Top 10 Social Media Marketing Platforms

November 26, 2020July 24, 2020 by OnlineBizz Buddy

Social Media Marketing includes various social media platforms to reach new customers, promote their business, create brand awareness, and increase sales.

Some most common social media platforms that we frequently used in social media marketing are given below –

1. Facebook

Daily active users – 1.45 billion

Monthly active users – 2.20 billion

Facebook is the best social media marketing platform, which is founded by Mark Zuckerberg on February 4, 2004. It allows us to invite and connect with our friends, relatives, colleagues, and customers by sending them messages, images, audios, and videos.

It also allows us to like and comment on the posts, which are shared by them.

Most of the small as well as large organizations use Facebook as a “center” of their social media marketing. Organizations use Facebook to promote their brand, create awareness about their product, and reach out to a wider audience. Facebook also helps the audience to see our latest content, our working hours, write their reviews on a particular product, and also see our organization’s location on a map.

There are the following advantages of using the Facebook platform for social media marketing –

Facebook helps us to easily reach the targeted audience.
It allows us to share budget-friendly ads to the audience.
Using Facebook, we can learn and use a new market strategy at a low cost.
It provides various marketing platforms.
It allows organizations to communicate with clients

2. Twitter

Daily active users – 145 million

Monthly active users – 320 million

Twitter is one of the most effective, popular, and fast-paced social media marketing platform created by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, Evan Williams, and launched in July 2006. It is an SMS-based communication platform, which allows registered users to read and write small messages called “tweets.” Using Twitter, marketers can easily reach hundreds and thousands of customers to share the latest news and promote their brand. The main disadvantage of using twitter is that we can use only use 280 characters for the message.

There are the following advantages of using the Twitter platform –

It helps us to increase customer satisfaction.
It allows us to continuously send information in the form of small messages called “tweets.”
It helps us to establish a stronger relationship with customers.
It improves organic search engine ranking.
It is a very efficient platform for gathering feedback from customers.

3. Instagram

Daily active users – 500 million

Monthly active users – 800 million

Instagram is maintained by Facebook. It is an effective tool to reach the audience and allows the marketer to share images, memes, and videos to promote their business. According to a survey, 80% of accounts follow a business on Instagram. It works flawlessly on mobile phones and tablets. Recently Instagram introduces a new feature that is shared stories every day. This feature helps marketers to easily update their customers about new products on a daily basis.

There are the following reasons to use Instagram platform –

Instagram’s Global rank (Worldwide rank) is 5th on the internet.
Instagram helps marketers to enhance their branding.
It is a marketer-friendly platform.
It helps marketers to drive traffic and grow their business.
It helps marketers to acquire customers easily.
On Instagram, content is available in the form of images and videos, which helps customers to understand the product in a very simple way.
Instagram’s brand engagement and visual content are ten times higher than Facebook.

4. LinkedIn

Daily active users – 562 million

Monthly active users – 303 million

LinkedIn is the best B2B (Business 2 Business) social media marketing platform, which was founded in 2002. It allows us to create profiles as a fresher or as a professional. It is a place that helps us to search for jobs, stay connected with professionals, recruit new employees, and discuss business ideas with experienced employees to promote our business. A company profile on LinkedIn not only helps us to generate the local leads but also helps us to draw global leads.

There are the following reasons which make LinkedIn as a very effective platform for social media marketing –

It provides an opportunity to stay updated about new technologies.
It helps us to display and update our resume to search for new job opportunities.
It is a free platform that mainly focused on career development.
It helps to build and promote business brands.
It is used to generate more leads.

5. Pinterest

Daily active users – 320 million

Daily active users – 120 million

Pinterest is a combination of the two words “Pin” (Thumbtack) and “Interest” (Interesting). It is quite different from all other social media marketing platforms. It is an image-pinning website introduced in 2009. Currently, Pinterest becomes one of the largest visual social networks to share and discover ideas, images, recipes, videos, new brands, infographics, and more.

There are the following reasons to use Pinterest for social media marketing –

Pinterest is the fastest-growing platform for online content distribution.
It is mostly used to create brand awareness and increase website leads.
Its user-friendly platform allows us to create a visual profile for business and publish news.
Its visual-heavy social network helps us to build more traffic on our website at a low cost.

6. YouTube

Daily active users – 1 billion

Daily active users – 2 billion

YouTube is an excellent free video-sharing platform for social media marketing. It was created in 2005. YouTube helps us to create and upload our videos on the valuable content and deliver it to the audience in the form of tutorials. YouTube is like a platform where we can show our talent to attract the audience. In YouTube, content mainly available in the form of Podcasts, Infographics, Presentations, and video series.

