Social media marketing is one of the best ways your brand can reach a wide audience – if you do it right. Facebook, for example, now has 2 billion monthly users around the world and 17 million active users in Australia (70% of Australians have a Facebook account, and 50 % check theirs daily), so a Facebook account that attracts a lot of views is hugely valuable in marketing terms.
Other social media platforms also reach huge numbers of Australians, with YouTube boasting 15.5 million different Australian visitors a month, Twitter having about 3 million active Australian users, Instagram 5 million, Snapchat 4 million (per DAY) and LinkedIn 4.2 million (although a lot of the users for these platforms will overlap heavily).
Smaller brands especially need a strategy in order to build up a social media following, as if you can get people who have never used your business to follow you on social media they will be more likely to give you a go in the real world.
With that in mind, here are the best 4 ways you can market your brand over social media:
1.) Stand out
With 2 billion users, there are a lot of Facebook accounts out there. In order to attract more followers than just your family and friends you need to find a way to stand out from the crowd.
A good way to do this is by coming up with a gimmick to follow, or by creating an interesting brand narrative. A successful example of this is the White Moose Café in Dublin, which has built a huge following by picking fights with vocal interest groups such as vegans. The owner, Paul Stenson, also has a highly active Snapchat account and has succeeded in making his café a Dublin tourist attraction through the power of social media.
2.) Use humour
People don’t go on social media looking for ads. If you want to engage people with your posts, at least some of them need to be humorous. Jokes about your industry are the most appropriate ways for your page to be funny as well as relevant, and if you can get people to share them you should quickly build up a following.
The humour also needs to be accessible to the majority of Australians, as even if your target audience will all get the joke you need other people to share it first. Highly technical jokes are probably not appropriate, while humour that makes use of pop culture will be very effective (hint: it’s very easy to find a Simpsons quote relevant to literally ANYTHING).
3.) Be informative
People who follow you should be able to explain what you do. If you run a restaurant or a bar, this is easy, but if your business is a bit less accessible to the average person then you need to help your followers understand it by posting content about your industry.
If you run an accounting firm, for example, some of your posts should explain what accountants can actually help people with. Likewise, financial advisors can post articles explaining how investing in the stock market actually works.
4.) Be original
A good mix of humour, information and a brand gimmick should help you to build up more followers, but to be really successful in the social media world at least some of the content you post has to be original.
It’s easy enough to appropriate memes or modify a quote under a screenshot to make it humorous and unique, but posting original information is harder. If your website has a blog then linking to this occasionally is a good way to make sure your followers are seeing things they can only get by following you, as well as let you make the article as relevant as possible to your business.
Social media is a fairly new phenomenon in marketing terms, and plenty of major brands are still struggling to get it right. By following these 4 steps your business will be able to build up a presence online, and this will translate into more people using your product or service.