In part one of our deep dive into social media marketing, we investigated the best ways to capitalize on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Now in part two, we'll look at the more creative-minded social media platforms for growing your business: YouTube, Spotify, Reddit, and Pinterest.
Social media marketing is all about cutting through the massive amount of visual "noise" that people see online every day. Your goal is to get your target audience's attention and build a relationship between them and your brand. While direct marketing has its place in social media (something we will discuss further in this blog), social media's primary value comes from authentically interacting with your users and providing them with timely and fascinating content.
Remember this as the overall strategy of social media marketing. We'll discuss each platform's advantages, audience, monetary commitment, and online tools.
The secret to social media success, no matter what platform you are using, is cultivating a reciprocal relationship with customers new and old. That requires timely engagement, quality content, and a solidly defined brand.
Let's get into the different social platforms.
To create your YouTube marketing strategy, you'll want to start by defining what you want to achieve with the platform. Are you training people on your products and services? Showcasing product demos? Is your goal to entertain, inform, or inspire? And what return do you plan to get out of your investment?
YouTube offers a lot of opportunities because it has a whopping 2 billion users worldwide (as of 2019). It's even the second largest search engine on the internet, processing more than 3 billion searches a month. Being on a platform as popular as YouTube can help improve your SEO and overall brand appearance online.
In this section, we'll discuss how to brand your YouTube channel with a channel trailer, the advantages of advertising on YouTube, and a few ideas for marketing videos.
After creating your basic profile (channel icon, channel description, contact info, and links to your company website), we can upload our content. One key aspect of YouTube channels that gets overlooked is that you can customize how your channel appears to subscribers and unsubscribed visitors.
Now you can offer content to tantalize visitors into subscribing. Start by creating a channel trailer. Your channel trailer is a teaser for the rest of your content, as well as your company brand.
The online video editor Animoto has a stellar example of an effective channel trailer:
On YouTube, you can promote your business channel with AdWords campaigns since Google owns the platform. You can also:
Let's look at some of the YouTube platform's advantages in a bit more detail.
When you begin your YouTube content marketing, try experimenting with different videos early on to see which ones may work and which ones may not. You want to pinpoint exactly the type of content that keeps your audience coming back for more.
Here are a few ideas to get you started:
More and more, we're beginning to see that the standard definition of social networks is expanding. Spotify is a music streaming service that has been around since 2008 but has since developed a lot of their functionality to make it more social. Integrations with Facebook and Instagram allow brands on Spotify to embed songs and playlists on those sites. Companies use this to create their own cross-platform "auditory" brand identities.
Music is one of the more personal forms of media in our society. We view the music we listen to as an extension of ourselves, a form of art that can both speak to us and for us. Music can be a potent tool for a company that wants to define its brand and connect with its users.
Using the power music can have on people, it's time to figure out how to implement your marketing strategy using Spotify. Focus your Spotify strategy on three pillars: Playlists, paid ads, and podcasting.
Creating company-branded playlists is a useful method for obtaining organic traffic. One-third of all listening time on Spotify is spent on user-generated playlists, which equates to about eight hours a week listening.
What's cool is targeting people in specific moods. For example, if you sell exercise equipment, you could create your own branded workout playlist and promote it. Some brands organize their songs around significant events like the Super Bowl, award shows, and holidays.
Spotify provides a few pointers on creating appealing playlists from their updated Brand Playlist terms:
By the end of March 2020, Spotify had 286 million monthly active users. Out of these, 156 million users had ad-supported (aka "free") accounts. Although that's only over 50% of the total user base, compare it to their competitors: Apple Music is estimated to have only 80 million customers in July 2020, while Amazon music had 55 million users at the beginning of 2020.
Spotify offers targeted advertising campaigns beginning at approximately $250 each. A little more expensive than other social platforms, but Spotify has a few key benefits:
First, users aged 18-34 (Millennials) make up over 55% of Spotify's user base. This is a coveted demographic since Charles Schwab's 2019 Modern Wealth survey showed that 49% of millennials aged 23-38 overspend on products advertised through social media.
Second, Spotify offers audio, video, and display ads. You can entirely create and manage your video, display, and audio ads through the Spotify Ad Studio. Depending on your budget, you may end up going with one or more of these three ad formats. When starting in the Spotify Ad Studio, you can run audio ads at a minimum of $250 budget.
Third, Spotify's ads cut through the fluff. Here's what that means: You probably scroll through hundreds of ads you don't even notice while surfing the internet. Since you're consuming everything visually, they get diluted with the massive amount of content on your screen.
But with Spotify, the listener is locked in. The listener is hyper-engaged with their music before the advertisement comes on, and since the ad is unskippable, they will end up listening to it. Even if they're feeling spiteful and decide to take their headphones out for the ad, the ads are short enough (approximately 30 seconds each) so that it's not exactly worth it. Chances are they won't take their headphones out on the next one.
Last year, Spotify pledged to invest $500 million in podcasting. After their investment in 2019, Spotify saw a 200% increase in podcast listening year-over-year (YoY).
Spotify decided to model their podcast strategy after Netflix. Netflix invested heavily in original programming, making it stand out over other streaming services that merely rotate older shows and movies. That business model inspired Spotify to obtain the exclusive rights to some precious IP that would draw listeners away from other streaming services.
This year, they signed an exclusivity deal with one of the world's biggest podcasts, The Joe Rogan Experience, for just over $100 million. Former First Lady Michelle Obama signed with Spotify in May to produce her show, The Michelle Obama Podcast. And Spotify has even become the official home of DC Comics for podcasts.
