Social Media Management Tips for 2020 and Beyond

Operating a successful business in the modern day means having a solid social media marketing strategy. But with dozens of platforms, millions of users, and thousands of online competitors, navigating the tricky world of social media can seem overwhelming.

Below are some social media management tips that will help make your marketing strategy more successful.

Make Videos

The first and biggest marketing advice you'll want to follow is to use video. More and more social media content shared by users is visual. It's the quickest way to get a personalized message to your customers.

You'll need to take a number of factors into consideration when putting together your video marketing.

First, keep in mind that you'll have about 5 seconds to draw your customers in; after that, they're moving on.

Second, since many social media platforms mute videos by default, you need to make sure to design your video so that it will still appeal to viewers even with no sound.

Use Live Video

On the cutting edge of the video trend in social media engagement is live video. Snapchat, Facebook Live, and Instagram Live all use live, ephemeral content. Your video is posted to your feed as soon as it is shot, and unless you choose to save it, that content is gone again in 24 hours.

Live video can be a great way to keep your customers in the loop about the latest that's happening with your business, but it also needs some careful management.

For instance, if you're interviewing people and someone says something unflattering during a live video, there's no editing to smooth the moment over. Make sure to pick your settings carefully, and have fun with live video!

Get on Social Messaging

Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and other such social messaging platforms have become integral to social media engagement. They are one of the best ways to connect with your customers, and Facebook will even display how well your page responds to messages. A business wishing to be more connected with its customer base will want to make the most of this feature.

As the internet grows and the world gets smaller, the younger generations are flooded with impersonal, mass-marketing messages. Being able to offer an authentic connection to a human being who can answer questions, rather than another bot, can draw in the younger crowds.

It's hard to find a social media strategy that will build brand trust and loyalty quicker.

Use Hashtags

Hashtags may seem silly as a social media marketing tip at first, but they can be an incredibly powerful marketing tool.

Essentially hashtags are used to organize and cross-reference posts. They are most effective on Twitter, Instagram, and, more recently, Facebook.

Let's say you're putting a post on Instagram that includes a dog, and so you add the hashtag #dogsofinstagram. This post will now join more than 97 million posts (as of the time this is written) also using that hashtag and will be seen, not just by your followers, but by anyone who follows or searches that hashtag.

Proper use of hashtags can increase your post views exponentially and bring in new potential customers.

Set Up Email Automation

The more marketing demands increase, the more the marketing processes are becoming automated. Some social media management tools can automatically post or cross-post to various social media platforms. But one of the processes that are moving towards automation is email blasts.

Email blasts can be an excellent way to reach your customers and keep them updated on the latest with your business. But they can take time to design, meaning less time your team has to spend on other marketing strategies.

Set up an automatic email (for instance, every time you post on your blog) and keep your customers in the loop without using more valuable time.

Use Augmented Reality

Augmented reality is the kind of technology you see in science fiction movies. You scan a page in a magazine or a flyer or a poster with an app on your phone, and suddenly it transforms into a video or an interactive screen. There may be links or calls to action. You can even display a live Twitter feed.

If you want your business to be on the cutting edge of marketing strategy, start looking into augmented reality. It is a great way to get customers engaged with your content. And it's a great way to show off your business in more depth than ever before!

Use Content Marketing

Studies suggest that social media users are more interested in reading an article or blog post than a direct advertisement from a company. In fact, the fact that you are reading this post now proves that content marketing works.

Once a reader is invested in an article, they are more likely to be receptive to a call to action from your company.

One of the main advantages of content marketing is it sidesteps the search for potential customers. Create a piece your customers would be interested in, and make it as widely available as possible.

Now, not only do your current customers have another incentive to stay engaged with your site, your new potential customers will be drawn in by the promise of an interesting article, and they will come to you.

Need help creating your content marketing strategy?  Don't worry, we have you covered. Check out:
How to Develop a Content Marketing Strategy: A Start-to-Finish Guide

Use Powerful Storytelling

Human interest stories capture attention. People are far more interested in hearing a powerful or funny or moving story than they are in listening to a sales pitch.

Find the reasons your business is important, find the stories that showcase those reasons, and tell those to your audience.

For example, let's say you own a local yarn shop. You put up a blog post about a woman who comes into your shop with a freshly-shaven head. Her best friend, she says, has been diagnosed with cancer, and so she shaved her head in support and now needs yarn to knit hats for them both.

Rather than saying your shop has yarn that will work to make a chemo cap, now you've drawn in the readers. They're invested in this woman who cares so much for her friend, and they're impressed with your shop for giving her the tools she needed. Your customers are now, by proxy, invested in your business, and your powerful storytelling is at work growing your business.

