Social Media Marketing in 2023 | The Definitive Guide

Social Media Marketing Definitive Guide: 

We are all well familiar with social media, and we are aware of these media’s tremendous influence on humans’ modern life.

In this article, we want to talk about the economic dimension and the importance of these media for businesses and tell you how we can use these networks to transform our small or big companies!

Social media have been guests of our digital world for years. The presence of these media soon changed the way people use the Internet. These networks have largely replaced web surfing and using sites for many people and have gradually increased their share.

From the very beginning, the high potential of these networks made businesses pay attention to them in addition to ordinary Internet users. There are big economies today which were able to provide a powerful position for themselves from small companies and through social media.

Now, after more than a decade of the presence of these media, they are a massive part of the Internet.

These points have made these networks have billions of feedback! This incredible influence of social media on people has made them an extremely convenient platform and an effective channel for various businesses.

As an eCommerce (or even non-internet) owner, you can use this huge potential to your advantage.

Hundreds of businesses have used social networks as an effective launching pad for themselves. They have brought their small business to a profitable stage with minimal cost (even, in some cases, no cost!).

So, you can get the best results with a suitable strategy and, of course, with a detailed understanding of the behavior and characteristics of social media and its users. Stay with MyAdviseNow so we can teach you everything you need to achieve this success.

What is Social Media Marketing?

For a simple definition of this topic, any business or economic activities on social media platforms related to marketing goals are called social media marketing.

These goals include increasing the popularity and reputation of the brand, increasing traffic, attracting customers, and increasing the sales of products and services in this way.

Commercial activities in the context of these media mainly take place in the field of content production (text, image, video content). But there is an easier way to be noticed in media: advertising.

The heart of every social media beat with the participation of contacts and users and sharing content with them! These media have practically no use without content sharing by users.

This is where you should use this potential feature and create a communication channel from your contacts so that you have chosen the right path by sharing your content.

It doesn’t matter whether your content is shared by mentioning (tagging) the names of friends and acquaintances under Instagram posts or retweeting on Twitter.

The main point here is that your content should be high quality, relevant and engaging to lead to much sharing and Participation from other users.

Statistics About Social Media

In the following, we mention some strange statistics about social media. Remember, these statistics and figures have been recorded on a global scale, and this information may be different in a specific country.

• Almost 97% of today’s big companies are related to media and social networks.
• More than 78% of the sellers of various products and services sell using these networks.
• 71% of customers who accessed a company’s products and services through these networks and were satisfied with its quality and conditions have recommended that business to others.
• 63% of today’s users expect companies to provide customer service through these platforms.
• More than 90% of customers have described one of the most important reasons for creating user accounts in social media as finding products and getting to know brands.
• Visual content such as photos and images gets 40 times more than other types of content. Therefore, it is recommended to have significant activity in producing visual content.
• More than 50 million small business accounts have been set up on Facebook.
• More than 4.4 million videos were uploaded and shared on Facebook in February 2016 alone. This figure has been associated with a 30% growth from 2017 to 2019.
• More than 90% of Instagram users are under 35 years old.
• On YouTube, more than one billion people log into their user accounts monthly.
• More than 25% of referral traffic in 2018 came from Pinterest.
• Instagram is more attractive to women than men. More than half of Instagram users (nearly 58%) are female, and 42% are male. On the other hand, on YouTube, the situation is precisely the opposite. The share of men using YouTube is nearly 55% and women 45%.
• During a month, more than 200 million people publish stories on Instagram.
• More than 90% of people choose YouTube as their first platform for searching and watching videos. At the end of 2018, the number of active Facebook users exceeded 1.52 billion.
• More than 93% of Facebook’s revenue came from ads displayed on mobile phones.
• More than 25 million business profiles operate on Instagram.
• More than 80% of Instagram users follow at least one business profile.
• More than 50% of university-educated people in Europe and America use LinkedIn, and only 9% of users of this social media do not have a university education.

Read: Earn money from Instagram

The above list is only a tiny part of the unique statistics and figures related to social media. This statistic is changing and growing every day.

Such information shows that social media has tremendous potential for commercial and economic interactions on the Internet for companies and businesses.

What Are the Advantages of Using Social Media Marketing?

As mentioned, this marketing model’s goals can differ. As someone who intends to enter marketing, you should have predetermined goals.

For one business, it is only about getting visits and traffic for the website. For another, it is about making the brand name famous and valid.