There are the following advantages of YouTube in social media marketing –

YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine and the 3rd most visited website.
It is the best and easiest way to learn new technologies.
It helps us to promote and sell our products worldwide.
It is completely free to use and helps to acquire qualified traffic.
It will expose you to connect with a huge audience.

Note: YouTube is a mixture of both social media marketing and content marketing

7. Tumblr

Daily active users – 71.6 million

Monthly active users – 64 million

Tumblr is a network of millions of user-generated, personal Web sites. It’s part blogging platform (like WordPress, Blogger or Posterous) and part social networking service, letting users create and post their own original content.

Written entries, photographs, video clips or links to other Web sites — you can share all of these things with your friends and followers. Users subscribe to as many other users’ pages as they like, which show up on the user’s feed, or Dashboard.

It’s also possible to give “notes” to other subscribers in several forms — you can reblog someone’s content on that user’s Tumblr site, “like” it, or reply. To further the social aspect, authors can opt to post their Tumblr entries simultaneously, or at least link to them, via other services, such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Tumblr refers to itself as a platform for short-form microblogging, also known as tumblelogging, a name that predates Tumblr itself. As of 2012, Tumblr hosts more than 64 million “tumblelogs.” More than 13 million people visit Tumblr a month, most of them with their own active blogs.

Each day, 25,000 new users sign up for the site, and altogether, 71.6 million new Tumblr blog entries, photos, videos and audio files are posted each day. Although you don’t have to be a registered user of Tumblr to read others people’s Tumblr blogs, you do have to be registered if you want to leave notes.

8. Snapchat

No. of daily active users – 210 million

No. of monthly active users – 360 million

Snapchat is a great platform for adults. It is free to download. It allows us to create a new type of social media on a network. Snapchat mobile app is used to share photos, videos, and doubles as messaging services for users. It is most known due to the fact that messages and content disappear on it. Users can either send the content directly to another user or upload this content as their “story,” which is viewable to users till the next 24 hours.

There are the following reasons to use Snapchat in social media marketing –

It allows us to share and collect snaps from specific events to create stories on the social media platform.
It is used to add a filter on photos to make them more attractive.
It allows customers to interact with other experienced customers to know about the pros and cons of a product.
Using Snapchat, customers can directly communicate with companies.
It is a user-friendly platform for newcomers.

9. Starbucks

No. of daily active users – 10 million

No. of monthly active users – 19 million

Starbucks is one of the engaging brands on Facebook. The main objective of introducing Starbucks is that it helps to build an online community of loyal fans and engage with them.

Recently, Starbucks introduced a strategy to launch new variants of its existing products based on consumer’s suggestions on their Facebook page, so customers not only enjoy the clicks-ins, photographs put by marketers but can also enjoy live audiences on Facebook.

10. TikTok

No. of daily active users – 150 million

No. of monthly active users – 300 million

TikTok is one of the best social media marketing platforms launched in 2018. It is a popular video streaming and sharing app which allows us to create and share a 15-second video on a particular topic.

There are the following reasons to use TikTok for social media marketing –

It targets a huge audience in the easiest way.
It creates better user engagement.
It allows us to create a small video and share it with their followers to get more likes and comments to grow our business.
Recently, Tiktok launched its own advertising platform to advertise business using Tiktok ads. Now, Tiktok advertisement becomes the best platform for producing and launching new products as well as services.

Social Media Tips You Should be Using

November 26, 2020May 30, 2020 by Learners Coach

Do you have the latest social media marketing tips – Here’s some you should certainly add to the list if you want to enjoy success.

Have A Plan For Your Social Media Channel

Many companies find it overwhelming to have to create content for their social media channel. Worse, some companies create one type of content and then send it out across their social media platforms.
You need to be creating a plan for a social media channel. Your plan needs to include choosing a channel (i.e. Facebook), the goal (i.e. sales goal), who you are targeting, the structure, type of content (i.e. video), your tone (i.e. funny), the desired action (what behaviour do you want from the user) and your channel integration.

Consistently Deliver Content

One of the quickest ways to grow the number of followers you have is to be consistent. Put the proper system in place to make sure you are always providing relevant posts that are valuable and interesting to your audience.
Don’t overwhelm your followers by providing the same types of posts repeatedly, instead manage your categories and make sure you are not repeating posts.

Strategically Implement Hashtags

One way to help to increase your social media success is to avoid random hashtags and instead use a strong hashtag that will tie your campaign pieces together. Use a hashtag that’s both easy to remember and easy to spell.
Make sure it’s not already being used by someone else. Once you have your hashtag created you should follow the conversation and then join it.

