Social Media Marketing: Definition, Strategies, and Trends

As a business owner, it seems like if you’re not sharing your business on social media, you’re doing your marketing wrong. Years ago, Facebook and Instagram marketing would be enough to get the awareness necessary to capture leads and move them through your sales funnel. While the list of social media platforms just keeps growing, the number of people who currently know how to manage them all seems to get smaller and smaller.
Why is your social media marketing important, and how can you make it work for you? This post goes through leading social media platforms, creating a strategy, and giving you valuable insight into what’s currently trending. With this knowledge, you’ll be ready to start today on a plan that expands and improves your marketing approach.

What’s the Deal with Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing targets your ideal customer base through their preferred social media networks by creating relevant content they’ll interact with. You can try social media marketing for goals such as awareness and reach, social media growth, lead generation, and more. Social media marketing is a way of meeting your audience where they spend time — specifically their leisure time. How can you show up for your ideal buyer on social? Let’s first go through which social media channel options you have.

Different Social Channels to Experiment With

Choosing which social media platforms to tackle can be complex if you don’t know what each of them has to offer. Experimenting with different types of social media content and social networks can often be the best crash course to understand what works best for your target audience — the people you want to reach with your social campaigns. Let’s get to know the leading platforms a bit to assess which ones will be best for your business.

FACEBOOK AND INSTAGRAM

Despite both being owned by Meta, these two social media platforms are very different. Think of Facebook and Instagram as siblings — not twins — from their active users’ ages, interests, and behaviors to the very nature of the content you’ll find on them. Understanding the differences between them will help you know which content to post on them, curated for the specific buyer persona you’re looking to reach.

What makes the two networks unique? Facebook remains the go-to network to find like-minded people. Whether your interests revolve around a particular podcast, a language, arts and crafts, or anything else, you’ll find your tribe on Facebook. Posts on Facebook vary from mainly text-based to photos and video.

Facebook’s monthly active users as of Q4 2021 were at 2.91 billion, with the most significant number of users in India, the United States, Indonesia, and Brazil. More than half of its users are outside the 25–44 age group, the main playground for other major platforms. Additionally, it became the platform on which users spent the most time in the United States earlier the same year.  

YOUTUBE

Choosing which social media platforms to tackle can be complex if you don’t know what each of them has to offer. Experimenting with different types of social media content and social networks can often be the best crash course to understand what works best for your target audience — the people you want to reach with your social campaigns. Let’s get to know the leading platforms a bit to assess which ones will be best for your business.

TIKTOK

Since the pandemic, TikTok has seen a growth that social media apps can only dream of. The app was released in 2017 by the Chinese company Bytedance and has grown exponentially year after year. As of January 2022, TikTok has 1 billion monthly active users who spend an average of over 14 hours per month consuming content. This time spent is only slightly less than that of US users on Facebook, clocking in at 16.5 hours per month on average.  This engagement opens the opportunity for businesses to approach users with short-form video and, done authentically, in a way that compels them to learn more. B2C companies especially have seen an enormous opportunity within TikTok, with the #FoundItOnAmazon hashtag becoming such a trend that the sales platform has a dedicated list for shoppers from the video app. .

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