But in general, social media marketing has various advantages for any business. In the following, we will point out the most important of these and introduce them to you from a specialized and detailed point of view to tell you why you should use these networks for your business.

1. Advanced Targeting

Social media allows you to target the exact audience and customers you are looking for. In fact, in this type of marketing, you can approach your target market with better and more stable conditions.

Apart from the fact that target customers can be better identified in this way, it is also possible to better understand the customers’ concerns with the help of these tools.

2. Build reputation and better recognition

There is a massive flood of users on social media. What better place is there than this suitable platform to introduce your brand to others, which provides you with this possibility in the simplest possible way?

There are no limits in geography, age, and population; you can do unlimited marketing and attract customers in these media.

But apart from this, with the help of social media marketing systems, you can earn credit and increase your brand’s reputation. It should also be recognized that effective social media activity will lead to practical and valuable branding.

3. The possibility of launching a free campaign

Unlike websites that need design and development, building and setting up a business page on social media may not take a total of 1 minute! Activity in these media also does not require paying membership fees or such issues.

You can create a page quickly and for free without having to pay anything or spend a lot of time creating a page. In addition, unlike designing and setting up a website, social networks do not require special knowledge.

4. Low costs for advertising

You must also know how far social media advertising, especially YouTube and Facebook, has progressed recently, and hundreds of thousands of companies and commercial companies are ordering these ads.

The cost of advertising in these networks is significantly cheaper than other types of online advertising. With a low budget, you can start sending advertising orders to these networks and make your business famous, surprisingly.

In fact, in a normal situation (and, of course, if your type of advertisement is strategic and targeted), you can earn tens of times at a meager cost.

This is why even the biggest companies in the world have given up on television ads and giant billboards and have come to social media ads.

Read also: 21 Low-Budget Online Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses

5. Access to hundreds of reviews of your brand or products

Many exceptionally experienced and professional customers are very interested in introducing and reviewing the products or services of different brands on social media.

Many consumers spend a lot of time looking for these reviews on social media. The reason for this is that customers consider the words and opinions of other customers to be a much better criterion than the company’s common praise of its products or services. For this reason, this topic has become extremely hot and trending in social media.

YouTube is the first in this field, and hundreds of thousands of review videos of various things have been published, which has countless audiences.

This feature has also made the topic of freelancing expand significantly. Freelancers have used this feature and user preferences in the best possible way.

By reviewing the products users are looking for, they put their videos or content in front of hundreds or thousands. In many cases, millions of users in this way to a Weiner becomes. Many famous people have earned millions of dollars in this way!

Apart from these two, another advantage is only applicable to business owners. By viewing these reviews on social media and seeing customer comments about your products or services, you can find flaws much more straightforward than usual and try to fix problems and increase quality.

6. Mouth-to-Mouth Marketing

In today’s businesses, there is a topic called Mouth-to-Mouth marketing, during which customers who are satisfied with a product or service begin to describe and promote that product to their friends and acquaintances or even publish it on their virtual pages or personal blogs.

With the expansion of social media, Mouth-to-Mouth marketing also expanded significantly and is now known as viral marketing. If you offer a high-quality and suitable product, and even a few people do this for that product, your brand and products will be displayed exponentially many times more.

Remember that this method is much more effective than traditional advertising. In fact, except that you will not bear the cost of advertising this model, your products and services will be introduced to new users and customers in the best and most effective way possible.

Social media has provided this capability well for today’s businesses. Half of the incoming traffic these businesses receive is this way.

7. Obtain information about the trends of the day

We all know that time is gold, and social media can prove this and help you get important information as quickly as possible. The requirement for success is to have a growing trend and stability.

For these two cases, the first important thing is always to be up-to-date and get practical information related to your field of work as soon as possible.

You can do this on social media and, in a short period, bring a large amount of updated information and essential news in your field of work. Social media is the best place to follow the trends of the day.

8. Create a competitive environment for competitor analysis

One of the best social media marketing strategies is the ability to review and analyze competitors. We have repeatedly mentioned that examining competing companies’ behavior and performance is necessary for success.

Of course, do not confuse this with copying or imitating the behavior of others! This means that you should constantly monitor your competitors and take advantage of the things that make them succeed or fail.

So, social media also helps you to find out about their current information and strategies directly, without your competitors knowing anything.

In fact, by doing this, you can compare the state of your business and your campaigns with competitors and identify deficiencies. In many cases, you can even use competitors’ surveys and get the views and requests of their users, which can be found in the comments section of posts on virtual networks, and start implementing new ideas earlier than competitors!