Try Pinterest And See If It Works For Your Brand

Pinterest is a popular social media channel, especially among women. You do not necessarily have to have something visual to show to be successful with Pinterest. Play with it, experiment, see if it can be helpful in branding your product.
There you now have 4 excellent tips that should be part of your repertoire for social media marketing success.

10 Ways To Build Your Credibility On Social Media

Social media is an incredibly powerful marketing tool that can help you to reach a potentially unlimited number of people with the very minimum investment in terms of time, money and effort.
But while social media might be incredibly powerful, it’s still only going to be as good as the strategy you have in place and if you haven’t first established yourself as a credible authority then you’ll find that everything you do falls on deaf ears.

To improve your effectiveness then, you should make this one of your biggest focuses.

Here are ten ways to build that credibility:

Create a Blog

Then fill it with well-researched, in-depth and informative posts and share them on social media. This is content marketing 101 and one of the best ways to establish trust and authority. If you can’t write, hire someone who can to do it for you.

Build Followers

Unfortunately, if you have a social media account with 14 followers, you will have a hard time convincing people to put stock in what you say. Of course, it shouldn’t necessarily matter but it does. People see this as an indicator of your authority. So get to work growing that number.

Be Personal

People like to know that there’s a real human being behind a social
media account which can help to build trust and therefore credibility.

Every now and then posting a personal image will help to build that connection with your fans.

But Not Too Personal

That said, a drunken rant or a Tweet about your toilet habits can also seriously undermine your respectability. You might think it’s amusing/poignant, but your business account is not the place for that kind of content.

Branding

Your social media pages should have strong branding that utilizes high definition images and well written information. Make sure that everything says ‘quality’.

Spelling

Does a misspelling necessarily mean that your interesting fact isn’t true? It shouldn’t do really but to a large portion of your audience it does.

Post Regularly

If you go days, weeks or months on end without posting then your social media will look like a ghost town which suggests it’s not a professional account.

Network

One of the easiest ways to be persuasive is to appeal to another authority on a given subject. If you can get a referral from another big social media account, then this will help you greatly.

Participate

Communities on social media give you a chance to answer questions and demonstrate that you know your stuff. You should consider this almost as an opportunity to ‘advertise’ your expertise and know how.

Deliver Quality

Most importantly: make sure that all your posts are interesting/entertaining and that you are consistently delivering quality and value.

Reasons To Use Social Media In Your Business

If you run a business and you’re interested in extending your reach and spreading the word to as many potential customers as possible, then ignoring social media is simply not an option.
Social media is an incredibly powerful tool for any business that wants to promote itself to a large audience and has been instrumental in the success of many modern products and services.
In case you’re still thinking you can do without it, read on to see some of the reasons you should definitely be using social media:

The Market Is Huge

It’s a well-known fact that Facebook would be the third largest country in the world were you to take every member and put them in one place.
That’s an absolutely insane number of users that you can gain access to then, simply by signing up to the platform and starting to promote yourself there. Then if you consider all the other social media platforms available, this is simply too huge of an opportunity to miss.

It’s Conducive To ‘Virality’

If you want an idea, video or article to ‘go viral’ then you need social media. Social media’s design makes it perfectly suited to helping media to go viral as all the tools for sharing and are right there and the networks are already in place.

It’s Interactive

Social media isn’t just about reaching your audience, it’s also about interacting with them. Because social media lets you respond to comments, it means that you can actively engage with them and thereby build a relationship.

It’s Personal

Social media is also personal and often the networks that are in place are based on real-world social networks. So, when you see that someone ‘likes’ a product that isn’t just a meaningless statistic, it is a referral from a friend or colleague who you trust.

It’s Targeted

When you sign up to a given social media channel as a user, you will start out by giving your personal details. These include your name, age, marital status and more.
In other words, you are providing tons of information that can then be used by businesses to identify their precise target demographic. You don’t just have a huge market here but a tailored one!

And there’s more!

Social media has many benefits beyond these five though. Whether it’s the incredible networking possibilities you’re interested or the tools and apps that make it so easy to manage your accounts there are many more ways that social media sets itself apart as one of the most powerful tools available to businesses of all sizes.

What Is The Ideal Length of Your Content On Social Media Platforms

How long should a Twitter post be? Well, how long is a piece of string?

In reality the ‘ideal length’ of any content is likely to vary depending on your niche/ industry, your target demographic and the intent of said post.

That said though, statistically speaking there are some useful guidelines to keep in mind when deciding how long to make any given post.

