Social Media Marketing Best Practices

Being a part of the social media community is a great asset to have for your business, but some businesses may think it’s not in their best interest or they never had a successful social media strategy. Using social media best practices can increase your business exposure without depleting your entire marketing budget.

What does organic mean?

It is widely known that posting on your social media business page is free, so why do you need a budget? There are two kinds of social posts: organic and paid. What does organic mean in social media marketing? What are organic social posts? Organic means anything on social media without paid promotion. Organic are non paid ads. Social channels will let those who follow you see your business’ posts. Maybe. There are so many posts and tweets that go out every day that if you don’t put money behind these, many times no one will ever see the posts. According to Just Media, your followers will see less than 20% of the content you post. For example, Facebook’s algorithm pushes friends and family posts over business page posts.

What are paid social media posts?

Paid posts are posts in your newsfeed that have the “Sponsored” tag attached. Paid social posts give you the opportunity to get very granular with segmenting and targeting your audience by demographic, geographic, behaviors, and/or interests. LinkedIn gives you the opportunity to target by industry, employee, and seniority level as well. You can reach an audience beyond your current followers. You also have the opportunity to create different audiences for different types of posts.  However, it is important to note that not all posts can be promoted. Social channels have their own advertising policies that prohibit certain types of images and verbiage.

This begs the question, should all your social media posts be paid posts? Are organic posts useless since there is low reach? Or should you do both paid and organic? We believe you should do both. We find that some of our clients perform well even with organic posts (this always depends on the industry). Then when we pay to promote the organic post, it doubles or even triples the reach! Organic posts might reach an audience who would otherwise be missed when targeting through paid posts. So it’s never a waste to post both organic and paid. However, businesses that completely depend on organic influence risk becoming irrelevant and stagnant on social platforms. That’s why we suggest you focus your marketing efforts on a paid social media strategy, while still posting organically.

Why do I need a social media budget?

A social media budget will help promote your business and reach new consumers. The good news is that social media advertising can be executed with any size budget. Remember the time put into developing the content and finding engaging images is also a component of the budget. However, the benefits certainly outweigh the costs. The budget can be applied to different types of social ad campaigns depending on the goal, whether it is brand awareness, website traffic, engagement, or conversions.

You might think your audience isn’t on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. But that’s okay. Advertising on Facebook provides access to a bunch of other applications and mobile websites through their audience network, which uses the same targeting data you entered on Facebook. New to Facebook? Partner with a social media agency like ours to create a brand awareness ad campaign for you. The goal in this is to start reaching and connecting with your target audience so that they might like and follow your page.

Did you know promoting posts on Facebook also gives you the opportunity to promote on Instagram with just one click? Your business doesn’t need an Instagram account to do this. Promoting on multiple channels increases your brand awareness.

Many businesses owners and employees are on LinkedIn because they know they need to be, but many businesses do not have a company page. How can prospective customers on social media find your business if an account doesn’t exist? LinkedIn’s network has over 65 million professionals with nearly 50% of members having decision-making authority for their companies. Set aside some of your budget to create sponsored updates. These sponsored updates can be clicked through to the company’s website or to their LinkedIn company page.

Paid advertising and sharing content brings more than just brand awareness. Generating website traffic and producing quality leads are benefits of using social media marketing best practices.  Don’t forget to take advantage of your ad campaign’s analytics on each social platform. Social media analytics enable you to see how successful your social advertising is or if you need to refine your strategy.