9. More discoverable and accessible to the audience

All businesses go about it differently to be noticed by the public. One of the most important goals of any business is to have a way to be available and known by new contacts.

Social media does that for you. Suppose you send high-quality content related to your goals in these networks. In that case, you will naturally be discovered by many users and new customers.

10. Create an effective communication channel

These days, many companies use the chat system and communication bridges of social media and the online support system to establish relationships with contacts and customers.

In western businesses, many companies have used Twitter for customer support. But in Iran, some successful companies and campaigns have used the Q&A system or the question and answer system of Instagram stories.

In this way, they not only create an exciting way to interact with the audience but in this way, they can launch a helpful survey. You can also communicate more effectively with your customers with the exciting tools of the Instagram stories system.

You can even follow your contacts and customers and access their images and stories more than usual. Knowing their daily concerns lets you get important and valuable information to improve your business.

11. The opportunity to discover practical talents

Many people may have noticed this point, but social media provide you with a suitable platform to find talented and capable people.

Suppose you pay more attention to the behavior of your virtual page contacts and followers. In that case, you will see that some follow you because of their interest and knowledge.

These people can be good workers for you, and employing and hiring these people in this way will be more helpful than standard recruitment systems!

12. The ability to display the features of your business

Unlike the usual communication systems, social media have a more private mode, allowing you to produce and publish content with fewer worries and more intimacy.

Just like the most successful business companies in the world, who, in addition to introducing products and producing targeted content, use exciting methods to attract more users’ trust in these media, you can also dedicate a part of your activity to displaying secondary things.

For example, you can share pictures or videos from behind the scenes of your work and team members in these media.

By doing this, you can bring your contacts closer to you and interact with them like a close friend. The results have shown that this method has had excellent feedback in increasing stable and loyal customers and thus increasing sales.

13. The possibility of creating a virtual community

In continuation of the previous option, social media helps you to have a close and much better relationship with regular contacts or even professional and busy people in your field of activity.

With such a system, it is possible to create an active virtual community and use sincere bilateral or multilateral cooperation best.

People are very interested in this dynamic business and are much more willing to communicate with this business model.

By creating multiple communication bridges, these companies have created a universal campaign and established a very intimate relationship with their contacts. The first step in turning a user into a loyal customer is gaining their trust. This social media feature makes it very easy for you.

14. Get backlinks and increase site traffic

Social media will be influential in SEO and optimizing your ranking in search engines. Just like hundreds of reputable brands that put their website links on social networks in different ways, we can do this and get healthy and reliable backlinks very quickly.

By receiving these backlinks, we not only get many visits for free and efficiently, but because of the validity of these networks, the visits are entirely natural and organic.

After that, the site’s ranking improves in search engines and, as a result, traffic. Our site will grow more and more, and the conversion rate will also increase.

You can publish links to your site’s content in posts on networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or even YouTube and direct visitors to your site by persuading them.

Another exciting method used a lot is to insert a link in the stories we usually encounter on Instagram several times a day.

Remember that an article or content that can get thousands of likes and shares can also be a great source of referral links!

15. Help to increase revenue generation by selling more

We are not supposed to use social networks only to communicate or introduce ourselves to our contacts. These networks can directly become one of your sales channels!

Since you can present your products or services in these networks just like your website, then the ability to prepare a sales platform in this way is very high.

People are always willing to buy from a brand they trust. But they still go to other brands. In social media, you can expose yourself to a wide range of products for sale and use the so-called sales funnel method well.

Remember that these media have many tools for you, with the help of which you can present your products and services to customers in the best possible way.

Due to the convenience and functionality of these media, users can see your images or videos at high speed, and there is no need to register and download files and such issues.

An interesting report published by Pinterest social media shows that more than 75% of the users of this network have become their customers as soon as they see the images and information available from different brands.

This is why it is said that online customers buy what they can see and review. Social media has given you the tools to showcase your products correctly.

Read also: The Ultimate eCommerce Marketing Strategies to Win in 2023

16. Hashtags

The beneficial and lovely system of hashtags is one of the most important advantages of social media. The practicality of this feature has made the regular search system give way to hashtags.

Hashtags are tags of words or phrases in the form of links. When a user clicks on them, he gets access to all their hashtag content.

This system helps users to access the keywords they want very quickly and easily and to reach what they are looking for much sooner.

Hashtags are also beneficial in social media marketing. Different businesses direct new customers and users to their virtual pages quickly and easily using other hashtags related to their work field.

