tips on social media marketing for businesses

For e-⁠resident startups and businesses, social media marketing provides you with a strong online presence and a global audience to boost growth

With over 5.17 billion social media users worldwide, social media marketing is fast becoming a core component of any robust marketing strategy. Not only can social media marketing help businesses engage with clients and customers, but it can also help enhance brand reputation, awareness and trust and can boost sales. 

Businesses of all sizes can use social media to achieve sales and marketing goals. It's THE place to catch the attention of potential customers. This is because a large portion, probably most, of your potential audience is on social media. There are thousands of platforms to choose from, with some of the most recognisable and popular channels being Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. 

Below we take a deep dive into the ever-evolving world of social media marketing, looking at some best-practice tips to supercharge your business social media presence.

What are the benefits of social media marketing?

Businesses can use social media marketing as part of their general marketing strategy to engage with customers and supporters on social media platforms. These platforms can also be used to promote your brand, your products and services, and to showcase your brand story and values.

There are many benefits for companies using social media marketing. It can help you reach and engage with customers, it can increase awareness of your brand, and it can be a powerful tool to increase trust in your brand. Brigitta Sibrits, e-Residency Social Media Manager explains. On social media, she said, "people are now more interested in connecting on a deeper level with the products/services they buy, and what easier place to showcase that, than social media.”

Many social media channels also allow you to sell products, and can thereby help you increase sales revenue. Furthermore, many social media channels and tools can help you measure the impact of your social media marketing, helping you to gauge performance through metrics. 

Marketing on social media can help you achieve your goals, whether you’re:

• a copywriter looking to expand your business,
• transitioning from being a solopreneur to establishing an agency,
• a corporate trying to enhance your brand awareness and increase sales,
• creating your own social network, or 
• a startup looking to grow your audience and engage with your target market rapidly and affordably.

If you’re looking for some great examples of social media marketing, follow and engage with the Estonian e-Residency program on LinkedIn, Instagram or YouTube. 

13 Social Media Marketing Tips for Businesses

All businesses can benefit from social media marketing. Whether you’re just getting started, or you want to improve your social media marketing strategy, the tips below aim to help boost your social media presence and your business marketing efforts. 

For remote businesses and startups that are part of Estonia's e-⁠Residency program, here are 13 opportunities to maximise your business presence on social media and grow your business.

Bonus tip for startups: Navigating the startup phase of a new business venture can be exciting and challenging. As there may be many tasks for you to take care of, you may want to consider hiring a marketing agency to manage your social media marketing. The e-⁠Residency Marketplace has a list of service providers in various sectors that could be useful. 

1. Define Your Brand and Persona

Before you start implementing your social media marketing plan and tactics, your business should define your brand and its persona. To do this, you’ll need to ensure that your brand and persona resonate with your target audience. 

It’s also important to have a clearly defined tone of voice, style, visual assets and messaging. This can help your customers clearly identify your brand across all your marketing channels. 

2. Know Your Audience

To be able to effectively communicate with your audience, you need to get to know them better. Research where your audience lives, their demographics, and what they’re most interested in. These insights can help you target the right social media platforms and tone of voice, and lead you to craft engaging content that resonates with your audience.

Many social media platforms have built-in analytics that provide global analytics, such as Facebook Insights and Instagram Insights. These help tell you things about your audience such as their behaviour and preferences, where they are from, etc.

3. Be Strategic When Selecting Social Media Platforms

Social media marketing can be leveraged as part of your overall marketing strategy to help engage your audience. However, it requires significant effort and resources to develop content and strategies for each social media platform.

Each platform is very different in the way the algorithms work, what type of content is most effective and who uses them. Keep that in mind when deciding on what platforms to use - you don’t have to be on all of them. That’s why it’s best to be selective about choosing which social media channels to have a presence on. 

According to Brigitta Sibrits, Social Media Manager at e-⁠Residency:

When thinking of creating a social media presence, or revamping your existing presence, consider three key things:

1. Who is your target audience and what platforms do they use?
2. Does your team have the skills and resources to manage your social media?
3. What type of content do you want to create?

The amount and type of platforms should become fairly obvious after answering those questions.

Sibrits adds that "if you're not sure what platforms to use or what type of content to post - try them out! You've probably tested your product/service many times, so do the same with social media. Set targets, test for some period, and make decisions based on the analytics and KPIs."

In some cases, even having just one social media account can do wonders. This is because different platforms are suited to different types of audiences. LinkedIn for example is good for business-to-business (B2B) marketing, where you can network with professionals in your sector and connect with potential partners. It’s thus good to consider which social media platforms your target audience likes to engage on best when selecting social media platforms for your business. 

