Why Social Media is Important to Businesses
In 2021, the population size grew to 7.8 billion, while the daily social media population became 3.2 billion of those people. That means 42% of the world’s population uses social media daily. On average, each of those people spends about 3 hours on social platforms per day, and others can spend even more time if combining multiple platforms. These social platforms can consist of Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. The platforms searched are refined by data and algorithms to display new interest for the audience to keep them engaged. The first step in growing a brand is realizing the platform is its own brand. In today’s age of tech-savvy integration, there is no true growth without connections and social media is a place to make thousands that were not linked to personal connection or word of mouth. Social media is a broadcasting tool that can shape the brand to not only gain traction from the target audience but also, new clients that were not sought after originally.
Social Media Benefits:
- help reach the target audience
- increase the company’s popularity online
- give alternative ways to sell, purchase, or like products
- give a better idea of what the audience prefers
- increase in networking, even internationally
- recruit and attract highly qualified employees
How to better your social media
Balance Rule
Having the proper balance in anything is necessary, whether it is time management, nutritional balance, or even the type of content being posted. The 80/20 rule has been around for generations but is often misinterpreted in the depth that the balance rule can have. It is designed to create 80% of content that focuses on the audience, entertaining, being educational, and informative. The remaining 20% of the content focuses on the brand’s personal promotions. In other words, in every 5 uploads of content, 1 should focus on promoting the brand and the other 4 should focus on the audience’s desire for knowledge. The selling of the brand should always come second to the target audience’s need for knowledge and entertainment. Desired content from the target audience can be educational information about the brand or how to help navigate through it. It can, also, be a way to ask what is wanted. The most common balance rule options are:
- 80/20 Rule
- 5:3:2 Rule
- 4:1:1 Rule
Cross-Posting vs. Cross-Promoting
Cross-posting is a common social media mistake that occurs when the exact same content is shared on multiple platforms instead of tweaking the content across platforms to have variety in posts. The tone of content changes across different media platforms. The content posted should differ from one another. If the audience is entering a platform expecting different styled content but receives the same content on every social media, it will lose traction. For example, on Instagram, it is picture-based content with a caption of 2,200 characters, but on Twitter, there are only 280 characters and it is more text-based. Cross-posting is like writing a paper and repeating the same sentence multiple times throughout the paragraphs to get a message across, instead of giving more examples or comparisons to build on the message.
On the other hand, cross-promoting is a great alternative compared to cross-posting. Cross-promoting is focusing on what each platform’s posting style is and tweaking a post on those platforms to suit the varying target audience. For instance, if a company wants to share an important message across multiple platforms, they can create a few sentences to describe the topic, provide tweaks to the message for each platform, and carry the message with unique content that caters to each platform. In short, there is a variety of styles in each post, but they all have the same message or purpose.