The Changing Face of Social Media Marketing

Do you remember the last TikTok video you watched? How about the last Instagram reel that pulled you down a rabbit-hole at three in the morning? Probably not. But you most likely clicked that heart button, shared it with a friend, or saved a screenshot of some of it.

Marketing via social media is a complex interaction that can expand your ROI exponentially if it is handled properly. What does that mean exactly? Glad you asked.

Social media has more click-throughs, views, and shares than any other type of digital media. Facebook shares, Instagram stories, TikTok trends, and more all make the rounds through millions of peoples’ devices every day. That means that your potential exposure to new customers, sales opportunities, and customer retention on those platforms is astronomical.

But only if you handle it correctly. Social media trends tend to change from hour to hour, but the average life-cycle of a trend is about a month including the rise, the peak, and the decline.

Managing Social Media For Maximum Exposure

Social Media platforms are full of content. A lot of it gets skipped over and becomes forgotten almost instantly, but a viral moment can be a massive boost for your business. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to predict what will become viral, but there is one consistent element – quality.

In the past, many marketing companies would simply throw as much content as possible into the Internet with the philosophy that the more content the better. However, in the past few years Google has updated their algorithms to engage content in a way that is more in line with how Gen Z and Millennials search on the web.

This means that in order to get the best exposure, you need to have something current, written in a way that relates to your target audience, and of high quality.

If you simply throw a bunch of stuff at the Internet, it will quickly become drowned out by the higher quality content that generates more clicks, more ROI, and more relevant answers to consumer questions.

Quality Over Quantity

Consumers are smart, which means that you need to make sure your content is relevant, engaging, and current. If someone clicks on your link and sees no value and a few clickbait links, they aren’t going to follow through and you’ve lost their attention.

It is important to remember that having quality content means providing something of value to the consumers looking at your Social Media content rather than simply linking a call to action. They want to find a relevant answer to their question and evidence of the quality of the answer in the social media post.

You might be thinking, “What about retention then?” It is more important to consider quality over quantity when focusing on retention of clients or customers. They already know what you offer if they’ve purchased your product or service before, so they don’t want to be bombarded with ads for the same thing again.

Instead, you need to continue providing high quality, useful content related to your brand on those social media platforms so your clientele knows that you are staying on top of things and looking to the future. The last thing you want is to become irrelevant to your returning customers.

So What’s Different?

Everything is different today than it was a year ago when it comes to social media. The same platforms still hold a lot of the cards – Facebook is still the leader in advertising reach; Twitter is the top investment for marketing companies in 2022; and Social Media makes up 44% of advertising investments for companies this year as well.

The difference is that with these big pushes into Social Media platforms as the advertising space, it is essential to get in on the trend early rather than late. If your marketing shows up on the scene too late, it can easily slip through the cracks of all of the other content already out there.

The other thing that’s different is that SEO is no longer as directly tied to Social Media tags as it used to be. This means having quality content that is relevant to your business and your consumers in as many places as possible.

Solutions

Social Media advertising is rapidly changing the face of digital marketing, and those changes require investments of staff, time, and money to not only keep up with the trends, but flexibly respond to them as they continue to do so.

One solution is to hire a full-time social media marketing expert, which can be done fairly effectively for the right price. Training, branding, and advertising guidance will need to be delivered to this person or staff to operate on your behalf, so that is something to consider as well.

Another solution is to hire a digital marketing team to handle all of your online marketing needs in one place. This has several benefits:

• All of your brand assets are in one place
• You pay the marketing agency directly as an expense
• You don’t have to pay for employee onboarding and maintenance
• It’s almost always cheaper than hiring internal staff
• The marketing team are experts in their field

Ultimately, it’s a lot of work to maintain a prominent, effective Social Media presence, but by bringing together a marketing team that works with all of your brand in one place to collaborate on your brand, you can see the best results, all the time, before you even know the trends are changing.

Find out how PixelPop Marketing can provide you with an all-in-one digital marketing plan today.