I don’t think I need to tell you how big social media is.
Social media is the fastest growing trend in the history of the world.
This sector has grown faster than the Internet itself.
Within the first ten years of being publicly available, the Internet managed to gather roughly 1 billion users.
If you think reaching nearly one in six people on the planet within ten years is fast, then I agree with you.
But, how about reaching one in five within nine years?
Since opening up for everyone to sign up on September 26, 2006, Facebook just crossed 2 billion monthly active users as of quarter two of 2017.
Even though the world population has grown to over 7.5 billion, by now, one out of every four humans on this planet has a Facebook account.
Facebook, quite literally, is beginning to take over the world. 62% of people in North America use the platform, and the percentages for similar countries are equally staggering.
In some ways, Facebook is a country of its own. It’s larger than any other country in the world, and one could even argue that it’s more connected.
And that’s just Facebook.
We haven’t even taken into account the usership on all the other platforms.
By the end of that analysis, we’d likely have trouble keeping count.
But don’t mistakenly believe that people are only using these platforms once a month just because that’s how most people go about measuring the stats.
In reality, people are using these platforms every single day. And they use them not just once per day, but multiple times.
People check, check, and check again.
In fact, we’re so addicted to our mobile phones and the social media apps on them that there’s now a word for our obsession.
Nomophobia is the fear of not being near your mobile phone.
With such widespread use, social media presents an incredible marketing opportunity.
If you’re not using social media marketing already, you’ll either have to learn it now or lose in the long run.
In this social media marketing guide, I’m going to walk you through the 12 most popular platforms.
I’ll give you an overview of each one, show you how to build a successful social media strategy for them, and point you to some of the best places to learn even more.
Below is a table of contents, so you can quickly jump to whichever platform interests you the most.
But first, let’s go over some definitions.
Definitions
As usual, Wikipedia is a disappointment when trying to define social media marketing. It simply says, “Social media marketing is the process of gaining website traffic or attention through social media sites.”
Wow, who would’ve thought, right?
I’d like to take a swing at defining social media marketing myself:
Social media marketing is the process of creating content that you have tailored to the context of each individual social media platform in order to drive user engagement and sharing.
You gaining traffic is only the result of social media marketing. What do you do to get that result? Create content that works well on each platform.
Naturally, however, each platform is different. On one, blog content is the master. On another, video dominates. And on another still, pictures win the day.
That’s why I’m going to show you the differences between the top 12 platforms and how you can leverage each.
As you’ll see, each platform requires a slightly different strategy.
Because here’s the thing: Everyone wants their content to go viral.
But, to do that, the content must be engaging so that people want to share it. Your content must be so good that it makes the user want to tell all of his or her friends about it.
Otherwise, your social media strategy will fail.
You’ll have no shares, no viral content, and no traffic back to your site.
Overview
Even though you hear about the same few social networks all of the time, that doesn’t mean there aren’t any others out there.
Wikipedia alone lists over 200 of them.
This great graphic called “The Conversation Prism” gives a good overview.
While this list is fairly up to date, it may come as a surprise to you that it’s entirely different from the first version of this graphic from 2008.
All versions aggregate around 200 services, but from version to version (which they usually update every 2-3 years), the creators remove over 100 social media platforms and add another 100.
The world of social media is changing incredibly fast. So when you’re just starting out, start with the ones that have been around for years.
Betting on “the next big thing” can pay off if you’re right. But, if you’re just getting started on a social media strategy, you can’t afford to not have a Facebook page or a Twitter account since we’ve already seen how effective they are.
Let’s look at some key social media terms.
Content: Content is whatever you are posting. It can be a Facebook status update, a photo on Instagram, a tweet, something to pin on a board on Pinterest, and so on.
The graphic already showed you that content comes in many different forms and that you need to custom-tailor it to each platform. What’s even more important than content, though, is context.
Context: Gary Vaynerchuk said that if content is king, then context is god. You can have a great joke, but if you place it somewhere inside a 3,000-word blog post, very few people will see it. On Twitter, however, that same joke as a tweet might crush it.
And, the opposite is also true. Packaging your entire blog post into one tweet is hardly possible, so try a good call to action with some relevant hashtags instead. And that brings us to hashtags.
