Social media marketing is a practical approach to reach today’s internet-dependent audience, where we spend most of our time. According to Statista, there are nearly 5 billion social media users worldwide, with each spending 37% of their time online on social media, making it an ideal platform to reach a wider audience.
However, having a social media presence doesn’t guarantee success. It’s essential for marketers to follow the dos and don’ts of social media to create a successful campaign that delivers long-term value!
1. Do: Know your brand voice
Obviously, you must stay professional in what you deliver through social channels, and it must be reflected in how you communicate with your audience.
Your brand voice should be consistent across all channels but tailored to the specific audience, occasion, and platform. Consider these factors on your brand voice:
- The tone of your messaging. For example: serious, humorous, or questioning?
- Brand personalities. For instance, professional, ambitious, or charming?
- Emotions you want to evoke in your followers. For example: touching, happy, or mad?
Whether you go for professionalism, education, or fun, a clear brand voice will help your potential audiences to memorize and recognize your brand. With ROI Digitally’s brand voice, as we play the role of an expert, a consultant, and sometimes a salesperson, you can normally see we use a confident, straightforward and informative tone to showcase our honesty, and dedication when we do storytelling and consulting our audience or potential clients.
2. Do: Choose your platforms carefully
Have you ever needed help choosing a social media platform to publish your brand? Don’t you know what to create next after having a Facebook account?
Well, it is understandable. Besides considering the platform where most of your audiences allocate, learning the pros and cons of each platform is important to enhance your brand awareness, take care, nurture, educate, interact with your target end users and convert them into leads or deals.
For example, if your business is rich in visual resources like food and beverage, clothing, and photography services, you can choose Instagram, the social platform mainly focusing on vision, as your visual-based channel. The best platform for a B2B business to enhance its network, build better employer branding, and recruit human resources is LinkedIn.
Depending on your location and market trends, to reach wider audiences and compete with other brands, you need to at least appear on several specific platforms. For instance, in Vietnam, we have Zalo as one of our most popular communication and social media platforms, we cannot skip TikTok if our brand targets young people. In the US, if your brand focuses on products and visuals, you can even spread your words on Pinterest and Behance.
No matter what type of business you are, you always have opportunities to develop your online presence. Just to be aware, do careful research and focus on the platforms that resonate with your customers and where you can deliver value.
3. Do: Be consistent
Never ever leave your platform blank. That’s the last thing you want to do cause it can result in losing customers! Consistency is key to social media success. Your followers expect you to post regularly and deliver quality content that best catches your audiences’ attention.
One tip to help you maintain your consistency is to create a content calendar that aligns with your business objectives, seasonal events, and customer interests at least 2 weeks in advance. This will keep you on track and make you more strategic about your social media activity. You can head to our Social Content Calendar Template to explore how a template can help you be more organized with your content.
Also, use the same tone, branding, and messaging across all of your social media platforms. This will help create a cohesive brand image and give followers the impression that you are reliable and trustworthy.
4. Do: Research your audience
Nothing would go wrong with getting to understand your audiences precisely, right?
Nobody will likely follow a channel posting irrelevant content with them. Thus, knowing your audiences’ interests, desires, or pain points and creating content that best matches those needs and wants, that’s how you can immediately grab their attention.
If you are still wondering how to understand your audiences, use analytics tools like Meta Business Insights, Twitter Analytics, and Google Analytics channels or source/medium reports. Their advanced technologies gather and provide in-depth insights into your audiences’ actions taken toward your pages.
5. Do: Engage with your followers
Audience engagement is the fastest way to generate leads and establish close relationships between businesses and customers. And luckily, there is no better place than social media!
Don’t just regularly post content and leave it. Instead, do some extra follow-ups. Respond to comments, ask questions, or participate in relevant conversations. Moreover, don’t be so professional. It’s fine to use funny teen codes, or trending jokes to talk to your followers. Be friendly, be engaging!
6. Don’t: Post without visual
Gitnux stated that visual content is 40x more likely to be shared on social media than other types of content. Would you likely react to a post full of text with no visual image to capture the main ideas? I don’t, and I guess neither do we.
The visual element is the thing that helps your brand catch audiences’ attention before they read your caption. Therefore, it should be attractive and include elements that complement your message. Choose high-quality images and videos that align with your brand style.
Also, with the various types of visuals like reels, images, and videos out there, be sure to optimize your visuals for the specific platform you’re using.
7. Don’t: Forget CTAs
Ask yourself: What is the meaning behind the content without calling for attention from your audiences?
Call-to-action (CTA) is an essential part of content. Whether it is on the caption or visual, it motivates your followers to take action, such as visiting your website, downloading your content, or making a purchase.
One note is to make sure your CTAs are specific and actionable. Use actionable words like “click here,” “register today,” or “learn more” to create a sense of urgency. But be careful with your wording. Nowadays, the art of persuasion is to reduce hard-sell urges like “Click Now”, “Buy Now”, and using less pushing actions such as “Learn more”, “Explore here” or more conversational words like “Would you like to download it?” to put in your CTAs.
8. Don’t: Respond to messages you can’t leverage
Though I have mentioned the importance of audience engagement by responding to comments or messages, however, not all messages are worth replying to.
Before responding to a message, consider if it is relevant, aligns with your business goals, and how it will impact your brand image. Remember, not all conversations are worth engaging in, so stay professional, and be selective and strategic with your responses!
9. Don’t: Skip brand guidelines
While brand voice maintains your professionalism via online branding, brand guidelines allow you to be identifiable by audiences easily.
85% of organizations reported they had brand guidelines, which are presented on every content they deliver online, most recognizable through visuals. Consider these factors to establish perfect brand guidelines:
- Logo
- Brand font
- Brand color palette
Be sure to align the delivered content with your brand guidelines. In fact, skipping brand guidelines can create mixed messages that confuse and detract from your overall brand image.
10. Don’t: Use controversial content
Social media can be a double-edged sword. While it can significantly boost your brand, one misstep can lead to catastrophic results. I like how the Black Mirror’s episode named “Hated in the nation” talks about how social media can help us express our thoughts and feelings, but also how they backfire on us because we use it in an extreme way. In this episode, the social media users wished somebody else died just because they hated them using hashtags on Twitter. In the end, the users who once wished others die also receive their biggest penalty – death.
In our real world, besides the good things such as raising awareness and raising someone’s voice, controversial topics can even put an end to someone’s career or life, so as a social media manager or a business owner, try to avoid using controversial content, offensive language, and insensitive humor. Not only can it cause a public backlash, but it can also damage your brand image and lead to lower engagement and revenue.
Social media has become an integral part of marketing strategies, but knowing what works and what doesn’t is important. By following the dos and don’ts of social media marketing, you can create a successful campaign that resonates with your audience, builds strong relationships, and drives conversations.
You can double-check your social media pages and see whether you have mistakenly missed anything mentioned above. Make a little adjustment, and let’s wait for the positive results!
Co-Founder & General Manager @ ROI Digitally