Here we will look at what has been shown to be most successful across a variety of platforms:

Twitter

On Twitter the ideal length for a post is apparently 100 characters. This is according to Twitter’s own ‘best practices’ guidelines where they state that tweets of 100 characters or less enjoy 17% higher engagement. That’s not an insignificant stat so keep it short and Tweet!
Research from Buddy Media though only somewhat supports this claim, finding that retweets peak for Tweets of 100 characters while longer ones do better than shorter ones. It seems that 100 is definitely the Tweet spot (sorry).

Facebook

It seems that brevity is also preferred on Facebook where 40 characters and less seem to do best. Jeff Bullas conducted a study on retail brands on Facebook and found that short posts and particularly those below 40 characters would receive 86% higher engagement.

Many more studies have similarly supported the idea that shorterdoes- better on Facebook. The point to remember is that people are in a rush. All the time. And especially on social media. If your content is really long, chances are they won’t read the whole thing.

Blog Posts

While it’s not social media, chances are that you’ll be integrating your social media strategy with content marketing. So how long should a blog post be?

According to a site called ‘Medium’ the content that gets the most attention is 1,600 words, taking the average reader 7 minutes to read.
It seems that a little more depth is actually a good thing at this point!

Gaining The Trust of Your Audience On Social Media

Marketing is largely about building and maintaining trust. It’s one thing to be able to reach out to a huge audience but that doesn’t mean anything if said audience is simply going to ignore everything you post.
This is why it’s so incredibly important that you ensure you are doing everything you can to build the trust of your followers and to establish yourself as an authority.

So how do you go about doing that?

How Building Trust Works

The first thing to understand when it comes to building trust and authority through social media or any other means, is that it takes time. This is not going to be something that happens overnight or with a single post but rather something that you need to develop and build on.

At first when people read your posts, they are likely to pretty much ignore them. If you manage to get them to stop and take it in and if you manage to teach them something, then it might sink in. Still though, they are unlikely to become paying customers at this point.

The second time they notice a quality post of yours though, you might find that it registers with them and sparks a memory but only if your branding is good.

In other words, they might remember that they enjoyed the post you shared last time and therefore they might decide to pay attention to you in future.
Over time they will then go from ‘taking note’ of what you say, to actively seeking you out’. It’s only once you reach this latter point that you will then have their trust and attention and it’s only then that you can start effectively making sales.

The trick here then is consistency and quality. It’s tough going to continually be posting relevant, informative and accurate information but that’s what it takes to really become a thought leader in your industry or niche.

Helping Things Along the Way

There are a few things you can do to speed up the process though. For one, if you can get a mention from someone that your audience already trusts this can go a long way by sharing some of that trust.

Likewise, it’s also important to engage with your audience, to respond to their questions and to make sure you appear approachable and responsive.

Pay close attention to what the leading names in your industry are doing and you should be able to pick up more pointers that way. It’s not by accident that some accounts rise to the top but rather through careful planning and hard work.

Top 6 Best Social Media Marketing Strategies That Works in Kenya

August 17, 2021May 30, 2020 by Learners Coach

Improve your social media marketing by implementing the best proven social media marketing strategies that works in Kenya .Getting the most out of your social media will have a positive effect on your return on investment and that’s what you want to see.

Social media can be a very powerful tool when used correctly, but the problem is far too often it’s not utilized in a way to get the most out of it.

Let’s have a quick glance at some of the things you can do to make the most out of your social media campaigns.

Make sure you navigate users to your landing page via your social media. A landing page is a great place to have your visitors land. Make sure that you include this link on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and any other social media channels you use. Then make
sure that your landing page is a key part of your marketing strategy.
Make sure that you are watching for posts that are from users that have a concern about your company or your brand. It can be something simple like your return policy or it can be something more complex like the impact your product has on the environment.

Social media is such an important tool for today’s business, whether you are strictly an online business, or you have a brick & mortar store.
You can increase your following and your sales by making the most out of these social media strategies and tools, and there are plenty.

Social Media Tips You Need To Know

Social media has so much to offer and your business is missing out on revenue if you aren’t taking full advantage of it. These 6 social media tips will help you maximize your marketing.

1. Know What Time Is Best To Tweet

There are some solid rules about when the best time to tweet is and which days are best.
Look at your Twitter activity and determine when you get the most activity and interaction on your feed then plan your upcoming tweets to work around those ‘hot’ times.

2. Ask Questions on Your Facebook Page

Ask a question, get a response. Questions are excellent conversation starters and they are also a good way to do a little market research. Turn a picture into a question.
Choose a trending topic and include a hashtag, then watch your interaction go through the roof. Your hashtags are a key way to draw people to your page.

