2022 Ways to Use Social Media to Market Your Business

In 2022, there are literally hundreds of social media platforms and dozens of ways to create marketing content.

-If you’re a small business owner or consultant, where do you start with social media marketing?

-What platforms should you use and what type of content is best for promoting a business?

I will discuss five of the best ways to use social media to market your business. 

Images on Instagram

Instagram is a great platform to market your brand or business to Gen Y and Z. Statistically, over 70% of the 1.3+ billion Instagram users are between them.

Some things to keep in mind before you post …

1.    Instagram also offers several filters to change the look and feel of images. However, be careful not to over-edit photos as they start to seem inauthentic when your audience just wants to get to know the real you!

2.    Try to keep content on-brand.

3.    When taking a photo, leave negative (empty) space around the subject to draw attention to your intended focus.

4.    Shoot the subject from different perspectives to give photos a different “feel” and utilise natural light when possible. 

Memes on Facebook

Everyone loves memes, right?

One meme won’t make everybody laugh — but you’ll be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t appreciate any meme. Memes can even become a part of popular culture, such is their impact in terms of becoming well-known on social media. So...

-Stand out by making people laugh.

-Create your own memes based on your industry and modify popular memes to have more of a connection with your business. 

Videos on YouTube

YouTube is the most organically visited website in the first world with1.7 billion unique monthly visitors. 70% of the videos watched on YouTube is recommended by the algorithm, meaning, new channels can reach an audience without a large existing following, in 2018 that 90% of people discover new brands and products on YouTube. Therefore, YouTube is a great channel to get your brand out there to your target market. Right way is...

-YouTube videos should be longer than 5 minutes and ideally 10–20 minutes.

-Many people use YouTube to consume informational content so share content about your area of expertise such as “how-to” guides, product demonstrations, or topic explanations.

Infographics on Pinterest

Pinterest almost seems like the misunderstood sibling of social media. Ignored by many marketers, perhaps because they don’t quite understand how it can add value to their business. It’s not a platform for vanity metrics and instant gratification of likes — it’s more for the long term game and increasing your website traffic.

Users can create their own ‘boards’ based on any topic where they can create and share their own content, or pin other relevant content of interest to these boards with approximately 85% purchase rate on visit. Pinterest has over 450 million active users, which means it should not be neglected by marketers.Therefore, if your brand sells products or services to women, you should really be on Pinterest. Use as..

-A great tool to showcase products for retail brands, Delicatessen , Bakeries & Coffee Bars infographics fit well into the Pinterest landscape.

-Infographics are an image that uses information and visuals to explain how something works or summarise statistics or other data in a visually interesting and easily understandable way.

People pin content onto boards based on their interests. So, if your pin helps explain a topic or process people are interested in, it may be repined multiple times to different boards, spreading that content around the internet.Pinterest images also perform well organically in Google image searches, and hence, people may find your Pinterest images without being a user of the platform. Pins can be linked to your website, increasing your traffic.

Short-form content on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a social media network for business-focused content and has over 700 million users globally.

LinkedIn has started to feel a lot more like Facebook over the past few years, but without your annoying comments on all the photos you post. What works...

-Short-form content is typically less than 1000 characters (150–250 words) and could be in the form of images, videos, polls, or just plain text.

-For a video, less than three minutes long.

-You can use LinkedIn to post articles — however, the algorithm doesn’t favour long-form content. To read an article, people have to click on it and leave the main LinkedIn feed. However, LinkedIn wants to keep people on the main feed, and hence the algorithm doesn’t favour articles.

-When posting a piece of short-form content on LinkedIn, you can use up to 1200 characters of text and include a piece of media.

-Using 1–5 sentences of text is suitable for a post and other times, you might want to use up all of the characters if you have a bit more to say.

-Share content about your area of expertise to enhance your credibility as a capable professional.

In the end.. 

To all business owner or new to digital marketing, I hope you enjoyed. Good luck with your content marketing endeavours!