Marketing has so many channels available to promote your brand and products. One of the most popular these days is using social media for marketing. But social media can be tricky, especially when using it for marketing.

What is social media marketing?

It’s using social media — such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and more — to promote your business.

There are two ways to promote your business:

• Organic: Posting for free and see who gets to your website or landing page
• Paid: Paying to get traffic to your website or landing page

Target the right platform based on your ideal customer

In order to target the right social media platform, you need to consider your customer. Many marketing professionals create a customer profile to provide information about who they’re marketing to.

Who’s your ideal customer?

• Business or individual?
• For businesses, consider:
  • Type?
  • Industry?
  • Size (revenue or employee)?
  • Who are you selling to? (See individual)
• For individuals, consider:
  • Gender?
  • Age?
  • Background?
  • Interests?

The information about your customer determines which social media platform may be best.

For example, if you’re in real estate selling houses to people who love to travel, you should care less about LinkedIn and more about Facebook. If you own a bakery, you may actually want to reach out using a few platforms, including Google, Pinterest, and Facebook. If you’re a consultant selling to businesses, LinkedIn is your best shot.

As the information above indicates, don’t forget that even if you’re “B2B” (a business selling to other businesses) that people make decisions. Those people may have things in common, too.

Organic social media

Free, even for marketing people, is always considered the best way to promote your business. And it usually means they’re drawn to your brand, information, products, or services. That’s why organic social is always a smart investment.

Here are a few best practices when it comes to getting more people to your website or landing pages.

• Be topical or timely. People want information that’s relevant. For example, if you’re from a travel company, you may want to talk about summer vacations when people start planning them, not in September, at the end of summer. 
• Promote more useful information than promotional information (selling your products and services). For example, if you’re a college consultant, pushing people to your blog to get college preparation ideas is useful! That blog post can even have a link to get to your products or services. 
• Add images and video. Anytime you post to Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, don’t forget an image. If you have video, post that. Don’t worry about it being absolutely perfect — people have lower expectations from social platforms, especially if it’s fun or useful.
  
• Post at specific times. Mention, a social media listening platform, recommends posting during slow times so your communication stands out. Looking at research data, these are generally the best times you should be posting:
  • Facebook: Thursdays and Fridays between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m.
  • Twitter: Weekdays between noon and 6 p.m.
  • LinkedIn: Tuesday – Thursday between 7 a.m. – 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. – 6 p.m.

• Engage and interact with people online. If someone likes or shares something you posted, thank them. If a person comments on your post, respond. Of course, embody your brand, but if you don’t have one — remember to be pleasant. Chances are good trolls (a cyberbully) won’t respond, but if they do, consider ignoring, muting, or blocking them.

Paid social media

When people typically think of paid social media, they think of ads on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. Each platform has things that make it unique, but the bottom line is thinking through — again — about your ideal customer.

You’ll also need to determine what your objective is. In terms of marketing, consider whether you want people to just go to your website or perform a specific task, such as contacting you. 

SproutSocial gives a great review of the steps to take for different platforms.

Social summary

Experiment — start slow, understand what’s working and why, or why not and then tweak. After you have a winning formula, invest more time and possibly more money. Cultivate your audience by providing content that keep them engaged. It’s why having a content marketing strategy is so important.