you as a business are doing in these unprecedented times. Below, I will outline the top 5 strategies for marketing on social media – yes especially applicable now during the pandemic.

1. Work with a Professional – Do Not Hire an Intern

Social media has become an increasingly complex landscape with many features added daily by platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn. There are various options from embedding links into videos or photos to correctly tagging various accounts from personal brands to company pages. Hence, hire a social media marketing agency or at least a part-time professional to manage your accounts. The marketing agency or professional will help you pick out the types of platforms to focus on since that is where most of your customers are concentrated, e.g., Facebook is for baby-boomers and TikTok is for Gen Z.

2. Content is Still King

Content is what gets your customers through the door, i.e., it’s equivalent to a window shop with the intricate display that attracts the customer to enter the store. Now days, the first stop your customers will check out is your social media. When the customer Googles the brand, the first few stops are the brand’s social media channels such as Twitter, Instagram and its Facebook Page. Make sure you are ready with content that is appropriate for each platform, and the message is congruent with each platform.

3. Partner with Complimentary Accounts

If you are a health and wellness brand, e.g., your main product is healthy snacks, partner with a fitness brand, e.g., a fitness studio, to expose your product to a relevant audience. Gift the products to the studio in exchange for the fitness studio posting on its social media. A successful a brand-to-brand partnership would like look this on Instagram.

4. Engage with Your Customers

It’s rudimentary to engage with your ex customers, current customer and potential customers on social media. If they ask a question, jump in and go beyond what is necessary to answer. Also, check the notification section frequently to see if a customer is talking about your brand elsewhere, i.e., on another account, and dive into the conversation. Customers take note of excellent customer service and the noise echoes through the social media universe as others look at the comments left by other customers and how the brand replied – were they helpful, quick to reply or was the reply cold and uncaring? The reply to a customer may even make a thread of a conversation where others jump in and contribute. This kind of approach may make for an excellent customer retention tool.

5. Work with Influencers

Building brands on social media has almost become synonymous with influencer marketing. Here is an example of one of the fashion brands that has successfully implemented influencer marketing all the way from a start-up to an IPO! Choosing the right influencer for your industry and niche is extremely important; hence, back to point number 1 – work with professionals and not interns. Parse through influencers and pick the ones to partner with for long term, remember influencer marketing, like social media marketing, is a marathon and not a sprint!