How to Create a Winning Social Media Strategy for Business Growth

Let’s admit a fact: social media is no longer just a space meant for fun. It has become an essential marketing strategy. With 4.89 billion active users worldwide, marketers regularly use social media for business to reach out to a massive audience and create brand awareness. They can leverage the platform to build brand followers, drive leads and sales, and ultimately bring remarkable business growth. Hence, learning what social media marketing is, how it can benefit a business, and how to execute it properly are important questions for marketers to answer and help their businesses thrive in this ultra-competitive world.

What is Social Media Marketing for Businesses?

Before understanding the term, social media marketing, let’s first learn what is social media for business. Social media is a way to help companies communicate with their customers virtually and cost-effectively. Using social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook (now Meta), Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok, businesses can create brand awareness, engage with their customers, drive leads and sales, and increase their Return on Investment (ROI). Social media marketing is a process of creating compelling content (in the form of video, audio, images, and posts) for businesses on social media platforms to achieve the above business objectives.

ALSO READ: 9 Types of Social Media Marketing Benefits for Consumers

What are the Advantages of Utilizing Social Media for  Business Growth?

According to the Statista report, increased exposure is the most significant advantage of implementing social media strategies, followed by lead generation and increased traffic. However, there are other benefits of social media for business that one should learn to sharpen their knowledge. 

Humanizing the Brand

When executed rightly, social media strategies can create a positive impact on brands. It provides the human face of the brand while fostering trust, loyalty, and authority. By developing and posting compelling content, social media encourages businesses to represent the people behind the brand and the actual users of its products. That way, social media marketing helps build brand credibility and reliability.

Creating Customer Engagement

Social media for business is a game-changing tool. It allows them to engage with their target audiences by responding to their posts, sharing personalized content, and answering their queries. It helps them understand their customers’ perspectives on their products and services. This, in turn, helps them generate content or develop products accordingly. Furthermore, by using social media strategies, companies can express themselves, show that they care about customers and their needs, and hence offer customized engagement.

Enhancing Customer Service

Though chat, email, and phone lines are some of the dedicated channels to connect with customers, social media platforms are another powerful way to serve them. Since comments, posts, and feedback over social media platforms are public, intelligent and timely replies can help a brand showcase that it listens to customer feedback, thus leading to enhanced customer service with trust and loyalty.

Boosting Sales and Conversion Rates

According to a Statista report, the average time a user spends on social media is 147 minutes (around two-and-a-half hours) per day. This means that the content shared on social media platforms can reach a broader audience, and if it’s compelling, it can turn viewers into customers on a large scale. And that’s the ultimate goal of investing in any social media marketing strategy.

The Best Platforms to Optimize Social Media for Business Success

With numerous social media platforms available, choosing the right one is a daunting task for businesses or marketers. But we’ve made things a bit easier, with this list of the best social media platforms to help you figure out which one to leverage for your specific needs.

Facebook (Meta)

With 2.9 billion monthly active users across the world,  Facebook stands at the top. Companies use Facebook specifically for cultivating customer relationships and target advertising. They connect with audiences who are between the age group of 18 to 44.

YouTube

YouTube is a video-sharing website that offers multiple benefits, such as live streaming, playlists, user feedback, and comments. It helps businesses to generate tutorials and how-to videos. Furthermore, it’s a powerful platform for advertising and cross-promotion of brands, products, and services.

 Instagram

Instagram allows businesses to share photos and videos with live streaming, filters, posts, and impactful and funny storytelling options. It helps companies to connect with their followers and create brand awareness. They can reach audiences of all ages using Instagram.

Twitter

This is a social media platform with a microblogging service. It enables businesses to exchange short messages in the form of text with their customers. Twitter is a perfect platform when companies need to deliver the latest news or updates to their customers and connect with audiences who fall between the age group of 25 to 35.

LinkedIn

Though LinkedIn is the go-to social media for business professionals, it’s also an influential community. It encourages core values, leadership, and learning. To showcase its work culture, share industry insights, find prospects, and build a business brand, LinkedIn is ideal.

ALSO READ: 9 Social Media Marketing Success Factors That Impact Campaigns

How to Choose the Best Social Media Platform?

Now that you have an understanding of the best social media tools for businesses, let’s explore how to choose the right one among those.

• Identify if it’s Business-to-Business (B2B) or Business-to-Consumer (B2C) before selecting the preferable social media platform
• Spend some time understanding the target audience and where they are available
• Learn about the target audiences’ demographics, such as their age and gender to find the suitable platform
• Research competitors to know the social media tools they are using that are yielding high outcomes
• Before getting on social media for business, check which platform is the most appropriate one for your marketing objectives 

What are the Steps to Design Winning Social Media Strategy?

Designing a social media strategy is a detailed process. It requires outlining a document containing social media goals, techniques to achieve those goals, and the key metrics to measure the progress. Here are some proven steps that businesses can incorporate to create a successful social media strategy.

• Establish clear social media goals that align with the business objectives
• Learn about the audience, such as their age, income, interests, and location; it will help you understand their needs and pain points
• Perform a competitive analysis to know your competitors and understand their social media tactics
• Choose the right social media platform that suits the business requirement
• Develop relevant and personalized content on social media that meets audience requirements
• Create a content calendar, including dates and times for posting engaging content on social media, and stay consistent
• Track the performance of the social media marketing campaign using various analytics tools such as Google Analytics

Learn Social Media Marketing with Emeritus!

Social media marketing is one of the most competitive and demanding careers today, and every business wants a strong social media presence. Therefore, acquiring the required skills, such as designing, marketing, copywriting, and data analysis, can help aspirants build lucrative careers in this field. Enroll in Emeritus’ online digital marketing courses and pursue social media programs to enhance your skills.

Write to us at content@emeritus.org