Essential Apps for Social Media Marketing

Photo by Tracy Le Blanc from Pexels

Social media continues to grow not only as a primary source of entertainment and news, but also as a platform ripe for marketing your brand. Today, we will review 7 essential apps for social media marketing.

Tik Tok

To summarize, Tik Tok is a video sharing app that allows users to create 15-second videos. You can add music, stickers, filters, and more to really make your video stick out. Tik Tok released back in 2016 but only recently exploded in popularity. The app currently has over 75 million users and continues to grow each day.

• Brands can create a series of videos that can be stored on the app for people to enjoy.
• You can tell your story in a fun and engaging way and place it on your profile page.
• Get creative and share interesting videos that relate to your business culture.
• Since these videos don’t disappear, many users will re-watch their favorite videos over and over and over again.
• Simple videos can get millions of views! Try not to overthink it and just create.

Instagram

Instagram used to only be a place to post your favorite photos, but now has a plethora of new additions that allow you to engage with your audience in more meaningful ways.

• Post multiple 15 second videos for Instagram stories that can be viewed back to back
• Use IGTV to post full length videos
• Add stories to your front page that represent your brand the best
• Create live videos to provide news, updates or to simply interact with people
• Make a business account and view analytics on posts directly through Instagram
• Post photos that represent your brand personality, behind-the-scenes features, and other content that focus on giving your brand a personality

Twitter

Twitter is the perfect place to post random thoughts, facts, news, and updates to everyone that follows you and beyond. Businesses can take advantage of this social space by posting:

• Funny thoughts, gifs and pictures that relate or don’t relate to your business
• Fun facts about your industry or the work you do
• Important updates about new projects or innovations in your business or industry
• Engage with your audience and provide immediate support for customer service related inquiries
• Create, join, or get added to Lists in your related field for even more attention
• Curate multiple related tweets into one slideshow of stories using Moments

YouTube

Videos are the most engaging and personal pieces of content. They take time, effort and money to create, but stand out significantly for your business. Videos allow potential customers to understand the nature of your business and build trust while entertaining viewers. If done correctly, they may not even realize they were watching an advertisement for your brand. More views could equal more potential customers. Here are some ideas of what you could film for a YouTube video.

• Create explainer videos to detail complex areas of your business
• How-To videos
• Videos of things you’ve created
• Have an introduction video for the front page of your website
• Make a funny video
• Share your videos across all your social media to increase exposure

Facebook

Almost everyone has a Facebook account! As of August 2018, there are over 2.2 billion active users which makes Facebook the largest social media platform. With so many users scrolling through their news feed every second of every day, Facebook is hard to pass up. It’s a marketing haven if you post regularly and remain consistent. So here are some of the things you can do.

• Create a Facebook business page
• Post everything on your business page. Photos, videos, status updates, and replying to customers are essential to maintaining your page.
• Post your YouTube videos. Some videos are actually known to get more views on Facebook than on YouTube itself.
• Promote your Facebook page through ads to expand your audience
• Use Facebook insights to learn more about your customers
• Encourage comments and reply to them to create a human voice for your business

Reddit

Reddit is a massive sharing community known for its amalgamation of topics and subjects. However, it is not a place to sell or market your company. You will be flagged as spam, but not before receiving several hate messages directed at your attempt to promote your brand. It is a place to tell stories, share information, post art or talk about science, music, or the science of music. If your company or brand is all about being unique and different, then Reddit may be the place for you.

• Build Karma. It reflects your standing in the community based on a score. It’s directly connected to the comments you’ve made or links you’ve submitted.
• Post funny, unique, cute, interesting or informational things. Benefit the Reddit community in a way that urges users to view your content.
• Share links to useful sites and use the entire link. Do not use link shorteners! Users might think its spam or malware.
• Use Subreddits and be part of the community.
• Drive more traffic through Reddit Ads. The community is more active and users spend time on it than any other social site.

Tumblr

Tumblr is the place where you post all your blogs, pictures and basically anything else you want to share in one location. Although you can post links, videos, audio, blogs and even plain text, photos are extremely popular and should be a majority of your posts. It also has a much younger audience, so if you’re aiming for ages between 16 and 25, then this could be the place for your business to thrive.

• Post images! Anything that aligns with your business and its values should be posted. Do not post stock images. People will know.
• Write detailed blogs. Images can include text and most images usually have in-depth stories or details about the image.
• Give your profile a unique appearance. Hire a designer or find a professional looking theme online.
• No need to worry about followers. Users care more about interactions and building meaningful relationships.

Conclusion

Overall, there are more social media apps available, but these are the 7 I believe are the most important that every business should own. You might get more traction in Twitter and Instagram than Reddit and Tumblr, but it doesn’t hurt to try. Try them all and see which one sticks. Even if you don’t get much attention on a specific social platform, you should keep posting to it anyways. You never know where a customer might discover you.