How to Create a Successful Strategy in Social Media Marketing?

 

Now that you are familiar with the advantages and characteristics of this type of marketing, it is time to get down to business and start your marketing strategy.

In this case, you must act step by step and be principled. In the following, we will introduce the leading solutions for launching a successful campaign in social networks.

1. Determine your goals

You will only progress with setting a goal and just having a page on social media. If you have a strategic team, it is better to consult with them and propose plans to start work.

To think that there is no particular need for planning for such a problem and that you can be active in all networks is very good on the surface. Still, it is better to know that such a view has caused the early failure of many businesses.

You should identify the channels you need and then proceed to create the relevant campaigns in a principled way.

For this, first of all, you should see for what purpose you intend to set up such a thing. You should see from what strata your contacts are and their concerns.

Ultimately, it would help if you determined your ultimate goal by answering what exactly you want to gain from social media marketing.

2. Identify and specify your contacts

As we mentioned above, your most important goal should be to determine the target audience and, in other words, choose the target market. Just as you are looking for the answer to why you went to social media marketing, you should determine whom you will reach with social media marketing.

The information you need includes things such as age, gender, place of residence, interests of contacts, and other such issues that you can make a better decision by having them.

Of course, every business knows its target market well and knows who its main customers are. Still, in any case, for a professional start, you must implement this in principle.

For this, you can search and research other competitors to see what kind of people their contacts are.

3. Have a basic guideline for the activity

A big mistake many businesses make is needing to have basic principles and work instructions. This mistake causes everyone with access to the user account to share whatever they find helpful.

Apart from the fact that, in this case, inappropriate information may be published, this will cause no coordination and order in the activities of your network.

Mainly if a team carries out your activities with several members, you must prepare comprehensive instructions and explain how to work to all members so that they all operate in these networks according to the same policy.

Even if there is no team and you are going to manage a page alone, you still need to use proper guidelines for this work. You can understand these conversations by looking at Amazon’s Instagram page.

The following are some of the most important things to note in these instructions:

• Try to use consistent design language. You can even have a unique design on each platform.
• Be careful when using emojis. Overusing them is not recommended at all, and on the other hand, not using them may make your content look too formal.
• Use similar formats for images, videos, or even texts. You can choose a default format for each content type category and edit them into new ideas.
• Avoid inserting too many text descriptions, and try to convey your messages to your contacts through compelling images and ideas of this model. (Of course, this case is different in exceptional cases where you will only write text and articles in these networks.

4. Categorize and prioritize your content type

What type of content you publish on social media is very important. For this case, you should also refer to the contacts. Not all businesses will use social media content marketing the same way.

For example, one educational profile should maneuver more on articles and textual content, or an online store should focus on providing visual information about products.

You should also prioritize this issue. Of course, you can use more than one type of content. However, it is better to define the main priorities.

5. Schedule publishing and sharing of content

One of the common mistakes that many virtual pages make is that as soon as they set up their page on a social network, they start posting content one after the other. Then, after some time, they become feverish and quickly reduce this process and stop it very soon!

So quickly, a wrong decision will lead to you wasting your energy for several days.

The right way is to set a schedule from the very beginning and from the first article you want to publish. The best way is to prepare and publish content during different periods.

6. Check your progress and progress continuously

By constantly checking your situation on social media, you can notice your progress. If there is no progress, you will be quickly informed and try to fix it.

For this purpose, you can do this manually by checking all the content weekly and the number of views, likes, and shares of each content.

But there is another professional way for this, and that is the use of social media monitoring and analysis tools.

Buffer Analyze professional analysis tool, Zoho Social comprehensive network management system, or CoSchedule is among the most popular platforms you can use to analyze and monitor your social media profiles.

7. Use hashtags in the best possible way

As mentioned in the benefits section, hashtags are one of the most valuable tools you can use. The practicality of this system has made hashtags not only for regular users but also for professional users and businesses.

But how to use hashtags well? It doesn’t matter what network you use. The first step is to unveil an exclusive hashtag for your brand and introduce it as much as possible.

Then use this hashtag in all content, and even if you can share it in other sources, do this. Remember that hashtags typically have two fixed and variable forms.

The fixed form is the exclusive tags related to your brand and overall work, and the variable tags are different for each post. We suggest you refrain from using unrelated hashtags to attract more visitors and users.

Many people with the mindset that the more hashtags they have, the more views they will get make their content in the worst possible way and not only cause confusion and disorganization, but it can easily be the same as fake profiles and spam.

