One Size Does Not Fit All

Each social media site has different audiences, advertising mechanisms, and attitudes toward the content. 
This is part 1 of our deep dive into each social media platform. This week, we are focusing on proven platforms that have become household names: Linkedin, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. We'll discuss each platform's advantages, audience, monetary commitment, and online tools.

Your overall social media strategy depends on how you answer this question: Why does your business want to be on social media? 

Are you on social media to promote specific products you sell? Do you want to drive traffic to your website? Or re you just trying to provide a place for your customers to talk and engage over your products/services? 

Each platform has their own strengths and target audiences that they hit. And for each platform, you need to answer the 5 “W’s”: 

• Why do you want to be on social media?
• Who is your target audience?
• What are you going to share?
• Where are you going share?
• When are you going share?

As long as you can answer these questions for each platform, you can create an effective social media strategy for each. 

LinkedIn

Built for the business world, LinkedIn is the top social media platform for B2B businesses. LinkedIn makes it much easier to interact with company decision-makers such as executives, IT services, and sales. Lead generation is also a massive focus. LinkedIn is the place people search for new business technologies and strategies, so the users are already open to the idea of obtaining and purchasing new services. 

Overall Strategies

Linkedin is built to connect business-minded people with new individuals, ideas, and businesses. The point is to build a network of people and use that network to explore opportunities as they come up. Engaging your connections regularly with interesting content or even personal check-ins will establish firm relationships that can carry on for years. If you successfully nurture those relationships and position yourself as an expert in your industry with great content, then you will be looked at as a valuable resource in other peoples’ networks. Forming professional, profitable relationships with the right people and generate a steady flow of leads for your business.

Messaging Tactics

Sponsored posts and content are the easiest way to advertise on LinkedIn. The most popular are LinkedIn Dynamic Ads. These ads are personalized to each member based on their LinkedIn profile data. For B2B businesses, this is one of the best ways to digitally advertise: over 80% of B2B leads come from this platform, making it the number one social site for conversions.

If you want to drive higher conversions, you need to learn how to write great LinkedIn prospecting messages using the InMail feature. You'll have to overcome this obstacle: recipients often ignore InMail messages, yet based on LinkedIn's conversion statistics, it's still worth it. 

So how do you compel prospects to read your message? First, keep them to a few sentences or less. No one wants to read a long letter that just popped up in their faces; it's like a homework assignment. 

Second, be judicious about embedding links into your prospecting messages. That is because LinkedIn automatically creates a massive thumbnail that fills up the entire messaging screen. Not only is this obnoxious, but your prospect will need to scroll up to read the whole message (if they are willing to read it at all).

Third, do not overdo it. A message every 2-3 weeks is enough. If people get a steady barrage of InMail messages from you, they'll consider you spam and block your profile. 

Prioritize Video Content

No matter what social media website you go on, video content is the king. According to HubSpot, 81% of businesses use video as a marketing tool – up from 63% over the last year.   

There are a few things to keep in mind before publishing videos to LinkedIn. Roughly 85% of social media users play video without sound, so it's critical you provide closed captioning on all your videos. If you're not a video editing wiz, you can use LinkedIn's proprietary closed captioning feature. 

According to LinkedIn, the length of your videos can make a huge difference. Keep promotional videos under 30 seconds, while videos that describe your products or services reach the most people when they are between 30-90 seconds  According to that LinkedIn study,  you can get just as many clicks on a long-form video as a short-form video if you create a more complicated and engaging narrative.

Use LinkedIn Tools

If you create videos and content using LinkedIn’s native tools, it will reach more people on the platform than if you link to YouTube or your website. That is because LinkedIn distributes native content over third-party links. This creates a bit of an issue, because you are probably creating content to drive more traffic to your website. That is why we recommend you state in LinkedIn blog posts that it was originally blogged on your company site. Include the link and a short snippet of the article as the social post, then LinkedIn will prioritize it. 

Instagram

Instagram changes the way posts interact with its algorithm on a regular basis, so it can be hard to predict how much significant engagement each post will have. If you want to keep up a steady stream of engaged followers, you need to post Instagram Stories consistently. 

Since Instagram Stories are chronological, your account will show up at the top of your followers’ feed every time you post a new Story. Use these Stories to bring more clicks to what you’re actually posting on the account feed.  Accounts with more than 10,000 followers can also add clickable links on the stories. Use these links to drive traffic to your website, other social media accounts, or partner websites. 

Utilize IGTV

If you do not have the time and resources to create brand new content on a regular basis, IGTV provides an excellent opportunity to reuse your existing video content. If you find yourself posting a long-form video that takes 5-6 consecutive Stories to watch, then consider using IGTV as your main video content channel.  Listicles, tutorials, and customer testimonials are great examples of IGTV content.

Influencer Marketing

How effective is influencer marketing? It depends on the influencer itself. A lot of people can buy followers, so the proof of concept is really in the engagement rate. It's common for someone with 300000 followers to have almost 50% as bots. The first way to determine if an influencer will be useful is to check their activity and see if they are getting engagement from real, human followers. 

A great example is the makeup brand Glossier. They built their empire using "micro influencers." Micro-influencers are people in the same industry that create content based on their niche, usually to only 10k followers or below. 