Some other popular social media platforms include YouTube, Facebook, X, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok. There are several that can be leveraged to create digital communities, such as Facebook groups, Reddit, and Discord. 

4. Create a Content Strategy

Just as you would plan what content to share on your website or in your newsletter, businesses also need a content strategy for social media. Integrate it to create a cross-channel support system for your efforts. A great content strategy can help your brand to be discovered, and your content to be seen and engaged with. It can also boost both social media optimisation (SMO) and search engine optimisation (SEO) in regards to your content. 

As part of this content strategy, you’ll want to design brand guidelines, a social media sharing policy for staff, and establish rules around the content production and approval process and who can post on your businesses’ behalf. 

Creating a content strategy for social media also involves developing a content calendar. Decide which channels you are using, how often you will post on each channel, and what type of content to post. Plan out a whole month or so ahead and make sure all the content is approved if necessary. Taking time to carefully plan your content ahead of time according to your strategy can help you maintain a consistent posting cadence on social media. It will also help to avoid bottlenecks and give you flexibility so that you can respond to unforeseen changes or save spots for viral trends.

Great content requires you to be original, creative and authentic and is typically based on strong storytelling. Make sure to have a good mix of different content types such as videos, photos, infographics, and user-generated content to appeal to different audiences and different channels. 

It’s also best practice to post consistently. Not only does regular communication with your audience help maintain engagement with them, but it also has benefits for content visibility in terms of each platforms’ algorithm. 

5. Focus on Engagement and Community Building

Rather than trying to build followers or pay for advertising to increase your reach, businesses should try to build engagement with audiences on social media and communicate authentically.

This requires being active on social channels and taking time to respond to comments and messages, and taking part in relevant online conversations and events. You may want to host online events, or partner with others who have a similar audience to engage and cross-promote content. 

In addition to taking time to create and schedule social media content, it’s important to set aside enough time for community engagement. For larger organisations that have capacity, it may also be wise to recruit remote staff across different time zones who can be online 24/7 to respond immediately to any questions, comments or feedback and escalate any problems immediately.   

There are an increasing number of tools that can also be leveraged to provide customer support on social media. For example, you can use ZenDesk with Instagram and Facebook through an integration which allows you to connect these platforms with customer support. Consider deploying chatbots to automate immediate responses, especially if you don’t have a large customer support department.

6. Collaborate with Influencers

Using influencers and doing collaborations with well known social media personalities can really help build your brand awareness. Collaborating with people in your niche, who share similar brand values and a strong online presence can help you reach new audiences and build trust and credibility.

There are generally thought to be four types of influencers.

1. Nano-influencers with fewer than 10,000 followers,
2. Micro-influencers with 10,000-100,000 followers,
3. Macro-influencers with 100,000-1,000,000 followers, and 
4. Mega-influencers with more than 1M followers.

The bigger the follower base, the more the collaboration will probably cost you. However, Sibrits explains that "social media platforms are actually heading in the direction of nano- and micro-influencer marketing and platforms themselves are in favour of smaller creators." So, don't be shy to reach out to potential influencers yourself!

It’s important to seek partnerships that are mutually beneficial and authentic. There are many agencies and digital tools such as Meltwater that can assist you in finding the right influencers for your brand, and help you negotiate deals.

7. Focus on social media optimisation

By optimising your social media profiles and posts, you can reach more followers, drive more engagement, and generally improve the performance of your social media efforts.

There are a range of tactics you can use for social media optimisation (SMO). This includes:

• writing engaging, keyword-optimised copy, 
• adding strategic hashtags, 
• developing your tone of voice to relate to your target audience, 
• posting at the time of day when most of your followers are online, 
• posting the right amount of times a week for each platform, and 
• using the most engagement-boosting post formats

Other SMO tactics include optimising your social media bio or profile on each platform, adding relevant keywords in your captions, and tagging accounts that you mention in your posts. It’s also advisable to add a call to action in your posts and your bio, and optimise the links that you share on social media so that you can track them and use that data to inform your social media strategy.

Furthermore, don’t overlook the increasing importance of making your posts accessible and inclusive. That can be achieved, for example, by adding alt text to images and closed captions to any videos. 

8. Use social media analytics

Most social media platforms have native analytics built-in that provide insights and data to help you make more informed decisions about what content, hashtags, media types, and posting times are most effective. These metrics include reach, impressions, follower growth, and engagement. There are also a range of paid social media management services and tools that provide additional insights and analytics to help organisations optimize social media marketing efforts. 