Hashtags: By now, they’re a very common form that people use to add meta information on almost all social media channels. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest all use hashtags to let you describe the topic of your content or mark it as part of current trends.
They make your content easy for users to discover and therefore more likely that they’ll share it.
Shares: Shares are the currency of the social media world. Shares are all that matters on social media.
People will keep talking to you about impressions, click-through rates, and potential reach. But none of these tell you whether people actually pass on what you have to say.
When people engage and interact with your content, that’s good. But, when they share it, that is the time when you celebrate.
A great tool to measure shares and the overall impact of content is BuzzSumo:
The more shares, the more people love your content. It’s the best form of engagement that people can have with it.
Engagement: This is a general term that means that people interact with the content that you produce. It can be a like, a recommend, a comment, or a share. All of these are good, but the shares are where it’s at.
Now that we’ve covered some definitions, let’s take a look at some social media marketing trends for 2018.
2018 social media marketing trends
The social media world changes faster than any other online space.
And keeping up with it isn’t an easy task.
So here are a few trends you’ll want to keep in mind. Most likely, these trends will impact not just 2018, but also the future years to come.
Here’s what they are.
Organic reach is down
Once upon a time, a social media user could post compelling content and easily grow their social media following.
After a few months, they’d receive loads of friend requests, comments, shares, and “likes,” all because of their amazing content.
But today, that’s not so much the case.
In fact, most social media platforms are making it increasingly difficult to build an organic following.
And it’s not unintentional.
Here’s why. As the ability for organic superstars to shine goes down, something else goes up.
You guessed it: ad spend.
Of course, that’s just Facebook. But the truth is that it’s the same for every social media platform. They make it more difficult for users to grow their own organic platform so that businesses spend more money on advertisements.
In fact, one change that Facebook made caused a 52% drop in organic reach per post in just a few months.
Remember: Social media platforms are businesses.
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and every single other social media space wants to make money.
And they do that by connecting you with paying customers. Ideally, they do that well. But ultimately, they are each in it for the money. So you have to watch out and measure your own efforts to see what works and what doesn’t.
Social is becoming more ‘pay to play’
As organic reach becomes more difficult, businesses have to pay to play.
They can no longer trust savvy content marketing efforts to build a following.
The more that social media algorithms prioritize advertisements, the more that businesses are willing to pay.
This is why social media ad spend is on the way up. Advertising budgets for social media doubled from 2014 to 2016.
That’s not very surprising, really.
It makes sense when you find out that social media companies make practically all of their money from advertisements.
In other words, social media is only free for users because advertisers are paying loads of money to reach those users.
The user is the product.
But to reach them, you have to pay.
Fortunately, if you choose the right social media platform for your business to invest money into, that won’t be too big of a problem.
Most social media sites still have very reasonable advertising costs, particularly if you have thought through your advertisements well.
After all, the better your ads, the less you’ll spend.
Channels are merging
As entrepreneurs create social media websites, the possibilities become increasingly endless.
And that trend isn’t slowing down. As new ways of communicating, reaching customers, and pulling leads develop, so do strategies that are equally innovative.
Take, for instance, cart abandonment emails.
Once, the only place to send and receive cart abandonment messages was through email.
You’d receive something like this in your inbox.
Now, however, Facebook Messenger and a swath of other messaging platforms are equally viable.
Just the other day, I received this message from Pura Vida Bracelets on Facebook Messenger.
So, what’s the point of all this?
Channels are changing, and the way marketers use them is changing even more.
As more and more social media sites find their footing, expect the merging of different marketing channels to happen even more than it already has.
Tools are merging
But it’s not just the channels that are merging. The tools we use are also merging.
How many times this week, for example, have you logged in to a SaaS product with Google or Facebook instead of creating new login credentials?
As more tools flood the Internet, all of it becomes cluttered for the users of those tools.
Fortunately, marketing tools all around the Internet are working to integrate seamlessly with the giants of advertising.
Take MailChimp, for example.
With MailChimp, an email marketing software, users can create Facebook Ads natively from their MailChimp accounts.
They can do so to target their email subscribers or create a lookalike audience from their current subscribers.
