How to Use Social Media Effectively

Nowadays, more people own a mobile device than a toothbrush. It turns out the average person spends just under seven hours looking at a device screen every day whether it's their smartphone, tablet, laptop, or TV. 47% of all online time is spent on social media and more than 2 billion people have social media accounts. According to the 2015 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, a significant 64% of marketers are using social media for 6 hours or more and 41% for 11 or more hours weekly. A study from Microsoft reported that the average person has the attention span of 7 seconds. This means you have to find a way to create concise messages that stands out enough to capture the interest of your audience. 

Satya Nadella, the chief executive officer of Microsoft, has said that “The true scarce commodity” of the near future, will be “human attention.”

In my Principles of Marketing class, I was shown a video on YouTube called socialnomics. It caught my attention as my professor pointed out that the commonly known 4 P’s (price, product, place, promotion) is now turning into the 4 C’s of digital: Creating, Curating, Connecting, and Culture. You never know what social media tactic is going to be most effective for you. Social media evolves at the speed of a blink. If you want to use social media in the most effective and fun way you should try to keep an eye out for what’s working best at that moment. Dig into research, experiment, and gather advice from professionals. 

The most commonly used social media platform is Facebook then Twitter and Linkedin, respectively. Facebook dominates the B2C space, whereas Linkedin dominates for B2B marketers.

How to Get the Most Out of Your Social Media Platforms

• To get the best use out of your social media page, optimize your profiles. Make sure that your profile pages use relevant keywords to get discovered via search.
• You should brand your profile pages with attractive cover photos, backgrounds, and colors.
• Find out your users' interests. By finding out relevant issues and interests you can attract more users and business.
• You need to post frequently! Post 5x or more daily on Twitter and once or more each day on Facebook, Linkedin, and other social media platforms you use.
• Make it a habit to use hashtags whenever possible, because it helps with tracking of promotions, targeting readers by areas of interest, and starting conversations.
• Try to stand out! Invest money and time on great quality images to make people stop and look at your brand.
• You should also try to humanize your brand by sharing candid photos of yourself and your team.
• Make things exciting for your fans and customers by doing contests and giveaways.
• Dial-up social media at events. You should create event pages, select a hashtag, interact with attendees, stream videos, and then publish content from the event.
• Perfect your timing by using analytics tools to discover when your followers are most active.
• It’s really important to learn from your analytics. This helps to determine where traffic is coming from and going to.
• Keep up with changes because the networks make changes often and you don’t want to fall behind.
• The most commonly used type of content on social media is visual (71%), blogging (70%), videos (57%), and podcasting (10%). 

What Types of Content Work Best on Each Platform?