We were delighted to be invited by Brighton Chamber to host a “Bite-Sized Learning Session” to help Brighton and Sussex-based businesses supercharge their brands using social media.
A huge thank you to all those who attended – a major part of what we do is focused around Brighton, so we’re always delighted to be able to support our local Brighton business community. We’re thrilled to have received some brilliant feedback, but we’re not done just yet…
We thought it’d be beneficial to share some of the key takeaways that our presenters took attendees through, so you can apply them to your own social media efforts.
With over 2.79 billion people using Facebook globally, and 79.9% of that number being mobile-only users, it presents a huge opportunity to hit your target audience.
Firstly, post with intent! Decide what you’re going to post and when, and stick to it. Being confident and consistent with your posts will not only keep you stress-free but also present your brand as a reliable and stable source.
Additionally, Facebook is a great platform for customer service. People expect replies within minutes and Facebook enables you to do this without any additional widgets attached.
Useful Tools for Facebook:
· Facebook Pixel – Installing a pixel on your page allows you to collect data about who is visiting your site and allows you to retarget those users later within Facebook. Plus, it gives you the bonus of accessing lookalike audiences. To find out more about Facebook Pixel, click here.
· In addition to Pixels, it’s beneficial to use Custom Audiences on the site too. By doing this, you can retarget users who have watched your videos, interacted with your posts, or followed your page, to name a few.
Here in the UK, 71% of businesses use Instagram and with 1.074 billion users globally, if you’re not using Instagram to promote your business, what are you doing?!
Our first top tip would be to post content that is consistent with your brand personality. When users land on your Instagram page, they should be able to identify exactly what your brand is and what you stand for.
As well as this, we encourage user-generated content (UGC). When users share posts that feature your brand, they expose your brand to their audience. When you share the user-generated content on your account, you give credibility to your brand.
In a recent Instagram case study, 75% of the participants said that UGC makes a brand more authentic.
Top Tips for Instagram
Instagram offers a wide variety of features for you to use and promote your content with. Instagram Stories, videos, Reels, and Carousel Ads are a few we’d highlight but the list goes on!
Just remember, 98.8% of users access Instagram with their mobile devices, so designing content that caters to mobile should be front and center of everything that you do on Instagram.
In the last 12 months, 82% of B2B content marketers used Twitter for organic content marketing due to the platform having 187 million monetizable daily active users. Needless to say, Twitter is a great platform to market your business on.
Twitter Tips
Twitter is all about conversation and engagement. When you’re selling products or services, you don’t want to be scrolled past instantly. To avoid this, we’d recommend not trying to sell all the time – don’t just advertise, open discussions, and be in conversation with your audience.
There are two sides to all conversations – speaking and listening. Keep your ears open on Twitter. Learn about your competition, gain feedback on your products or services. It’s a perfect platform and opportunity to understand what your customers’ needs and wants are.
Lastly, when it comes to marketing on Twitter, Promoted Tweets are the most common method of advertising, consisting of creating a tweet and sponsoring it. Promoted Tweets are a terrific way of generating, increasing brand awareness, and promoting your products.
Being the most trusted online social network, with over 55 million companies using the site, LinkedIn is an essential tool in your armoury when it comes to social media.
LinkedIn Suggestions
Within LinkedIn lives LinkedIn Analytics (each channel has its own analytics suite) which allows users to see who follows you, how they found you, and what the most engaging pieces of content are on your page, amongst a whole host of other metrics.
In terms of advertising, there is a range of different ways in which you can advertise on LinkedIn, such as:
· Sponsored Content – “Native Ads” that show up in the feed.
· Sponsored Messaging – Directly advertising to users through their inboxes.
· Text Ads – Ads that appear on the top and right-hand side of the desktop feed.
· Dynamic Ads – Ads that appear on the right-hand side of LinkedIn and are personalised.
By using a variety of these marketing techniques, you’ll be well on your way to creating a strong supportive journey for the audience’s awareness, consideration, and conversion stages of brand engagement in LinkedIn.
TikTok
Last (but certainly not least), we have the newcomer to the social media family – TikTok. Whilst it’s the youngest of all the platforms listed, TikTok has exploded since its initial release in 2017. With over 2 billion downloads globally, TikTok is a serious contender amongst these social media giants. Alongside this, users under 24 (which is 76% in the UK) spend an average of 1 hour and 14 minutes using the app every day – so users are seriously engaged.
We like to say that TikTok is all about experimentation. It wants you to create, to play, to interact. It’s a tool for creativity. Marketing on this channel is new and exciting, and with that comes a number of intriguing ways to advertise on TikTok.
TikTok Tips
TikTok is a great channel for creating trust between you and your audience. It allows brands to present themselves as an individual and not a faceless company.
A great example of a brand utilising TikTok’s personal touch is The Washington Post.
Dave Jorgenson, the face and ambassador of The Washington Post’s TikTok account pitched the idea of the platform being a great way to get younger people to trust and get to know the brand. Instead of reporting news on their page, The Washington Post account creates videos centered around their office life and behind-the-scenes clips of what they’re up to, usually in a humorous manner.
This tactic has proven to work pretty well for The Washington Post, as their TikTok page has accumulated over 997.3k followers and 42.3 million likes – pretty impressive for a newspaper with an average reader age that would typically not be viewed as TikTok’ers!
TikTok is rapidly growing and offers an array of advertising tactics for you to use – with more being released all the time.
If you’d like to read more about how to unlock TikTok’s content and engagement potential, take a look at the blog we published on exactly that topic: https://arkeagency.com/news/tiktok-unlock-its-content-engagement-potential/.
Thanks, and Feedback
That’s just a slice of what we offered at our Bite-Sized Learning Session. A huge thank you to Brighton Chamber for inviting us to speak.
Through the session, we encouraged attendees to make use of social media, and we saw some brilliant engagement…thank you to all the willing participants!
We’ve also received some wonderful feedback from those who joined us:
Thanks Mike & Ben – great session!
Thank you, great session
So helpful, thanks guys!
Thank you
Thank you Mike and Ben! V useful
Thank you so much, a really good presentation and very informative.
Many thanks, Mike and Ben. Great overview and lots of practical tips 🙂
Wrap up
As we’ve said several times already, a huge thank you to all who attended. We love working with the local Brighton business community and being able to deliver a session on something we’re so passionate about was a brilliant experience.
If you missed the session, hopefully, this blog has been useful and has given you some tips and tricks to supercharge your social media. You can keep up to date with all the different events that Brighton Chamber has to offer by visiting their website: https://www.brightonchamber.co.uk/
If you’d like help with your paid social, brand engagement, or guidance in supercharging your social media, get in touch with our social media whizzes.
