Your business thrives on social media marketing. In 2018, social network ad spending in the United States is projected to hit $26 billion. Over the next five years, social network spending is expected to go up 18.5%.
But does that future include Facebook anymore? Facebook has been in serious trouble since the Cambridge Analytica scandal earlier this year. Could this be the end of Facebook?
If so, you and your business need to be prepared. Whether you’re a personal brand or head of a marketing firm, you’ll want these five social media marketing tips for a post-Facebook era.
When you used Facebook, you used it as a mini-blog of sorts, posting your brand’s opinion, products, and other content. Now, instead of doing “microblogging” with Facebook, you’ll simply do it with other social media platforms.
One obvious microblogging site is Twitter, Facebook’s miniature cousin. With Twitter, you’re able to speak as your company in under 280 characters. While it used to be only 140 characters, this recent doubling of social real estate allows your brand maximum potential in marketing.
This social media marketing tip is great because all businesses and personal brands should be on Twitter. This specific platform encourages blatant self-promotion. You can do as many in-the-face advertisement posts as you want without getting annoying to your followers.
You can easily link your other content, as well as stay relevant to industry news with reaction posts. A simple switch if there ever was one, Twitter and other microblogging sites (Pinterest, for example) are easy changes to get you achieving social media success.
Of course, you’ll want more than 280 characters from time to time.
If you don’t already have a blog on your website – or even if you do – posting full-length content to other sites gets you and your business noticed. Sites like Tumblr, WordPress, and others offer the opportunity to give your customers value off-site.
The reason why this is one of the social media marketing tips is that you can keep your audience up-to-date with your company: Employee of the month, new products, company mantras, etc.
You can also ask questions to your audience and engage them in a back-and-forth conversation. Always make sure to link back to your main website so that people can find more of your content and products from the source.
This is where you can get people to sign up for updates on new content and announcements. Create a community around your blog; email them regularly and keep them locked in on your brand. Once you have a loyal following here, any new product or promotion will get tons of response.
This social media marketing tip is almost a sneaky one. Social bookmarking sites are sites like Reddit or Stumbleupon, on which you basically “bookmark” links to awesome content you find online.
As a business, you can use this to follow people (like you would on Facebook), share content from other websites, companies, or writers, and gain upvotes and likes from the community you build. When your posts get upvoted and shared a bunch, you can end up on the first page and, coincidentally, gain lots of traffic.
Another thing you can do with these sites is link your own website’s content. This not only gives you free marketing by backlinking your site but if it’s on another platform this helps in search engine optimization or SEO. It’s a quality link to a piece of content on your main site, upvoted on another site.
Social media and SEO, all in one place!
Make sure your content calendar or plan can withstand a Facebook killing. That is, see if your organic content can be altered to be posted on different social media platforms.
Hopefully, changing how you post content online will do a few things that help your brand.
For one, it gets you and your marketing team to be creative. If you’ve been on Facebook for forever, odds are your content has gone a little stale. Now that you have the challenge of a new social platform, your content will be different and fresh.
For two, you learn how the new social media rewards and demerits certain pieces of content. Other companies get lazy once they’ve been in an area for too long, banking instead on brand acknowledgment. Being the “new kids on the block,” you can be extremely original, using current data to create the best content you can.
Your goal is to win lifelong customers. Do it by giving them content that’s valuable, in the places they are online…except for Facebook.
Our last social media marketing tip is to enrich your content with media. Images are great and common and GIFs are wonderful for humor. But, for the most bang for your buck, you’ll want to include video.
Video sites are perfect for companies because they are optimized for mobile. Almost everybody watches video on their phones these days; this is a severely under-tapped market waiting to be taken advantage of.
Grab a piece of the action and have a company YouTube channel. Gain subscribers, take your blogs and turn them into videos, and watch your marketing improve tenfold. With people’s attention spans getting smaller and smaller, more enriching content gets to be king; video sites are the king of kings.
While it takes some time to get good at recording quality videos, it’s never been easier to create, upload, and share video content. Your brand and business will thank you for taking it from Facebook and putting it somewhere else on the Internet.
Achieving social media success is tough, especially with Facebook losing all of its trustworthiness. By staying relevant and switching up platforms, along with being creative, you can have a profitable social audience without Facebook.
If you stick to the social media marketing tips we’ve provided here, you’ll continue to grow and sell products as a business.
For more help with your company’s content marketing, please visit our archive for website technology.