Evolve your social media marketing in 2022
Our digital world is constantly evolving and as are the social media channels that we use. Read our guide covering everything you need to know to elevate your brand on social media in 2022.
Facebook, one of our longest running social media platforms has many benefits for businesses. With 1.86 billion users and a broad age demographic; it is no surprise that Facebook is one of the most popular choices for marketing.
Advantages
Paid advertising on the platform: When it comes to PPC, Facebook is the best social media platform. Featuring their very own system allowing you to sell your products directly via the platform. Businesses are also able to create promotional posts targeting specific demographics including age, gender and location.
Business Suite: Facebook has a fully integrated Business Suite system. Making it easy for you to track performance on your posts with insights and analytics software pre-installed.
Customer feedback: Users are able to send reviews, making your business page look much more trustworthy and reliable.
Instagram integration: As Facebook also own Instagram, scheduling posts also works with their platform. This creates a simpler process in publishing posts together.
Limitations
Harder to appeal to younger market: Due to the rise of platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat; the market on Facebook has shifted to a much older audience. So, if you are trying to appeal to a younger audience this may not be the channel for you.
Time and resources: Facebook requires an average of 4-5 posts a week; making it time consuming without any promise of return. We recommend creating a content calendar and posts scheduling to reduce overall timing.
Algorithm: Facebook uses a complex algorithm making it hard for your posts to reach out. Often, posts will not make it onto the timeline of your page followers.
Need marketing plan in place: To make the most out of Facebook for your business; you require a detailed marketing strategy which can be difficult for small businesses. If this is an issue then we are always here to help.
Privacy: In recent times, Facebook has had issues with privacy laws and regulations. Customer data used for analytics is now more limited which may make it harder to find trends in consumer behaviour.
LinkedIn is the platform for businesses, this is a highly effective platform for engaging with clients, other companies and co-workers. Over the last few years, LinkedIn has become an integral platform for social media marketing. Often, this is the only choice for specific companies. With 660 million users and 303 million monthly users, using LinkedIn for marketing is one not to be missed.
Advantages
Potential to go viral: A huge benefit of LinkedIn is there’s a much higher engagement rate than other social platforms. When you like someone’s post, it appears on your connections timelines; making it much easier to get noticed and go viral with the correct content.
Professional platform: This platform has been made specifically for industries to connect with each other; meaning that there is a clear demographic for creating business.
Industry Knowledge: Brands and heads of companies are able to share industry knowledge and expertise, positioning themselves as thought leaders.
Reach potential prospects: There are mass opportunities on LinkedIn to meet potential clients and generate leads.
Research: LinkedIn uses analytics on your business page to monitor engagement, how many have visited your page and opportunities.
Paid Advertising: Businesses are easily able to promote posts and paid advertising is integrated directly into the channel. This is advantageous as you don’t have to set a specific budget.
Post length: You are able to post blog length articles; if you need to explain your message in detail you can input as content as you like.
Limitations
Spam messages: Due to the competitive environment on LinkedIn, many users send out automated messages to promote themselves; this may cause your messages to be overlooked as spam.
Less interaction types: You can only follow or connect with people and like posts. There isn’t as much interaction when compared to other social media channels.
Need a complete profile: To harness all opportunities on LinkedIn you need a full profile including; website, name, biography, reviews, testimonials, videos, images and more.
Instagram is the 4th most used social media platform, with 1.386 billion users. Image and video is at the forefront of Instagram and as visual content creates a long lasting impression on consumers; using Instagram in your marketing plan is highly effective in articulating your brand persona.
Advantages
Visual content: Users retain messages from visual content 10 times more than from written content. This makes Instagram integral if you want to impact your audience and create a long lasting impression. Instagram is the ideal platform for reinforcing your branding.
Visual representation of your business: Using social media graphics to support your business is beneficial for brand consistency.
Hashtags: Using hashtags on posts is useful on Instagram in segmenting posts and targeting a specific demographic.
Location tags: Users are able to tag their location in posts, this can be beneficial for businesses if they want their posts to target a certain demographic by geotagging.
Advertising: Instagram advertising is directly connected to Facebook; meaning that you can create ads for your target market throughout the platform.
Large reach: Instagram is one of the most daily used platforms and due to the millions of users a viral post can easily transmit to a huge reach.
Instagram Shopping: Businesses are able to sell products directly via their platform as well as linking to their website. If a user views a product, Instagram will automatically retarget them with the same/similar products.
Limitations
Only photo/video content: Although it is advantageous using visual content, the lack of written content may be less beneficial for certain business types that need to explain their messages in detail.
Clickable links: You are unable to refer users to your website via Instagram captions, this may prove difficult in directing your audience to specific web pages as the only way to do this is by a single link in your Instagram bio.
Twitter is centred around a fast-paced news feed where users are able to upload small tweets. With over 206 million daily users worldwide, the platform works as a news hub for social media and has often been compared to the modern day newspaper.
Advantages
Customer service: Twitter can be extremely useful to respond to customers, users can tag businesses, explain their issue and receive customer service. This is beneficial as the brand appears up to date whilst engaging with customers.
Feedback: Users are able to give feedback on products/services, businesses can use this to their advantage by retweeting, positioning themselves as reliable and trustworthy.
Brand consistency: Twitter is extremely useful in projecting your brand’s voice, many businesses use this to their advantage and by tweeting regularly they can broadcast themselves much more than other social media channels.