The more that this happens between social media platforms and SaaS companies, the easier time you’ll have marketing to your target audience.
Really, this merging of online tools is a good thing for your business.
And, more than likely, it isn’t going to slow down anytime soon.
With these trends in mind, it’s time to look at the most popular platforms (and some that are up and coming). For each platform, I’ll give you a short history of how it came about, where it’s at right now, what the context of the platform dictates, and how to come up with great content for it.
We’ll start with the biggest beast of all: Facebook.
History: Like the movie name suggests, this is the social network. When Mark Zuckerberg and his co-founders created the site in a Boston dorm room in 2004, they only made it accessible to Harvard students.
But they quickly realized the site’s potential.
After expanding to Ivy League colleges and a few others, they opened Facebook to everyone in 2006. And as you saw above, it completely exploded.
Now, it’s the biggest social media platform out there. It offers marketers the most data and the most targeted ads. You can be as specific as defining your customer down to the socks she’s wearing.
With Facebook Ads, you can target management executives in the Bay area between the ages of 45 and 54 who play golf on a regular basis and regularly spend money on equipment (thanks to credit card data).
Context: Facebook gives you a lot of freedom when it comes to content. Images, videos, and text posts all work. What matters, though, is that you integrate your content into the platform as much as possible.
For example, instead of just posting a link to a YouTube video, upload the video to Facebook’s own platform. If you want to redirect people to a giveaway or landing page, publish it as a tab inside your fan page.
Try to keep your user on the platform as long as possible. People trust Facebook, and they don’t want to leave the comfort of “their homes.”
Business Manager
If you want to advertise on Facebook, the first thing you need to know about is the Facebook Business Manager tool.
You can think of this as a hub for managing your advertisements, pages, and people.
It’s free and quite simple to use.
Go to the landing page for the Facebook Business Manager. Click “Create Account” in the top right-hand corner.
Then, you’ll see this overlay come up. Simply enter your business name and click “Continue.”
Now enter your name and your business email, then click “Finish.”
Yep, getting it set up really is that easy.
You’ll now see your Business Manager dashboard. Feel free to browse around to get a feel for its capabilities.
This tool is an absolute must for anyone who’s serious about advertising and marketing on Facebook. It will give you a single place to worry about your marketing performance rather than having to jump from tab to tab.
Advertising options
Perhaps the best part about Facebook is the specificity with which you can target your ideal customer.
You can choose to target people based on their demographic, device, age, interests, and a load of other characteristics.
That’s a wildly valuable benefit for any marketer.
After all, we marketers take tons of time creating customer avatars and target market portfolios.
But Facebook actually allows you to put those things into action.
The first thing you’ll get to choose when creating a Facebook advertising campaign is the goal of your campaign.
Do you want to drive traffic to your website, drive conversions, promote your Facebook Page, get engagement on your post, or something else?
Then, you’ll also get to choose your audience based on their location, age, gender, language, interests, behaviors, and connections.
Finally, you’ll be able to select the devices you want to target and where you want your ads to show up.
Facebook recommends using auto ad placement, but if you disagree, you can just as easily decide where you want your ads to go and what device you want them to target.
Many social media platforms will make all these decisions for you. But Facebook puts you in the driver’s seat because they know you’ll likely do the best job of finding your ideal customers.
You, after all, know your target market best.
Lookalike Audiences
What happens when you find the perfect audience to target?
You’re raking in traffic and leads like never before. Booyah.
But does it have to end there? Finding your perfect advertising audience can take quite some time, so naturally, you want to make the most of it.
Fortunately, when you find your perfect audience, you can leverage it.
Facebook allows you to create lookalike audiences.
Basically, these are audiences that mimic the characteristics of one of your current audiences.
That means that if you have an audience that is performing remarkably, you can create a similar audience that should also perform well.
Advertisers everywhere flock to this feature because it streamlines the process of finding and expanding your target market.
You don’t want to miss out on it.
Instagram integration
Did you know that when you create an ad on Facebook, you can also run that ad on Instagram by clicking a single button?
That’s right. It takes you no extra work.
You can simply click the Instagram ad placement button and select “Feed,” “Stories,” or both.