Glossier's micro-influencers were people who liked to review makeup or do online makeup tutorials, so Glossier sent them free products for them to use in their content. The influencers would also get a new business percentage if they referred certain people to the Glossier website. 

Since then, a lot of companies have mimicked that strategy. There are even brands in deep competition with each other that will buy fake followers for their competitor, thus reflecting poorly on the competitor's page. 

Twitter

Using Twitter is an amazing way to get your voice heard because you can engage with people all over your industry without them even needing to follow you. By joining in on trending conversations or whatever the meme of the day is, your voice will appear in front of people who do not know your brand yet. By adding quality insight and opinions on trending topics, you can establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry.

The Twitter Attitude

People are hyper-engaged on Twitter; if you've been there before, you know. It's the premier location for hot takes, breaking news, and fiery debate. If you want to have success on Twitter, you need a lot of organic interaction. You need to dedicate yourself to engaging people on the platform; people are there to talk. Media companies benefit the most from Twitter, but eCommerce brands can also find their niche. 

For Kensium, Twitter is important to us because we can interact, comment, and even joke around with other industry partners. It's a great place to establish your brand as a thought leader since it is hyper engaging. 

Twitter site referral traffic is up 6% year over year (YoY). Because of the character limit, it's easy to put a CTA, relevant hashtag, and link to whatever content or product page you want. As an eCommerce merchant, it's crucial to create and maintain a blog, then use Twitter to refer to that blog. Using Twitter to build brand awareness has value (especially for newer companies), but the ultimate goal is to obtain conversions. 

Many brands try to stay ahead of the game by jumping in on every single trending topic, even if its irrelevant to their brand. This ends up “diluting” your brand’s voice and core message. Instead, focus on creating your hashtags and contributing to discussions that matter to your industry and audience. That way, you can add actual value to the online discussion.

Experiment With Twitter Advertising

With over 125 million daily users, Twitter is a prime website for advertising your company. Here are some best practices to take when advertising on Twitter: 

• If you are advertising to a new market, start with the “soft sell”. This means providing high-quality and relatively objective content on topics they are interested in. Don’t ask them to make a purchase immediately; nudge them into that direction. 
• Use contrasting colors in your call-to-actions (CTAs). UsabilityTools completed a study demonstrating highly contrasting call-to-actions (CTAs) “pop out” to consumers. High-contrast CTAs had a 75% higher click-through rate compared to low-contrast CTAs.
• Don't try to sell right away. When advertising to people that haven't been to your website before, start with a soft sell and share high-quality content instead of asking them to make a purchase immediately.
• Combine organic and paid reach. Turn organic posts into paid posts once they get popular. As certain posts resonate better with customers, start using them for paid promotion. 
• Build high-quality content. Use Twitter ads to promote eBooks and webinars, then get new leads to your sales funnel by asking for people's email addresses in exchange.
• Set up remarketing campaigns. Keep nurturing your leads by creating a Twitter remarketing audience and promoting your branded content to past website visitors.

No matter which strategy you choose, Twitter advertising can be especially effective since it's not disruptive and looks similar to the organic content your audience is already scrolling through.

Facebook:

Facebook has really committed to ad creation and tools for their user base. Their native advertising tool, Facebook Ad Accounts, have potent targeting capabilities that let you expose your brand to people who share your audience's interests.

You can also create focused messages that target specific demographics using their ages, locations, and the type of devices they use.

Get On Facebook Live

Facebook Live videos generate the most interest out of every post type on Facebook. In 2020, Facebook Live videos get up to 10x more comments than the typical video. In general, people get more excited for live videos because they are up-to-the-minute, and there is a ton of potential for the unexpected to happen. 

Like Instagram Stories, Facebook Live streams are chronological, so the latest stream shows up at the top of your newsfeed. We have the same advice for Facebook Live streams as we do for Instagram Stories: Having consistent content for your users builds your audience. 

Product demos, tutorials, or live Q&A sessions are all awesome ways to get started on Facebook Live. Branch out and experiment with your content, and try to make it feel natural. People tune into live broadcasts to get something unconventional, with a less “planned” feel to it. 

Build A Community With A Facebook Group

Facebook Groups let you engage with your followers in a free and casual way since they are not as public-facing as your company Page. Groups are more of the “VIP” lounge for your customers, while your Facebook Page offers more general information about your business. Groups give you an excellent opportunity to interact with your audience and moderate the conversation around your brand.

The group can be strictly about your brand, or about a broader topic that affects your industry. Before starting the group, get clear about its purpose and what you hope you achieve by moderating it. 

Facebook Groups are not ideal for the “hard sell”. People won’t want to interact with a group in which the moderator is constantly trying to get money from them. Try to avoid being overly "salesy" in your Facebook Groups, although it can be an excellent place to offer exclusive discounts and promotions. This is where the “VIP” aspect can come into play. 

Wrap-Up

Take our advice on your social media accounts, and you will see positive results soon. Kensium has this expertise because our digital marketing team has been working with these ubiquitous social media sites for years. 

There are some new kids on the social media block, however. Platforms like Pinterest, Reddit, and even Spotify are inventing new ways to get users engaged with new businesses and services. In Part 2 of this series, we’ll take an extensive look at how to capitalize on the latest social media opportunities. 

If you want more information, advice, and even some free consulting, be sure to check out Kensium’s Digital Marketing services.