Brand collaborations: We have seen many brands come together on Twitter, simply by using humour and tweeting each other this can be useful in positioning your company as the people’s brand and make you seem down to earth.
Twitter Analytics: Twitter has integrated analytics so that you can track the performance of each tweet, this helps in identifying strengths and weaknesses on posts and seeing which work best.
No algorithm: Tweets are chronological with the latest tweets appearing at the top of the timeline, this makes it one of the only social media websites not using an algorithm and gives a fair game to everyone., with no favour for certain brands/content.
Limitations
Time consuming: Need to tweet frequently every day to stay relevant. To make the most out of Twitter brands need to constantly be active and engage with other accounts.
Noise: As the timeline is constantly moving it is hard for your tweet to leave a long lasting impression. They can disappear off your audience’s timelines very quickly.
140 character limit: Twitter can prove difficult if you have a lot to say, you have a small word limit meaning that tweets can only be a couple of sentences.
Users follow many accounts: As users often follow hundreds of accounts, their timeline can become cluttered causing your tweets not to stand out.
YouTube
Although many may not consider it a social media platform, YouTube is the most used social media channel in the world, with over 2 billion daily users. More than 5 billion YouTube videos are watched every day, it’s also the second most visited website behind Google. These statistics prove that using YouTube to market your company is extremely beneficial.
Advantages
YouTube Advertising before videos: Businesses can use YouTube as an advertising platform through Google. You can pay to have a video advertised before users selected videos start. This is useful in providing your audience with direct content, relevant to what they are watching and gaining brand awareness.
Video Content: Users retain messages from videos much more than from written content, meaning a solid YouTube video for your brand will be much more effective in impacting your audience.
Engagement with audience: Engagement levels on YouTube are much higher than its rivals. With the option to like, comment and subscribe your audience is more active.
Analytics: YouTube has an advanced analytical platform which allows you to track performance and see geographical data of your audience, allowing an efficient system when targeting for your future campaigns.
Limitations
High cost: Due to the requirement of professional equipment for filming and editing, producing content on the platform comes at a much higher cost than other social media websites.
Time consuming: Editing videos is a lengthy process which is much more time consuming then other methods of content creation.
Need good video content: Although the benefits of YouTube stand higher than other channels, if the content is not high quality, you will not gain much attention and revenue.
Related videos competition: Related videos appear next to your videos, meaning that your competition is always close to you.
TikTok
TikTok is the newcomer to this list, only being founded in 2018 and has recently been named the fastest growing social media platform of all time. It now has over 2 billion monthly users and their growth shows no sign for slowing down. There is still a gap in the market with not many businesses leveraging opportunities of TikTok so this is definitely one to consider in your marketing campaigns.
Advantages
Algorithm: TikTok has an algorithm that appears to be much more advantageous then other social media platforms. The randomly generated content can work in anyone’s favour, with the chance to go viral even when your page doesn’t have many followers.
Popularity: TikTok is the social media brand of the moment and its overall popularity is not one to ignore. The brand recently grew to 2 billion monthly users in record timing, so using TikTok for your business is now more important than ever.
TikTok advertising: TikTok allows users to advertise directly through their system. By using paid advertising, you can force yourself onto others feeds, and with the right video you have the chance to go viral. See our blog on how you can use their advertising system to your advantage.
Limitations
Older generation not present: If your audience isn’t Generation Z, then this may not be the correct channel to use as overall 70% of users are young people. There has been an increased interest from older generations but this still may not be as useful than other channels.
Time consuming: Creating good content for TikTok is time consuming due to filming and editing, and making a good video proves hard for many. This makes it more time consuming than other social media sites.
Need good content: To push your brand and make the most out of TikTok, you need to be funny, engaging, relevant and active! This requires a lot of attention to detail so make sure you stand out from others.
Pinterest often doesn’t get the same attention as other social media websites but there is a specific niche market that many brands can benefit from. The platform is image driven and allows users to upload image content as well as share to others.
Advantages
Drive traffic externally: Businesses can take advantage by generating traffic from outside of Pinterest through other websites. Pinterest often appears on Google images so users can find your profile through a simple image search.
Shareable content: Creating good graphic materials and photography can be shareable for others, this is an organic way of promoting your brand and position your work to be popular.
Image content: Visual content allows users to retain messages at a much higher rate than text content, this is advantageous as your messages can stand out and be much clearer in engaging with your audience.
Engagement: Due to the nature of the platform, there is a high level of engagement with users able to like and share each other’s content.
Boost SEO with website referrals: By linking your Pinterest profile to your website, you can gain much more traffic to your own website which will ultimately increase your SEO ranking.
Limitations
Not as large audience: Pinterest has a low level of users when compared to other social media websites, this can make it difficult to directly market your business to your audience.
Need a lot of content: To make the most out of marketing through Pinterest, you need to create high quality content and post often, which can be time consuming and hard to incorporate into your social media strategy.
Not as much business orientation: Pinterest is designed for creatives to share ideas and bookmark content they like, this means that marketing may be more difficult. People are less likely to use this platform to find businesses and be sold to.
Copyright: Businesses need to make original content, by uploading other people’s images they may face copyright issues which will prove very negative.
Social Media Marketing with Stone Create
At Stone Create we offer flexible social media packages suited to your business. Simply choose which channels you would like us to maintain and we will provide content creation, maintenance and support for your business. For more information on where we can take your business with social media marketing, contact us today.