It is better to know that social media also have many monitoring tools, such as search engine bots. In many cases, the pages that are reported as spam in this way are included in the list of anonymous pages and are limited in many cases.

These pages are often unavailable or deleted forever without prior notice! So it is better to avoid attracting more visitors in unusual ways.

For example, you can also use critical global events in your hashtags. For instance, on Earth Day, you can publish posts related to this day with the hashtag and thereby participate in millions of global campaigns and get a large share of these views.

Read also: 20 Actionable Ways to Increase Sales for Your Small Business

8. Publish content when your contacts are active

This may seem strange, but it substantially increases the rank of a virtual page in social media.

For example, by updating its algorithms, Instagram has devised measures that automatically increase the posts that receive more likes, comments, and shares in a shorter time.

In this case, Instagram itself, in turn, helps this growing trend. For example, in Explorer, these types of photos and videos are prioritized.

To be successful in this, the best thing to do is to publish your content when the most significant number of your audience is online. For this purpose, it may not be possible to determine how many users are online. Still, this information can be obtained manually and with a simple trial and error.

It is enough to publish posts in a few time intervals to see the feedback of the contacts. Then you can quickly see when you got more likes and comments.

Pay attention to this point because the content-sharing system in these networks is such that new content is displayed on top of older content.

Therefore, if you send your content at the wrong time, not only Because your contacts and followers are not online, you will receive a lower percentage of views, likes, or comments, but because of posting newer content from other pages, your post will go to the bottom of the list and may never be seen by a large percentage of people.

The best time for typical peak consumption (6 pm to 11 pm) is to use social media.

9. Take advantage of the strong influence of stories

Stories, especially Instagram stories, which became available to everyone in 2016, are a feature that strangely changed the trend of Social media marketing.

Exciting features include the ability to create polls, the ability to complete a form to receive suggestions or criticism, where to use time tools (such as counters), and probably most importantly, the ability to put links in stories (by swiping up the page) are features that are useful to businesses.

They have greatly helped in advancing economic goals. Among the best parts of stories is that you can see the exact number with the name of each profile that has caught your story.

With this, you can find the feedback time of more followers and get more information from active contacts.

Keep these points in mind about stories:

• The beauty and charm of stories are their informality. Use simple, sincere, and even colloquial language in stories.
• Showcase things in stories that you wouldn’t publish elsewhere. Showing behind-the-scenes or funny pranks of team members and such pictures or videos have many fans.
• Make proper use of Q&A tools, polls, and other Instagram tools that are rapidly being upgraded and updated.
• Increase the appeal of the stories by tagging the location.
• Do not neglect the importance and vital feedback of the live stream or live stories! In this way, you can be in direct and instant contact with the contacts, and if you can have such a program now and then and answer the questions of the users’ lives, you will gain their trust.

10. Use the user-generated content system

User-Generated Content, or UGC, is an exciting feature for business owners to encourage their contacts to create content for them for free. The best example of this is creating exclusive hashtags for your audience.

For example, many smartphone companies assign a unique hashtag and ask users to publish content with those hashtags on social networks.

For instance, Samsung, with the hashtag #withGalaxy or Apple, with the hashtag #ShotoniPhone, or Xiaomi, with the hashtag #ShotByMi encourage their users to share photos taken with these companies’ mobile phones with these hashtags.

This exciting system helps businesses share millions of posts and articles about themselves in these media at the lowest cost and with a minor intervention and gain new users and contacts for themselves.

The exciting thing is that the statistics have shown that the use of UGC has led to an increase in the reputation of brands along with an increase in customer loyalty.

The most exciting thing is that most of the contacts of this system are professionals, and even by reviewing and introducing the products from the point of view of a customer, they increase your sales.

Conclusion: Social Media Marketing in 2023

Modern mobiles and portable devices are taking more and more share of the internet world. Reports show that mobile phone users record nearly 70% of site visits. Now that social media, which are completely specific to these devices, have a share!

Today’s smartphones are always everywhere in our pockets, which means that social networks are available to all of us at any moment.

Therefore, it is inevitable that trying to attract this turbulent and lively market should be one of every business’s most significant concerns.

Social media these days have penetrated our lives, so we cannot ignore them even if we want to. With social media marketing, you can easily and quickly reach a massive flood of users and potential customers.

We have mentioned different solutions and strategies in other articles from the MyAdviseNow site. We suggest you visit those articles as well.