Content calendars also help distribute resources effectively, improve team collaboration and give a more in-depth understanding of what works and what doesn’t. If you want to create messages that resonate with your audience, you need to know what they care about the most. Without the support of your audience, your strategy will be in vain.

Listening And Engagement

On Pinterest, Booking.com mainly focuses on creating image-based content. The content style is also very Pinterest-esque, with utmost attention to aesthetics. Instagram Stories allow you to add polls and questions that your followers can answer. These are all fun ways to interact with your existing or potential customers. You’ll see a mix of informational posts, promotional content, UGC, brand events, and celebrity endorsements. If you’re looking to hire someone in-house, here is a post about the essential skills of a social media manager.

More importantly, brands need to find ways to create videos that entertain, educate or inspire in under 30 seconds. X, previously known as Twitter, remains a go-to platform for real-time discussions, news, memes and customer service. While some advertisers have pulled back, user activity remains strong, particularly for those seeking updates and fast-paced interactions.

The ideal social media management software depends on your budget, industry and unique goals. For further insight and help determining which is best for you, read the complete breakdown of the best social media management software. Inbox pulls all social media messages and interactions into one unified interface, regardless of platform. Organize fun and creative contests or giveaways to boost engagement and attract new followers (we’ve got 12 inspiring examples right here).

Twitter is perfect for real-time news and offers one-on-one interactions. Many people believe that social media is a useful distribution tool and use the same message on each channel. By the term ‘humanize your brand,’ we mean to go beyond the glass tops of these digital screens. Show your audience what goes in your office, introduce them to your employees, and show the people behind your brand. Share successive posts to build excitement and relate the whole story from the beginning to the end.

At the end of the day, you want your target audience to choose you instead of your competitors. It can give you insight on what your competitors are doing on social media and give you ideas for your own social strategy. It may also empower you to think out of the box and come up with fresh content that allows your brand to stand out.

The best-performing brands don’t just post and hope — they test, learn, and repeat — and now, so will you. While there’s no shortage of numbers to pull, the key is to focus on metrics that tell a meaningful story — one that highlights your campaign wins (woo!) and exposes what needs work. By focusing on one bulk task at a time, you make room for creativity and plan ahead with ease. Next, you’ll take your general business goals and transform them into SMART goals. This is anything they’re doing that could pose a challenge to your own growth, like a new product launch or an aggressive ad strategy.

Using our social media services, we will position your company as the leader in your industry with high-value tweets and get your brand engaged in discussion threads. This will establish you as the go-to choice for the product or service you offer. A good content strategy should include a variety of content types, blog posts, videos, infographics and social media posts.

That means 5 billion opportunities to get your brand in front of new customers. For example, if you create a business page for your company and engage with other social media posts, you’re increasing brand awareness. Social media can also increase your website’s traffic through posts, shares and comments.

Once you learn the basics of social media reporting, you can track your growth over time. If you use Hootsuite Analytics as your management tool, you can use our built-in social media benchmarking tool to compare the performance of your social accounts against the average of brands in your industry. Check out our guide to using social media analytics and the tools you need to track them. If you’re still relying on assumptions about what your audience wants based on age or location, your content will miss the mark. Winning strategies in 2025 are built on how people interact, why they engage, and what triggers action. Now that you’ve set your SMART goals, it’s time to define the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will help you track real progress.

With the right social media marketing strategy, businesses can stay ahead of the competition and build a strong online presence in today’s competitive market. Social media marketing allows businesses to engage with their audience in real-time, building trust and brand loyalty. By creating compelling content and interacting with followers, companies can humanize their brand and make meaningful connections with potential customers. Additionally, social media platforms provide valuable insights and analytics that can help businesses tailor their marketing strategies for better results. The increasing use and effectiveness of social media influencers in marketing have intrigued both academic scholars and industry professionals.

This will help you automate data collection and analysis and enable you to track and measure the impact of influencer-led campaigns on your revenue. If your business comes out with a new item and you plan to promote the launch on social media, that’s social media marketing. If you interact with your customers via comments, that’s social media marketing.

Using Social Media Strategy To Influence Seo

With more than 48% of all websites using Google Analytics, it’s one of the most popular tools out there for digital marketers. Here’s a breakdown of how to track social media in Google Analytics. Put your brand on the platforms that are right for your specific target audience and goals. Using social media for business offers an opportunity to create and share content to raise awareness about your brand.

If you’re serious about growing across multiple platforms without losing your mind, SocialPilot gives you the infrastructure to plan smarter, post faster, and grow consistently. Now let’s focus on picking the right platforms—because being everywhere is not the same as being effective. From cross-country adventures to daily commutes, the content is raw, emotional, SMM Thai and 100% user-driven. This UGC strategy not only humanizes the brand but also reinforces its values—safety, longevity, and lifestyle alignment—through the voices of its loyal community. Once your goals are locked in, your next move is to understand who you’re creating for. Even the best content can miss the mark if it’s not built for the right people.

And you simply can’t build your entire audience in rented spaces anymore. We’ve already seen turbulence across platforms, and it’s only getting worse. That thinking fuels these ideas to pivot your social media strategy to other avenues.

The first thing to do when considering a career in social media marketing is to get your feet wet in the social media world. Start building your presence on major platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. See what type of plans they’re working on and get a better understanding of the benefits of social media marketing from their standpoint. Actively engage with your audience by responding to comments or direct messages. Provide opportunities for your buyers and followers to have their say via surveys or polls on the platform. This post exemplifies effective influencer marketing by combining relatable, aspirational content with subtle promotion.

