How to build your social media marketing strategy for 2019
Social media marketing Yes, everyone’s on social media—but how can you leverage that for your business? How can you use Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp to help you with your Internet marketing campaign? Do you even need online marketing? We’re here to answer all those questions and much more! What is social media marketing? Businesses are increasingly flocking to social media for their advertising needs. There’s a good reason for that. With half the world officially having access to the Internet just before the start of the year in December 2018, companies’ potential for marketing outreach has never looked better. And with eCommerce taking off, access to international markets is becoming ever more pronounced. Online marketing lets businesses to tap into new markets. It lets them establish themselves there so that in a few years they have a firm foothold and can sell more goods and services than their competitors. Added to that, digital marketing has the advantage of being able to target audiences more effectively than traditional advertising. Businesses can do this by carefully studying user experience on social networks and promoting online advertisements that are displayed along with user-generated content, with call-to-actions to their goods and services. Is social media marketing more important than Google Ads? Advertising on social networks shouldn’t replace your Google Ads. After all, people use both Google and social media platforms so it’s important to run ads on both Google and social networks. They complement each other. But it’s also important to note that people spend more time going through their social media feeds than they would on Google’s search engine results pages. When you compare user experience, you see that people tend to stay on Google for shorter periods of time because they’re trying to find other websites to visit. Whereas on Facebook, people will be staying for longer and they might also visit it when they’re bored and want more content to go through. Social media strategy Have a strategy is important. Your business needs to know what it wants, plan to get it, and then execute. There are several things that your business might need to consider when thinking about running ads on social networks. After all, you wouldn’t want to spend money on social media services if it won‘t have a good rate of investment, now are you? But don’t worry, we’ll go over all the important factors that contribute to a successful digital marketing campaign. Audience Bet you saw this one coming from a hundred miles away. It’s always there in any form of content that you produce. But I mean more than just a simple “know your audience” type thing. You will want to do things a lot more differently based on who you’re trying to sell to. If you’re selling to teenagers and young adults, you want to promote your products on Snapchat, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube and TikTok. While we’re at it, consider using memes and social media influencers. And no, don’t generalize them into one or two categories. Learn what they want and need; don’t just assume that they all like avocado toast and spend all their money on the latest iPhone. If you’re selling to new parents, think about running ads on Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest. Memes would work here too as new parents tend not to be too old for them. And if you’re targeting someone in their 40s and upwards, Facebook and Instagram are places where you’d want to run your online ads. As a final note, while some platforms might be unpopular in the United States, this doesn’t mean that it’s true in other countries. Take WhatsApp. Europeans use WhatsApp a lot because their carrier plans often limit how many SMS text messages they can send. WhatsApp is also popular in South East Asia. WeChat and Sina Weibo are popular in China, a lucrative market for many American businesses. Niche Depending on the goods and services you sell, you should favor certain social media networks over others. If you’re cybersecurity vendor, you should be on Twitter. Twitter is one of the most important channels of communications amongst cybersecurity professionals. You may even consider experimenting with Mastodon, a social media service similar to Twitter that’s decentralized. If you’ve just created a new fashion line, you’ll want to promote it on Instagram, YouTube and Pinterest first before moving on to other networks. Why? Because those are the platforms most people go to when they want to learn about the latest fashion trends. If you sell infant clothes, Facebook and Instagram it is for you. Your niche is critical to where your specific audience can be found. Use it to your advantage. How users use a social network This is very important if you want to do well on social media. You can’t possibly hope to be taken seriously on social media if you interact with customers on Reddit like you would on Twitter. Different social network sites have different rules on etiquette. It’s important to follow these rules. Otherwise, you might find your brand name turned a meme. Not a great position to be in when the Internet is making fun of your brand. One way you can get a better feel for user experience is by seeing whether the social network is primarily used as a mobile app (Instagram) or if it can be used on all devices. With messaging apps that support advertising, like Facebook Messenger, you want to make sure you optimize your ads for mobile. Try using AMP links if you can, or otherwise make sure that your links serve up the mobile version of your website and landing pages. WhatsApp Messenger doesn’t yet support ads, though it might in the future. But the reason I bring it up is that it’s a great example of a social media service that emphasizes mobile over desktop. That’s not to say you WhatsApp doesn’t offer WhatsApp download. You can, but it’s essentially WhatsApp Web—which only works if it can connect to your
Facebook Disrupts Russian Disinformation Campaign Targeting Neighbors
Today Facebook removed 364 pages, groups and accounts on its platform because it suspected they were linked to the Russian state-run news agency, Sputnik. The social media company said that some were being operated out of Moscow but hid their link to Sputnik in a bid to blend in as local-run Facebook pages, groups and accounts. Countries targeted by the misinformation campaign According to this article, the pages pretended to be publishing news in Romania, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Moldova, and Kyrgyzstan, while they were being operated out of Russia. Despite this, Facebook was able to link these pages and accounts to employees of Sputnik. While it is unclear whether these employees acted on their own, it is likely that they had the backing of Sputnik, as well as other elements within the Russian government. This is especially true because of the large sums of money that they had spent on online advertisement. Some of these pages regularly posted content promoting anti-NATO sentiment, protest movements and corruption amongst their followers. All in all, most of the posts were anti-Western and sought to bring about discord and chaos in the political systems of those nations that were targeted by this information warfare campaign. Examples of the Facebook posts made by Facebook ads and Russian reach One page is said to have had 790,000 followers, with other pages having similar number of followers. Facebook revealed that the operation had begun on October 2013 and had spent approximately $135,000 (using various currencies including US dollars, Russian rubles and the Euro) in ads on the social media platform. The most recent ad ran in January 2019. Facebook is yet to complete its assessment of the organic content spread from these accounts. These pages hosted approximately 190 events. The first of which is do have had happened in August 2015, and the most recent taking place in January 2019. Up to 1,200 Facebook users are said to have had expressed interest in participating or learning more about these events. However, the social media platform cannot confirm whether these events took place. Facebook has said that they used open source reporting to help investigate this incident. They have also shared information about their enquiry with the US law enforcement, the US Congress, other technology companies, and lawmakers in the countries targeted by the Russian information warfare campaign. Another operation targeting Ukraine uncovered The social media company has also removed 107 Facebook pages, groups and accounts, as well as 41 Instagram accounts, in a separate Russian misinformation campaign not linked to the Sputnik operation. They were tipped off by US law enforcement agencies. Russia is believed to have had carried out the misinformation campaign while targeting the Ukraine. Facebook was able to identify some technical overlaps between this campaign as well as the one that targeted the United States during the Midterms late last year.