What is social media promotion?
For today’s businesses, social media isn’t just an option – it’s an expectation. No matter the industry or company size, businesses should create and maintain at least one account on a social media platform to remain relevant and available.
Social media promotion and management don’t have to be complicated. It’s a natural part of a marketing plan and can support all other marketing functions by promoting certain items or announcements.
Effective social media promotion can result in:
- A passionate social media follower base
- Growth of inbound leads
- Stronger brand awareness, recognition, and appreciation
- Improved problem-solving for customers
- More website traffic
- A better understanding of the audience and customer base
- Expansion of the target market
- Humanizing the business, especially if it’s large or global
To do this effectively, businesses often use social media management software as a way to connect with their audience. These tools typically administer social media accounts, schedule posts, suggest content, and boost posts.
Steps to social media promotion
Though these techniques fluctuate depending on team size and marketing objectives, there are generally five steps involved in effective social media promotion.
These are:
- Create a strategy and social calendar. If there is a dedicated employee or team for social media, they should collaborate with other departments like product and content marketing to understand how to prepare for upcoming campaigns. Planning months in advance is possible with effective communication and a social media management tool.
- Schedule posts in advance. Social media promotion for product releases and newly published content can be scheduled at least a week in advance. This kind of content isn’t typically time-boxed or dependent on other factors. Occasionally, there is a necessity to promote items of more immediate relevance, like a fix for a software, website outage, or a response to a current event.
- Monitor interactions with posts and respond accordingly. Companies will often dedicate at least one person to monitor comments and other reactions to the social media promotions they publish. Certain comments will warrant a response; some will need to be deleted.
- Use feedback from these interactions to improve social media strategy. Effective social media promotion and strategy are constantly in flux. Learning from previous success and mistakes is non-negotiable. Regular reporting helps with this analysis.
- Partake in social listening. Have someone dedicated to social listening so they can be aware of topics the business is concerned about. This can help with trend analysis and competition, as well as a greater understanding of how people feel about the business and industry.
Basic elements of social media promotion
Social network platforms continue to get more advanced, but the basics remain the same.
Companies can effectively promote themselves on platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, and Pinterest.
The types of posts on these social media platforms include:
- Text-based
- Longer videos
- Short reels or stories
- Audio clips
- A single image or a series of images
- Polls
- Q&A
- Infographics
Social media promotion best practices
Regardless of the industry, business, or target audience, there are a handful of expected or recommended behaviors to employ. When running social media promotions, follow these tips and best practices to ensure success.
- Use a social media management tool to organize and create content. This also makes it easier to repurpose content.
- Mix it up. Don’t always post one type of media. without doing anything else. Keep things interesting.
- Don’t join a social media platform just because it’s popular. The relevant target audience might not be there.
- Create goals to guide your social media strategy. This strategy is not simply “posting things often.”
- Interact with your followers and encourage or incentivize them to share posts and promotions.
- Integrate user-generated content with business promotions.
- Post engaging promotions; make them something that requires action or engagement.
Social media promotion vs. advertising vs. boosting
Social media promotion is any action taken on social media profiles without paying for it. These are organic posts that followers see. Depending on the platform, the followers of followers may also see the content, especially if it has been reshared.
Social media advertisement is a paid opportunity to get in front of a company’s intended audience. Paid ads on social media help target the desired audience based on demographic information and behavioral data. The pricing depends on these factors, in addition to the platform used and the length of the ad campaign.
Social media boosting takes an organic social media promotion and adds a small payment to “boost” it to a subset of a target audience as a middle ground between organic promotion and paid advertisements.
Whitney Rudeseal Peet
Whitney Rudeseal Peet is a former freelance writer for G2 and a story- and customer-centered writer, marketer, and strategist. She fully leans into the gig-based world, also working as a voice over artist and book editor. Before going freelance full-time, Whitney worked in content and email marketing for Calendly, Salesforce, and Litmus, among others. When she's not at her desk, you can find her reading a good book, listening to Elton John and Linkin Park, enjoying some craft beer, or planning her next trip to London.
