Social Media Marketing Basics for Businesses and Brands

New to social media marketing? We share 4 essential strategy tips to help you get started.

You know your brand should be active on social media. But how do you start and how do you make sure you’re engaging with your audience in a way that works?

Social media marketing is when a business uses social media platforms — like Facebook, Twitter or Instagram — to connect with its target audience, increase brand awareness and grow the business. In a nutshell, good social media marketing means having an effective social media marketing strategy.

If you’re just getting started, keep these 4 tips in mind.

Start by outlining some realistic goals

Goals help focus your social media marketing plan and ensure social media is prioritized, not used only when you remember. Goals should be specific, easy to measure and time sensitive.

For example, maybe your brand’s goal is to:

- Grow your Facebook following to 1,000 by Q3.

- Increase each Instagram post reach by 25% by 2022.

- Increase the number of Tweets your brand shares each week from five to 10.

Setting social media goals helps you track the progress of your social media marketing strategy and then provide opportunities to set new goals to support continual growth.

Avenue Calgary’s digital engagement editor, Alyssa Quirico says, “I think it’s important to check in with your team on a quarterly basis to assess whether something [on social media] is really working, especially if something new was introduced.” She adds, “new digital content goals should be created each year and should play into your company’s business goals.”

Know your audience

Your business’s social media marketing strategy won’t be effective if it isn’t specific to your target audience. Don’t just guess who your audience is; check the numbers. If your brand already has a website up and running, make sure you’ve installed Google Analytics.

Google Analytics will show you a range of metrics including:

- Demographic data on who is visiting your website.

- What pages or posts visitors are spending time on.

- How they get to your website — maybe it’s via your social channels.

If you’ve already set up your social channels, know that each social platform also collects and displays analytics. Checking in on this provides hard data on who your social audience is, helping you focus your social strategy to that audience.

“I look at post performance daily across our social channels, paying most attention to shares, comments and click-through rates,” says Quirico. “When it comes to really digging into audience data, that is looked at monthly.”

Carefully choose which social media channels to use

There are a lot of social channels out there and effective social media marketing doesn’t mean your brand is active on all of them. Pick what works for your brand and its audience.

For example, a restaurant that shares beautiful food photography would be more likely to engage with its audience over Instagram, rather than LinkedIn. If your brand has a small team without much time to spend on social, the fast-moving platform Twitter might not be ideal.

Plan your social media content calendar

Your brand will engage with its audience — and entice new followers, too — if it shares interesting, engaging content consistently. It’s easiest to do that if you plan out your social media content calendar in advance.

“Big campaigns for social should be planned out quarterly. Those are the big content pieces that play into your digital goals,” says Quirico, adding that at Avenue “the majority of our [social media] content is planned monthly. It’s ideal if you can schedule your social posts at least a week ahead of time.”

Do you follow Avenue Calgary on social media? Check out what we’re up to on our platforms by following us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Photo by Castorly Stock from Pexels

Avenue Calgary is a city lifestyle magazine that brings readers the best of the city. We love Calgary and the people who live here. We want to inspire readers to take part in their city.