Use SEO

Of course, you can have all of the wonderful content marketing and powerful storytelling in the world, but the only way those marketing strategies will work is if your customers can find them.

In a world of millions of search engine results returned in fractions of a second, it can be hard to get your content on that enviable top-rank position in the search results. This is where SEO comes in.

SEO, or search engine optimization, work with the algorithms that search engines use when compiling their results to make sure your content shows up first in search results. This involves keyword usage and frequency, internal and external link use, and paragraph density. Some websites have plugins that can help you better employ SEO in your content.

For a complete guide explaining SEO, take a look at:
What is SEO?

Employ Customer Experience Marketing

Your business doesn't operate in a vacuum, and neither should your marketing strategy. If your customers are consistently running up against the same issues when dealing with their business, they are unlikely to come back or recommend your business to others.

Conversely, if their experience is a good one, loyal customers and word of mouth can be two of the most powerful mechanisms in growing your business.

Either way, you have to know what your customers are thinking (and saying to others). Customer experience marketing communicates with the customers to find out which parts of your business are working well for the end-user and which parts need rethinking. Surveys and polls are great ways to approach this.

Want to dominate by leveraging your data?  Take a look at:
The 10 Elements of a Successful Data-Driven Marketing Strategy

Use Influencer Marketing

As anyone who has ever bought a pair of Air Jordans can attest, influencer marketing is an extremely powerful marketing tool.

Effectively, influencer marketing uses endorsements from celebrities or other big names in your industry to sell your product. Your business can piggyback off the influencer's credibility and position to get your product in the public eye in a positive light.

Now depending on your business and your industry, influencers can be different people. Companies with a wide appeal may be best served by getting a well-known celebrity to endorse their product. Businesses in more niche markets may want to seek out an expert in the field instead.

Explore Hyper-Local Marketing

Interestingly enough, as the power of the anonymous internet grows, customers look more and more for personalized advertisements. No longer will generic, mass-marketing ads work. In a world where people can feel lost in the crowd, marketing that is individually targeted goes farther towards earning customer loyalty.

Hyper-local marketing focuses on just that. Addressing emails to the recipient individually, making a note of previous purchases so you can market similar products to them in the future, and tailoring social media targeting to smaller groups of people are all ways to employ this strategy.

Make sure your marketing strategy views your customers as people rather than numbers on a screen, and you'll see better results.

Need help creating your marketing campaign?  Check this out:
A Guide To Creating a Marketing Campaign

Hit the Right Balance on Post Frequency

Raise your hand if you've ever unfollowed a friend or business because every single post on your social media timeline was from them. Now raise your hand if you've ever realized that a page or person you used to follow seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth. It's a good bet that neither of those entities is one you'd be overly inspired to do business with.

There is a delicate balance in hitting the right number of social media posts every day. To complicate matters, the golden number of posts varies by social media platform.

Read up on how often you should post on each site, and do your best to fall exactly within those ranges on each platform.

Use Current Events

If you're looking for a way to capture potential customers' attention quickly, there are few more effective ways to do that than to tap into something they're already currently interested in. Connecting your social media marketing to current events can keep your social media profiles immediately relevant. It can also piggyback off an existing wave of cyber-attention pouring onto a certain topic, helping to raise your engagement rates.

If your business can link to a new movie that's coming out, a viral meme going around, or a major breaking news story, take advantage of the fifteen minutes of fame to get customers interested in your product.

For instance, with the new Avengers movie taking over theaters, if you own a fitness business, promote a weightlifting program that will let customers “Hulk smash” their fitness goals.

And if you happened to own a dress business during the black and blue/white and gold dress meme of a few years ago, you practically had your marketing campaign already written for you.

Market to Gen Z

For the past several years, media and marketing efforts have been focused largely on millennials, the generation born in the late 20th and early 21st centuries who have been entering the workplace, voting boxes, and position of favorite cultural scapegoat in droves. But millennials are old news now. Gen Y is out; Gen Z is where the future of social media marketing lies.

The oldest members of Gen Z are starting to come of age, and they are one of the first generations born into the digital age. Social media is as integral to their lives as the 5 o'clock news has been to previous generations. This makes them a good group to target in social media marketing strategies.

More Social Media Management Tips

Digital marketing can seem like trying to walk on a tightrope across the Grand Canyon while trying to balance a bear on a chair on a stick. But if you use some of these social media management tips, you'll have a more successful marketing strategy that will see your business grow.

Remember: the most important thing is creating quality content that represents your business well to potential customers.

If you would like to enlist the help of a Chicago SEO expert in designing your social media marketing strategy, check out my website. You can get started by checking your SEO score. You'll get instant insights into how to optimize your site and increase your customer reach.