It’s tricky to conquer social media in 2020. Algorithms constantly change. User trends fluctuate and evolve. As a result, marketers need to get creative about how to best optimize online campaigns on social media. Marketers still use social media to build, promote, and maintain a brand. Regardless of how big a business is, it’s crucial to have a social media presence for growth. Your customers are there; you should be, too.

Facebook still reigns supreme with over 2 billion monthly active users. However, due to the uptick of scandals in recent years, people don’t trust Facebook as much as they used to. According to data collected by Edison Research, the social media juggernaut shed around 15 million users last year. Most of the loss concentrates on younger audiences aged 12 to 34 years old. The same thing happened to Instagram: users complain their organic engagement saw a significant dip in 2019.

This isn’t to say that marketers should stay away from these two platforms. There’s no denying they’re still big players in the social media ecosystem. However, it does highlight the fact that marketers should pay attention to the shifting trend that’s occurred. The process of marketing to millennials and Gen Z has shifted.

Despite Facebook and Instagram losing users, marketers can still leverage these channels to facilitate business growth. Let’s explore four key strategies to ensure this takes place.

Find Your People

When it comes to social media campaigns, find your target audience. The first step is to reach the right people. Narrow down your list to your specific niche.  Then, laser-focus your efforts to audiences that can be converted into followers. You can then market to these folks down the line.

Here are some important points to consider:

• Age – Depending on your product, you might want to attract people who are in a certain age group. This information is crucial since you’ll be using different strategies when marketing to boomers, millennials, or Generation Z.
• Interest – Interest-based targeting is one of the most common strategies businesses use to introduce themselves to new audiences. It solidifies the people to whom you are marketing have similar interests to your business.
• Timing – Know where your customers are located. This will give you an idea when you should market to them. Identify which hours they’re on their favorite social media platforms and be present during those time to increase your ad’s visibility.

While there are other factors to add to your checklist, these three are essential. Once you’ve created your list, learn about copywriting and its relationship with social media.

Master Copywriting for Social Media

Depending on which platform you’re operating, your copywriting should be flexible enough to fit the best practices on each site. For instance, Facebook has a character limit of 63,206. Obviously, you won’t use all that. So where should you draw the line?

According to Buffer, an ad or post with a character count of 80 or less has a 66% higher engagement rate. Moreover, remember your copy is for the customer and not your company. Highlight the value of your post and how it will help people. The copy should also act as an amplifier to the image you use for your blog or article, which brings us to our next point.

Use Creative Visuals

Visual content is one of the main drivers of engagement on social media. The average attention span of people nowadays is only eight seconds. This is four seconds lower when compared to the numbers seen in the year 2000. This means written content isn’t consumed as much anymore. People only skim through articles. That’s where visual content comes in.

Facebook posts that contain images are three times more likely to see audience engagement compared to those without visual content. Tweets are 150% more likely to get retweeted if it’s accompanied by relevant images. And LinkedIn posts that have visual content will receive a 98% comment rate from users who are interested in the information.

Infographics are one of the top forms of visual content that people love to consume as they can process the information faster, retain it longer, and increases their desire to read. As an example, here’s a social media trends infographic.

This is why more and more content you see on the web is broken down by images containing valuable statistics. It gives people mental breathing room before diving on another block of texts.

Leverage Analytics

While visual content helps attract audiences to your site, analytics helps to identify what to tackle. There are a variety of SEO tools for monitoring, reporting, and analysis. It’s also critical to monitor what your competition is doing and what topics they cover. This doesn’t mean you should copy what they write about.

Instead, see what people say about their pieces and extract information about potential subjects that might interest your target audience. You can also identify other information that might’ve been left out. Then, cover it in your next piece. The idea is to capture gripping topics on your niche that will stimulate user engagement.

Aside from identifying potential topics, analytics is also there to give you an idea of what your competition is doing. Use tools like Similar Web to see which social media platforms are working for the competition and which ones are falling behind. Moreover, try to collect negative feedback your competition is receiving from their audience to avoid their mistakes. Tools like Sentione help accomplish this. Sentione provides sentiment analysis to campaigns run by online businesses.

In Conclusion

Despite negative sentiments of people towards certain social media platforms, social media isn’t going away. Sure, some networks may lose favor to the general population. But it’ll only get replaced by a more reliable and efficient one for that demographic.

Thus, familiarizing yourself with social media marketing and understanding how it transforms is an essential skill to grow your online presence. Just remember to prioritize value above everything else as people will always respond well to businesses that provide improvement to their customer’s daily lives.

Author Bio: Aubrey Barcena is a digital marketer at Growth Rocket, a boutique digital agency based in Los Angeles. They do inbound marketing, web design and development, and paid advertising.