But, before this leaves you feeling overwhelmed, we recommend you’re selective about which networks you’re active on as part of your content marketing strategy (more on this to come). A regularly updated online presence goes a long way toward establishing your business as a brand authority. Additionally, regular customer interaction shows you’re committed to your customers and care about their satisfaction. Plus, since your commitment is visible, prospective customers will feel more comfortable doing business with you. Promoting and sharing content on social media is a great way to generate more sales leads and successful lead conversions.

Plan ahead, stay flexible, and adjust based on what resonates most with your audience. When you create content that invites participation, rather than just broadcasting messages, you encourage more likes, shares, and comments, which in turn helps expand your reach. Strong captions that encourage responses, trending hashtags that boost discoverability, and interactive elements like polls, Q&As, and user-generated content all help increase engagement. To see real results, you need to post strategically, delivering the right content to the right audience at the right time. If you have existing social media channels, you could also ask your followers what they want from you.

Having more than 4 billion users, social media marketing is the new norm. Businesses, irrespective of the niche, are busy perfecting their social media marketing plan to get quality traffic, rigorous customer engagement, and drive sales. It is strongly advised that future studies conduct research in other countries as findings can be different due to the culture and social media adoption rates. Future studies should pay particular attention to other emerging markets (such as Russia, Brazil, and South Africa) as they suffer from the slow adoption rate of social media marketing. Some companies in these countries still rely more on traditional media for advertising of their products and services, as they are more trusted in comparison with social media channels (Olotewo 2016).

With its user-friendly interface and customizable templates, you can create a stunning website that integrates seamlessly with various social media platforms. This lets you showcase your brand effectively and drive traffic to your site through social channels. Maximizing social media’s potential for business involves understanding your target audience and tailoring your content to meet their needs. Leveraging analytics tools to track performance, collaborating with influencers, and fostering community engagement is essential for achieving business goals through social media.

Track engagement rates, reach, impressions, click-through rates, and conversions, to evaluate social media performance. The focus on quality and relevant content is more important than just consistently putting random pieces of content out on social media . Quality content is shareable, keeps users engaged for longer periods, and boosts your reputation. Make a content calendar to plan and schedule all your content to ensure consistency. This will help prevent gaps in your posts and allow for better strategic planning of your content themes and audience engagement.

Like most forms of advertising, it’s not always about sell, sell, sell. Sometimes, social media marketing is more about creating a space where your audience wants to hang out. Then, positioning yourself as a leader in that space they can trust. Choose 1–2 business goals, like increasing brand awareness, generating qualified leads, or improving retention. Discover how 5,000 global marketers use social media marketing to grow their audience, boost engagement, and drive conversions. The average person now spends 143 minutes a day on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

From there, divide your days into themes and go into deep work mode each day to maximize your productivity. When you set guardrails in the form of content pillars, you choose a strong focus and decide what your brand strategy isn’t. You can easily eliminate content ideas that fall far from your pillars and brainstorm the tiniest pain points within your core specialties. For example, whenever I think of Instagram and TikTok creator Suman, I think of “wavy haircare” because that’s her mojo. Her content pillars all fall under the bucket of wavy haircare — hair growth for wavy hair, styling wavy hair, products for wavy hair, etc. Some resources will start with setting social media goals, which is a great first step, but Instagram creator and consultant, Elise Darma, recommends putting audience research front and center.

Meire et al. (2017) investigated the impact of social media on acquiring B2B customers. By using commercially purchased prospecting data, website data and Facebook data from beverage companies the study conducted an experiment and found that social media us an effective tool in acquiring B2B customers. Future work might assess the added value of social media pages for profitability prediction instead of prospect conversion. When a longer timeframe becomes available (e.g., after one year), the profitability of the converted prospects can be assessed.

As you’ll have gleaned from this article, social media marketing is a deep, nuanced subject, and there’s often plenty to consider before a business kicks off any kind of social media marketing campaign. As your business and social media following grow, conversations about your brand will also increase. People will comment on your posts, tag you in their own posts, or message you directly.

ROI is the relationship between profit and the investment that generate that profit. Some studies focused on the ways B2B companies can measure ROI and the challenges they face (Gazal et al. 2016; Michaelidou et al. 2011; Vasudevan and Kumar 2018). For example, Gazal et al. (2016) investigated the adoption and measuring of the effectiveness of social media in the context of the US forest industry by using organisational-level adoption framework and TAM. By using data from 166 companies it was found that 94% of respondents do not measure the ROI from social media use. McShane et al. (2019) proposed social media strategies to influence online users’ engagement with B2B companies. It was found that hashtags and text difficulty are connected to lower levels of engagement while embedded media such as images and videos improve the level of engagement.

The rise of influencer marketing has further enabled brands to deepen their reach and drive meaningful engagement. According to the Q Sprout Pulse Survey, 90% of marketers reported that sponsored influencer content performed better in terms of engagement compared to organic content posted on their brand accounts. A well-defined social media marketing strategy also sets clear boundaries around your team’s time and expertise. Social media is a unique channel, and while nearly everyone uses it, this widespread usage often leads people to overestimate their expertise. Social media marketing tools like Hootsuite can help you schedule posts in advance (at the right time for audience engagement). You’ll also be able to schedule posts across platforms, while simultaneously tracking performance in a single, easy-to-use dashboard.