Five Proven Tips to Improve Social Media Marketing

Last updated on June 21st, 2023 at 11:32 pm

Love it or hate it, but you cannot ignore it. Yes, I’m talking about social media that has become a lot more than just connecting with friends, having personal interactions, and sharing opinions.

Around 3.484 billion people worldwide use social media, making it a powerful tool for brands to connect with their audience. In the US alone, 91% of businesses are projected to use social media for marketing purposes. Why shouldn’t they?

Social media offers multiple benefits – faster communication, networking, improved visibility, increased website traffic, are just a few of them.

However, not all brands can equally harness the power of social media marketing. If not strategically planned, social media marketing won’t reap the desired results.

In today’s post, I’m going to share five tips to improve the effectiveness of your social media marketing.

Without further ado, let’s dive in:

How to Improve Social Media Marketing

Follow these tips to increase effectiveness of your social media marketing:

1. Include Social Proofs in Your Campaigns

Don’t you check online reviews/testimonials of a product that you are thinking about purchasing? Well, this is something most of us do. And the reason is to find social proof.

Social proof is nothing but a concept that states people most often follow the actions of masses. When we notice that many people have already bought a product, we tend to believe that the product is excellent and end up buying that product.

As rightly put by Robert Cialdini, who studied the principle of social proof in-depth in his book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion,

We view a behavior as more correct in a given situation to the degree that we see others performing it.

By using social proof in your social media marketing campaigns, you make your campaigns more persuasive. And doing so will bring more prospects/customers participating in your social media campaigns.

Following are some common tactics of establishing social proof:

Positive reviews/testimonials
Influencer/celebrity endorsements
Awards/recognition
Social shares
Relevant Industry Associations

The next time, don’t ignore the importance of social proof in the digital space if you want your marketing campaigns to be more effective.

2. Leverage the Power of User-Generated Content

Needless to say, user-generated content (UGC) is gold when it comes to social media marketing. In fact, 85% of users consider UGC more persuasive than brand photos or videos.

So, if you incorporate user-generated content in your social media campaigns or you create UGC-based social media marketing campaigns, you have more chances of becoming viral on social media.

Energy drink maker, Red Bull, started a campaign #PutACanOnIt. This campaign became viral on social media with people sending interesting pictures of Red Bull Cans.

User-generated content not only amplifies reach on social media but also works as social proof, making your social media marketing campaigns more persuasive.

How can you encourage user-generated content on social media?

Creating a buzz around your brand, running contests/quizzes, leveraging the power of hashtags, offering rewards, and asking questions are some proven ways to encourage your fans to create content for your brand.

3. Build Strategic Partnerships

Building strategic partnerships is a must to improve your social media marketing. How?

Suppose you have 1k Twitter followers. So your content has the potential to reach 1k people without anyone retweeting it.

But if two people with 2k followers each retweet your content, won’t the reach of your content radically improve. Indeed, it will.

However, there is no way you can predict that your content will get shared even if you create super useful content. The only way out to ensure shares is that you should build a strategic partnership with people active in your niche.

Make a close group of people who share the same interest and promote each others’ content. This is a proven method to boost the reach of your content because it is a win-win situation for everyone in the group.

Leading social media platforms allow users to create groups, so you can use this feature to build strategic partnerships.

If any social media platform doesn’t have this feature, you can create an email-based group. Once any member of the group is ready with the content, he/she can let others know about the content so that other group members can engage with the content to boost its reach.

4. Start Using Social Media Calendar

Social media success doesn’t come overnight. You need to make constant efforts to build an audience.

True that posting useful content, solving the queries of your audiences, and engaging your followers are some proven ways to build a large, loyal fan base on social media.

However, posting random content, commenting, sharing random posts don’t make the cut. You need to organize your social media marketing efforts to maximize the impact. And a social media calendar can help you in that.

A good social media calendar not only organizes your social media marketing but also saves you time, making you more efficient.

With a social media calendar in place, you can:

Plan your social media content ahead of time
Get ready for leveraging special events and holidays
Ensure that you are covering all critical social channels as your business demands
Do theme-based social media posting efficiently

A social media calendar will make your social media marketing focused; thereby, improving its effectiveness.

And the good thing is, you don’t have to spend time on creating a social media calendar from scratch, google for a free social media calendar template. You will have plenty of templates to choose from.

5. Narrow Your Targeting to Increase Engagement

Social media is not about having tons of followers, posting hundreds of random updates, and commenting recklessly.

Instead, it is all about building a relevant audience, sharing useful content, and having meaningful conversations.

So the objective of your social media marketing should not be to reach a big audience but to reach a relevant audience.

Narrow your social media targeting to reach a relevant audience, and the engagement on your posts will automatically increase.

As aptly put by celebrated marketer, Seth Godin,

Reach doesn’t matter, because your job isn’t to interrupt people on other planets, with other interests. Your job is to interact with people who care.

Therefore, you should always try to add/follow relevant people, share content that offers value to your audience, and participate in relevant conversations that matter to your business/industry. Doing so will leave an impression on your audience that you’re someone who cares about the niche.

Eventually, if you keep your social media activities niche-specific, your audience will start trusting you. This will translate into more engagement, and your social media marketing will yield better results.

ConclusIon

In the realm of social media, you are not alone. Your competitors are also trying to ace their social media marketing. You need to outsmart your competitors if you want to outgrow them. The above tip can drastically improve your social media marketing.

Do you want to share any other tip to improve social media marketing? Please leave it in the comment section. I’d love to know about it.

Additional Resources:

Hello Sandeep, I love reading your content. You don’t publish frequently here. But all the articles offer value to readers.

Thanks, Rahul for nice words. I will try to be more regular. Please subscribe to our blog.

Certainly it’s worth a read. I agree to each point you have discussed in this post. Especially creating user-generated content and narrowing target audience are really important to drive success in social media marketing. Thanks, Sandeep for sharing such a useful post. Keep up the good work!