If your ad is highly visual and your target market is younger people, then you might want to consider using this automatic integration.
It will expand your reach with no extra work.
Facebook Live
People love Facebook live. They don’t quite love it like they love their families, but pretty darn close.
For a while now, marketers have stood in awe of the power of video marketing. At least, they did until live video came on the scene.
There’s just something about live video that makes it more appealing.
Maybe it’s the chance that people will mess up. Maybe it’s the transparency. Maybe it makes us feel more connected.
Whatever the reasons, the fact is the same.
People enjoy live video far more than they do traditional videos.
That’s particularly true on Facebook.
Users spend three times longer watching live videos than they do pre-recorded videos.
In other words, live video might be well worth your marketing time and money on Facebook.
It quickly engages people, and they watch it for longer than alternative video content.
And since it’s still early in its development, live video isn’t crowded yet. That means that it’s ripe for the taking.
Additional content:
Google+
History: Google+ has only been around since 2011, but can you believe that it has managed to gather 395 million users in that short period of time?
It was Google’s counterattack to Facebook. And even though it surely hasn’t dethroned the king, it’s done fairly well.
Out of 2.5 billion Gmail users, around 395 million have activated their Google+ accounts. However, only 25 million have ever posted on the platform, and only 4-6 million are really active on it.
However, the advantage of Google+ is its seamless integration with Gmail. This is because of Google+’s idea of circles. They group everything around their circles.
When you add someone to your network, you can instantly mark them as a friend, colleague or family member.
Google+ makes it really easy to connect with more people. It recently started allowing you to add people back (in return for them adding you) right from your notification email.
One of Google’s most successful moves was integrating Google Hangouts. Plenty of people use it to host webinars.
Context: Similar to Facebook, Google+ allows for a wide variety of posts, including images, videos, and even polls.
Even if your main outlet is Facebook, cross-posting to Google+ is an easy win, especially if your circles differ a bit from your Facebook fans.
Consider the popular YouTube comedian Jenna Marbles, for example. She just links her Google+ page with a tiny symbol on the channel page. But with 17 million subscribers, a lot of people click through.
I bet she set up her Google+ profile just once as a way to show her YouTube videos. Yet it has nonetheless garnered over 202,570 Google+ followers so far.
That’s not bad considering it’s just a little extra effort on top of her other social media channels.
Google+ original intent and evolution
Many online publications consider Google+ to be a failure.
Articles such as “Inside the failure of Google+, a very expensive attempt to unseat Facebook” are relentless in proclaiming that Google+ failed as a social media platform.
However, articles like these surely exaggerate the case.
Perhaps Google failed for being Google. Most of us expect bigger wins from such a big company.
But if you take the larger picture into account, they still have millions of daily active users.
That sure doesn’t seem like a failure.
Plus, one of their original intents was to compete with Facebook and automatically integrate with loads of different services.
Take login credentials, for instance. At least in that regard, they are prevalent.
If nothing else, Google and Google+ have succeeded at integrating themselves with other online tools.
But, there is something else to keep in mind.
In fact, this is the real important part about Google+ and why you might want to consider joining the platform.
It can help your SEO.
For business information, Google will automatically pull from Google+ business accounts to deliver relevant information to searchers.
Clearly, getting on Google+ is probably worth the tiny amount of time you’ll spend doing so to benefit your business’ SEO.
Additional content:
History: These guys did everything right. They had the perfect app and released it at the perfect time. Within three months of releasing Instagram in the app store, it had reached 1 million users.
Their growth was entirely organic. The app was so good that it dominated the app store charts for months. And, it still does.
When the app came out, Apple had just unveiled the iPhone 4. That brought a major leap forward in the quality of pictures that users could take with their smartphones.
Seven years and 800 million users later, the way the app works is almost entirely the same. People post pics, tag friends, insert hashtags, and double tap to show they like what others share.
It might seem like nothing has happened, but let’s not forget the fact that Facebook acquired Instagram in 2012, only 24 months after they started, for a whopping $1 billion.
And in 2015, they rolled out the use of ads for everyone.
Context: Pictures. Instagram is and was always about pictures. Out of all of the big networks, Instagram has the highest engagement rate.
