In 2018, the average amount of time people spent on social media every day worldwide was 136 minutes. That means that over two hours of our time is spent on some social media platform daily, whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, or a more fun platform like Reddit (my personal favorite).
I’ll bet we could use that for marketing! What’s the best way to do that?
Social media marketing is a broad field, but it can generally be reduced down to two types: paid and unpaid. I’ll go deeper into paid strategies in a future article, but right now I’m going to focus on unpaid, or organic. Basically, organic social media marketing involves advertising to customers through social media platforms without paying for ad space. Some specific activities could include posting, tweeting, creating short videos, or basically doing what you would for your personal social media account if you were trying to attract new friends. So while paid strategies involve a financial investment and ads being shown to people using the platform, organic is more about attracting people to you through what you’re putting out.
So all I need to do is post on my business account and the customers will just roll in?
Not exactly. One crucial component in today’s social media marketing game is ensuring that you are interacting with your customers via social media. For example, if they comment on a post, it’s good form to give it a like or respond. These kinds of actions are what creates a relationship between you and the customer. It is also worth putting some time into finding the most appropriate platforms to use to target the audience you’re going after, since they all appeal to different crowds of people.
It’s not just about building your brand, either. Some businesses, like Slim Jim, have used social media to establish their brand. More importantly, though, is they really make sure to prioritize conversing with the people engaging with their content above anything else. They also don’t always post about the business, which helps people not see the brand as something that is only trying to push a product. As you can see in the picture, Slim Jim’s profile classifies itself as “half man, half meat, half meme.” Content should strike a good balance of promoting and entertaining, and Slim Jim is a great example of one way to do this.
Cool. So I can use social media to engage with my consumers in real time. But won’t it get difficult if I have to have multiple platforms open at once?
It certainly would! Luckily, there are tools like Hootsuite that make managing multiple profiles on multiple platforms easy. Hootsuite lets you log in to all of your profiles on a single dashboard and manage them all in one place, simplifying the process significantly. They also offer a service that lets you schedule posts so you don’t have to sit at your computer until it’s time to submit your post (or tweet). Hootsuite offers a certification course that will teach you everything you need to use the service for only $99, which is honestly a great deal for learning how to use something that will help you a great deal in the long run.
Communication works best when it goes both ways, and an organic social media strategy is a great way to respond to your customers and enhance this communication.
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