Social Media Marketing: The Do’s and Don’ts

How to plug into the social network and convert like never before

Social Media has undergone a fundamental evolution during our lifetimes. Not long ago, we were blowing up friendships with our hapless Top 8 appointments on MySpace. Today, there’s a four-year degree’s worth of knowledge one must implement to harness the strategic power of our social networks.

Even the sheer number of platforms can be daunting. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter have become staples, but countless others are growing virally with time. Reese Witherspoon has only recently made us aware of the existence of Tik Tok, a platform favored by Generation Z, boasting more than 800 million installs and brimming with potential for social media marketers.

Since moving back into a dorm isn’t in the cards for most of us, we’ve compiled this handy guide to help you tweet, hashtag, post, and influence with Paris Hilton-level prowess to build your brand, attract more traffic, and send your conversions through the roof.

Make it mobile

Mobile internet consumption has grown by a staggering 504% since 2011. Try as we might eschew the siren call of the smartphone, data shows that we’ll spend an average of 170 minutes per day watching cat videos, liking Lady Gaga’s latest tweets, and compulsively buying waffle irons on Amazon. Your brand will reap great social rewards by bending strategy to fit these powerful cultural trends.

Out the gate, your social landing pages must be designed with mobile users in mind. Just as one snaps out of a scrolling session on Instagram to find five hours have passed, your mobile customers should be provided a seamless experience in which they can tap, swipe, and scroll their way to your offerings – without having to wonder how. Big, bright buttons, intuitive user interfaces, and effective use of imagery, copy, and link content are all essential to your mobile strategy.

A recent study by Microsoft has revealed the average human attention span to last a mere eight seconds – less, dear reader, than that of a goldfish. Perhaps more troubling is the statistic that this metric is decreasing at an average of 88% per annum. Users, it seems, are simply incapable of absorbing your long-form content. Try as they might, users just don’t have the patience to sift through large blocks of text.

Rather than succumb to the existential crises of our time, your brand must take advantage of these facts with dedicated content decisions that will maximize your marketing strategies:

• Highlight important keywords
• Use bullets to break up verbose passages
• Break key sections into subheadings.
• (See what I did there?)

Go viral with video content

Products with video content enjoy significantly higher conversion than their more traditional competitors. No matter what your platform is, the integration of video content in the form of mini-commercials, animations, or innovative product displays is essential to a successful conversion strategy.

And you needn’t take my word for it. This Instagram story from Nuxe reports a whopping 6.2X return on ad spend. Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine spurred the rise of their colossal headphone empire by sneaking their Beats products into music videos that would amass billions of views on YouTube. These and countless other success stories confirm that video offers the user a reason to stop mindlessly scrolling, and consume what you present.

Don’t let them refuse the call!

Most of us have heard the term “Call to Action” in our experiences with social media marketing. Like Lyanna Mormont, your brand must compel users to answer the call, and engage with your content. Wooing your followers with your brand’s unique personality will pay dividends in the conversion department. Even asking for followers can work, if one does so gracefully. Don’t churn out lifeless demands for users to “BUY NOW!!!” Consider your “voice,” and your audience. Craft promotions that will speak to those users.

Make like M. Night Shyamalan and split

Even the hardest hitters in the social media marketing world don’t always nail it on the first try. Sometimes, you’ve got to test the waters to see if your following is more into option A or option B.

Spend some time crunching the data. Take a good, hard look at your posts by the numbers, and analyze the cold, hard facts. Determine what sort of content is performing the best, and when it’s performing. Draft two possible content strategies that maximize the number of eyeballs that will land on your page. Schedule content to coincide with internet rush hour, and let the games begin. Many platforms will allow you to split test ads out of the box – Facebook and Instagram will both run two versions of your ad concurrently, thereby determining which is the most effective ad.

Consistency is Key

Like ice cream and showers, things often should be either hot or cold – certainly not both. The same goes for your brand. When curating the online experience you want your users to have, consideration should be afforded to the consistent presentation of small details. Are you using typefaces consistently? Does your color scheme wax and wane like an iguana trying to camouflage against a Where’s Waldo book?

Your audience shouldn’t wonder who is offering them the content on their screen – just like you can identify a person you know by sight, your audience should be able to recognize your brand at a glance. Elements such as tone in your writing, the style of imagery, and the usage of the color pallet are all components that will make up your brand’s visage.

The Age of the Influencer is Upon Us

If your social media marketing strategy leaves something to be desired, don’t fret – marketing in the land of the social network can often feel like the Wild West of advertising, fraught with algorithm changes, shifting conventions, and controversial privacy concerns. Untamed as these digital waters may be, there is no question that your brand must adopt an intelligent social media marketing strategy in order to engage audiences and optimize your results.

For brands struggling to gain traction in the social media jungle, a partnership with a company like Oyova can be a great first step in telling your brand’s story to an ever-changing world.