Since liking is so easy (you just double tap on a picture as you scroll through your feed), people tend to do it more on Instagram than on Twitter or Facebook.
You can also release 15-second videos on Instagram, but very few accounts do that successfully. People tend to like and comment more on pictures.
However, posting video on Instagram can certainly work, too. Ms. Dash, for example, has done well with video on Instagram.
Her videos routinely collect 3,000+ likes and hundreds of comments within a day of posting when she posts them.
She has collected just under 300,000 followers because her videos are excellent. Each one shows you an entire recipe in 15 seconds.
But, if I were to start a new Instagram account from scratch, I’d focus entirely on pictures. Here are a few categories that work well:
Inspiring quotes
Questions in text form (they engage your followers)
Photos of items from luxury brands (like Louis Vuitton handbags, cars from Ferrari, Coca-Cola, etc.)
Sparsely clothed women (who would have guessed?)
Of course, you must also make use of hashtags, give a call-to-action with each photo, and make sure that you’re using your bio right (it’s your only chance to link back to your site). But, we’ll talk more about that below.
You can also focus on Instagram influencer marketing.
Influencer marketing on Instagram
If there is one social media platform that represents the pinnacle of influencer marketing, it’s Instagram.
The reason for that is difficult to understand.
Perhaps it’s because the platform is so visual. Or perhaps it’s because advertisement overloads haven’t yet annoyed the userbase.
Or perhaps the influencers enjoy sporting their content more on Instagram than on Facebook, Google+, or the like.
Whatever the case, Instagram is winning big.
It’s no surprise, then, that 65% of brands participate in influencer marketing.
You might want to consider joining them.
And it’s not because you want to give into the trends of today. It’s because the influencer marketing trend on Instagram is actually a powerful one.
It’s one that you shouldn’t easily ignore.
Instagram Stories are stealing users from Snapchat
Instagram Stories is a feature that lets users create a coherent series of pictures, videos, or gifs.
And the feature exploded the moment that Instagram created it.
In fact, in 2017, the number of people using Instagram Stories flippantly passed the number of users on Snapchat, which is a similar platform.
In other words, if you’re going to use Instagram, then you should probably create a Story of your own.
Perhaps you should create a Story that shows users behind the scenes of your business or offers special deals.
How brands are using it today
OK. OK. Instagram is awesome, and it’s growing in power.
But all of that raises an important question.
How, exactly, are brands using Instagram? What do they use it for?
Well, the answer to that question is quite simple. They are using it for engagement.
Instagram is the best social media platform for engagement. It beats Facebook and Twitter.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that you can’t sell on the platform and market your products as well.
But trying to push for audience engagement is your best bet.
Then, once people learn to love your brand, they’ll buy from you.
On Instagram, though, engagement must come first.
Additional content:
YouTube
History: Does anyone remember the old player, Google Video?
Who knew that it would blow up to 1 billion monthly users in fewer than ten years? This social network has changed the way we consume video since it has made it easy (streaming is super fast) and free, and it gives us a way to express our opinions instantly (thanks to comments).
Users watch about one billion hours of video on YouTube every single day. That’s 114,000 years of time!
YouTube has spawned entire industries and kickstarted thousands of careers.
Ten years ago, no one could make a living playing video games.
Felix Kjellberg, aka PewDiePie, is one of the biggest earners on the platform, having made 124 million dollars since 2010 (he’s super humble about it).
About 40 million people watch his every move with the joystick, and he has even released his own game.
Another, more business-related, example is Robo, a 3D printer startup. They were able to generate $4.8 million in revenue using video ads, including YouTube ads.
Thanks to YouTube, people can now build a nice, small business teaching things, sharing makeup tutorials, doing funny pranks, or sharing their athletic abilities (or lack thereof).
For marketers, it’s a great way to share long-form content with your audience, especially if they’re not avid readers. For example, you could turn your blog posts into video tutorials.
Pro tip: Use other social media channels as a gateway to drive your followers to YouTube by giving excerpts, snippets, and previews of your videos. The little, bite-sized teasers will spark curiosity and make people want to see the whole thing.
Context: There are two ways to succeed on YouTube. You can either entertain or teach.
Article was written by Neil Patel, a renown internet marketer in USA