By using social media analytics and adapting your social media strategy, your business can help drive increased engagement, follower growth, and loyalty. In addition, social listening can help you track public sentiment about your brand.

9. Stay On Trend

Staying up-to-date with social media trends can have many advantages. By posting content that’s on-trend, you can drive engagement with your content and increase the visibility of your posts. Trends can relate to the type of media being used (such as Instagram reels or new features), the type of content being shared (such as cat memes), or the music that plays in the background of your TikTok video. It can also be about specific topics being discussed in the post. For example, if your business operates in the sustainability sector, you may want to emphasise your net zero or nature positive credentials. 

Consider not just following trends, but becoming a social media trend-setter. By communicating authentically and maintaining your brand values, you can carve out a new social media trend that may attract new followers and drive engagement.

A word of caution when following trends: make sure that your content remains sensitive to different cultures so that you don’t offend or alienate any of your fans and followers. 

10. Use the Right Social Media Tools

There are a suite of powerful social media tools that you can use to schedule social media content, get analytics, design graphics and videos, and manage your workflow. 

Sibrits explains how different channels suit different scheduling and analytics tools. "If you have limited resources and want to do things as effectively as possible, try using tools like Hootsuite, Sprout Social or Meta Business Suite for Facebook and Instagram. They help you schedule several posts in one go, see your workflows in one place, and monitor channel insights. Some platforms have scheduling built in like LinkedIn and YouTube for example and you can manage all your posts directly through the platform. On the other hand, some platforms are more keen on personal touch, like TikTok, where it's best to do things live.” 

Design tools like Canva or Adobe Express can help your content team create graphics quickly and remotely, while project management tools like Notion can help you create a shareable social media calendar to enhance collaboration. 

11. Be Authentic and Transparent

Communicating authentically and transparently on social media can help brands build trust, credibility, reputation and loyal followers. To be authentic, businesses should create original content and focus more on building community and engagement. 

Many brands that deliver authentic content showcase their teams and the real people behind the brand. This can also help build more a personal connection with the brand and more memorable storytelling opportunities. For example, you can post behind-the-scenes videos with your staff at work, or at work events that showcase the impacts they make and what they are passionate about.

12. Encourage User Generated Content (UGC)

Social media is meant to be social! Remember that it’s important to not only publish content about your brand, but try and encourage others to do that too. UGC content can be a great way of building both community and trust. People want to see how others use and like your products. 

“UGC has been the trend of social media for quite some time now, and it works!”, explains expert social media marketer, Brigitta Sibrits. 

By crafting effective UGC campaigns your business can increase following and engagement metrics, while connecting with your audience in meaningful ways and building powerful social proof. 

One of the reasons why UGC content is so powerful is that “people are getting tired of overly-edited and styled content made by brands - they want to see the real thing”, says Brigitta. “Especially when it comes to brands selling a product/service - social media audiences want to hear real stories from real people. It will add authenticity and social proof to your brand and social media presence,” she enthusiastically adds.

UGC campaigns can also be a budget-friendly marketing tactic with potential to go viral on social media, helping you reach a much wider audience. 

13. Leverage the Power of Social Media Advertising

If your business is looking to increase sales and conversions, then running paid ads on social media can provide a good return on investment (ROI) if designed right.

While there’s a lot that you can do to boost your reach and engagement metrics through organic social media, paid advertising can be a cost-effective method of boosting these metrics and increasing sales.

One of the benefits of paid ads on social media compared with traditional advertising is that you can set your budget in advance, can deploy the ads rapidly, and can access detailed analytics about the success of your ad campaigns. You can also target a very specific audience with your ads and you can also set retargeting goals. 

Final Thoughts on Using Social Media to Market Startups and Businesses

There are many business benefits of integrating social media marketing within your broader marketing mix. Social media allows global brands to engage with their audiences online, no matter where they may be located. Some businesses even manage to run entirely from using social media. 

Brigitta Sibrits' top tip for social media marketing is to "create a social media presence and create content that you would follow and like as a consumer – if you don't like your social media, why would anyone else?” 

For startups and businesses that are operating remotely as part of the Estonian e-⁠Residency program, social media marketing enables you to build a strong online presence with a global audience. By incorporating the tips above into your social media strategy, you can enhance your social media marketing while keeping updated about the latest social media trends and platform news as the social media landscape continues to change and evolve. 

This article was written by guest contributor and seasoned digital nomad Andy Stofferis (www.andysto.com).