Like music, podcasts are an especially personal form of media. Podcasts take it even further because you are listening to personalities you enjoy for hours at a time. Communities are built around everything from true crime to technology to comedy, because sharing an experience around a common interest appeals to just about anyone.
Podcasts can help build and maintain a steady audience, but they require time, planning, sound mixing, and ongoing collaboration. So before you jump into podcast production, let's explore the potential benefits they offer:
Reddit is one of the biggest, yet most underrated social media marketing platforms for online businesses. As of October 2020, Reddit is ranked the sixth most visited website in the United States (#17 globally), with an average daily user time of 11:29 compared to Facebook's 9:34, according to Alexa.com. The website is currently beating Twitter and LinkedIn in terms of daily traffic.
Reddit has its own "feel" to it; it's a little hard to explain, but let's just say it helps to be fluent in sarcasm. It's referred to as the "front page of the internet" not only for its news and social aggregation but because it's where a lot of memes, viral videos, and internet terms are spawned.
Unless you've paid for it as a sponsored post, do not come onto Reddit communities and begin directly advertising. Redditors are passionate about the communities they contribute to and dislike it when brands attempt to use a "subreddit" (a Reddit page dedicated to a specific subject) to sell products or services. Despite the simplistic layout, please don't confuse it with Craigslist. Posting apparent promotional content and advertisements on subreddits will get you nowhere fast.
If you plan to market on Reddit, you should adopt the following best practices:
Here's a quick roadmap to getting started on Reddit.
First things first, register for a Reddit account. The perfect username is one that includes one of your brand keywords and turns it into something lighthearted. For example, if you work for a candy company, try something like "TheRealWillyWonka."
Find all subreddits that may be relevant to your brand, then subscribe and start exploring. After identifying your target audience, start subscribing to all the subreddits relevant to your brand. One of the easiest ways to do this is through Reddit's native subreddit search bar. There's even a subreddit you can use called r/FindaReddit!
Don't merely recycle your brand's latest blog or Facebook post. Content should be original and created only for your target Reddit audience. Be consistent about your postings and be patient; if you only get a few comments and few upvotes, you're still heading in the right direction.
Keep up with your Reddit activity and keep contributing to the community. Think of it like becoming a "regular" at a bar; keep showing up, posting, and talking with people. There's no magic answer to the amount of frequency and volume you should have on the site. Just remember that people respond to authenticity, so don't overthink it. Respond naturally to comments that you think will lead to valuable discussion.
Remember: Using Reddit as a marketing platform is advanced organic marketing, so you need to tap into your primary research to figure out the best plan of attack for your chosen audience.
The beauty of Reddit is that its users actively curate the content they see on their homepages. By subscribing to different subreddits, they build their own personalized browsing experiences. Reddit's algorithm filters out anything unrelated to their users' subscriptions and keeps any content and advertisements that are connected.
This makes Reddit advertisements a bit of a PPC gravy train: instead of making estimations at user interests, Redditors are openly sharing their activity. It's much easier for businesses to locate and target their key audiences. In a nutshell, Reddit ads provide cheap, low-funnel traffic with precise targeting.
Reddit's ad revenue is much lower than other social networks, generating approximately $119 million in 2019 compared to Twitter's $885 million. This means you're able to buy cheaper ads with fewer competitors across the site. If you choose to run paid ads, you can choose to target users in individual subreddits or just the general interest category.
For example, if you are in the business of selling home kitchen supplies, try targeting subreddits like r/recipes or r/cookingforbeginners. As a general rule of thumb, find subreddits with at least 5,000 subscribers and over 100 daily visits.
Pinterest is probably the most visual-centric out of the social networks we've explored in this blog. The platform is centered around creating "boards," which are collages of photos and links organized by topic.
With over 335 million people using Pinterest every month, don't treat your brand's Pinterest boards as one-way advertising. Build a community by reaching out and interacting with your users, and eventually, they will become both fans and customers.
Pinterest has gained a reputation for being the home of aesthetes. These are people who take pride in the art and craftsmanship of products they buy and want to show them off. Pinterest users (called Pinners) often come to the website for design inspiration, whether they are planning parties, weddings, DIY projects, or holiday decorations. Their attitude is distinctly different from Reddit users: Pinners are open and amenable to branded content.
If you choose a Pinterest Business Account, you will gain access to Pinterest Analytics and other features, including a visual search tool, a native video player, and the ability to run Pinterest ads if you choose. Let's check out some tactics you can take to have a big impact on your followers.
To take advantage of Pinterest Boards, learn to master Pins. Pins are what your followers and potential customers use to save the products they like. When your followers click on one of your Pins, they should be sent to your website, preferably a designated product page for that Pin.
Of course, the only way to get people to click on your Pins is to have "Pin-worthy" images for what you're selling. 93% of Pinterest users say they use it when they are planning to make a large purchase. To convert these users to customers, you're going to want to become an expert at visual content marketing. Here are a few tips to get you going on your images:
Although determining your company’s social media course of action may seem daunting, you can avoid feeling overwhelmed by understanding social media marketing trends and using our guides as resources.
Maintaining your social media strategy takes a lot of work, but it pays off in the long run. With proper planning and consistency, you can engage, retain, and monetize your users for as long as possible.
Ideally, it would be best if you had a team dedicated to social media. If you want more information, advice, and even some free consulting, be sure to check out Kensium's Digital Marketing services.