3. Update or Edit Your Facebook Posts

It’s a cool thing to edit your posts on Facebook, which makes it easy to add to an existing post. For example, let’s say you ran a contest and now you have your winner. You can simply edit the original post and add who won the contest. It’s the easiest way to validate the giveaway too.

4. Spend Time on Twitter Interacting

It’s important for you to have a presence on your social media channels and that includes more than just posting. On Twitter rather than just tweeting respond to tweets your followers have made.

You’ll be amazed at how this can really grow interest and followers. It’s a
great way to connect with your followers and they feel like you are connecting with them.

5. Go For a Branded URL

The shortened URL is pretty standard these days. But you can take it even further and create a branded URL that will keep your website or brand in the minds of visitors. It also helps you to create tracking information that can be very valuable in helping you make sound decisions.

6. Have a Good Call to Action

Whether you want your visitor to buy something, say something, explore something or do something you need a good call to action to get them to act in the way you want. For example, save 40% by entering code FukuzaBaridi20.

Social Media Marketing Campaign Tips

There’s a tremendous amount of marketing campaigns taking place here in Kenya. Everyone is busy putting together their social media campaign, but many have little or no understanding of what they need to accomplish.

So, let’s look at how you can have an awesome marketing campaign and really enjoy the benefits.

Partner With Traditional Media

If you really want to get the most out of your marketing campaign and your hashtags, partner with traditional media like television and radio stations to create a strong awareness and brand recognitions.

Be Strategic When You Pay for Promotion

Not all promotions are going to come to you free. Some of your marketing campaign(s) are going to involve you paying for them. How much will usually depend on how many people it’s going to reach.

For example, a marketing campaign that reaches 50 million people is going to cost a lot more than a campaign that reaches 5000 people.
Don’t just spend your money. Make sure that you are being strategic when you pay for promotions.

Seek Out a Creative Real Time Marketing Opportunity

You need to keep your marketing campaign fresh and interesting. The best way to do this is to be creative and find a real time marketing opportunity that connects with current trends and interests.

The success of any marketing campaign is measured by the results you achieve. You need to measure your metrics, including your social metrics and brand metrics to tell how effective your marketing campaign is. Then tweak or change accordingly.

Understand How To Use Hashtags

Do you use hashtags? Are your running hashtag campaigns? If you said yes, are they successful? Would you like to have more successful hashtag marketing campaigns? Everyone is running around using hashtags but few understand their importance or what it is they even do, so before you decide to go hashtag crazy make sure that you do your homework and learn more about what it is they do, how they function, why they are so important to your marketing campaigns, and how to use them correctly.

Lastly, It’s In The Results

The success of your campaign is in the results you achieve. You can measure social metrics like engagement and impressions. You can also measure brand metrics to determine the growth in brand recognition.

There are tons of factors that contribute to your success, but letting your followers have a voice and letting followers inspire other followers can make a huge difference in the success of your marketing campaign.

Things You Should Do With Social Media

If you want to get the most out of your social media campaigns, you should incorporate these 3 things.

1. Optimize YouTube Videos

The second largest search engine next to Google is YouTube. If you want the best exposure you need to make sure that you optimize your YouTube video titles and descriptions with your keywords.

For Example, Jumia Products would be detailed using a strong introductory sentence that focuses on your keyword Jumia Products.

2. Value Your Fans Taking Time To Vote

There are many ways you can use social media to discover more about your audience. Creating a poll where you ask your followers to vote is one way and it’s a good way.
Asking your followers for their opinion is a win-win because you gain information you need, and your followers feel like they have a say.

3. Have a Wish List

Social media is a great way to tap into your audiences needs and to
encourage them to add something to their wish list. This call to action helps excite your customers about something you are offering.

It’s a tool that you really should learn to use to its fullest ability.

Parting Shot

When you are posting to your social media channels make sure that you are posting information that is valuable and informative. In other words, don’t post just to post.
If you have nothing interesting to say your followers will become annoyed and they may stop following you. There’s plenty of information that comes across a newsfeed, make sure yours is worth seeing.

Take advantage of the various formats at your disposal. Some formats are better for some industries than others. For example, YouTube can be a great choice if you can show your followers how to use something or do something, or if you offer something of visual or audio interest.

Twitter can be really good for industries that have short messages they want to share often, such as changing stock or sales throughout the day.

Make the most out of your social media and you’ll enjoy the real benefits. Don’t be afraid to think outside the box and try new tools and marketing strategies.