Fort many years now, social media has been regarded not just as a brilliant place to maintain friendships but also as a remarkably useful marketing platform. As such, today’s social media platforms are awash with paid promotional content, much of it providing an excellent return on the investment made by businesses in the adverts. There are dozens of different ways to use social media for marketing your products or services. This article looks at four of the most effective, giving you a choice of how to proceed in gathering more followers to your business in 2022.

PaidPosts

Paid posts on social media present firms with a speedy way to target a section of consumers with tailor-made content. You’ll know your target customers well – they’ll often share similar traits such as their age group or their interests. These fields can be selected when you’re paying for a promoted post on the likes of Facebook and Instagram, showing your advert to only those consumers you think are likely to be interested in what you offer as a business. Use paid posts to enlarge your follower base by speaking directly to the consumers you value the most.

Partnerships

As well as going it alone with your own sponsored posts, you can also make use of the popularity of other profiles and businesses on social media in order to grow your own base of followers. Take Instagram as an example – a platform that allows ordinary people to gather millions of followers. If you partner with one of these influencers in what’s called an Instagram takeover, you’ll be able to leverage their personal brand to help sell your products. You’ll pay a fee, and your influencer will pose with pictures of your products, posting about your company. It’s a great way to get on the map from a standing start.

Virality

Viral memes and adverts are common on the internet. Even something as simple as a funny tweet can be shared hundreds of thousands of times in the space of a few hours, effectively helping you to access a huge number of people from a single, unpaid post. Going viral isn’t something that every firm can do– it takes a specific set of social media marketing skills to stand a chance of getting that viral hit. Yet when you do find success, your follower count will jump hugely in a single day.

Engagement

Finally, if you’re a business that likes to be friendly with its customers, you can also use social media to start conversations and debates, to run polls, or to set up competitions. All of these ideas amount to engagement: being active on the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram in order to encourage more people to interact with your brand. Run this campaign successfully, and you’ll develop a number of loyal customers who may be more than happy to share your promotional content with their friends, thus upping your exposure naturally over time.

Social media is a strange beast to tame, but these four tips can help you to draw out the marketing value on some of the world’s most popular platforms.