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Social Media Marketing
Your social media strategy is an important part of marketing communications efforts.
If effectively planned and implemented, social media can help engage your audience and effectively deliver marketing messages.
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AOE can help you structure a social media strategy approach to reach your audience and deliver messages that will generate results.
Take your social media marketing to new heights with AOE
Social media is about dialog: real-time discussions that bring people together to discover and share information. The AOE Team can perform an audit on your existing social media accounts or help you create them from scratch, whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram or other mediums. We can also provide introductory and advanced training sessions on social media, develop social media policies for your organization, write content and create graphics for your social media platforms, and measure and record ROI.
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FAQs about Social Media
What is social media marketing?
Social media marketing is the process of distributing content on your social media platforms, utilizing the internet to market your brand. The purpose of social media marketing could be to engage with your audience, promote products or services, or achieve a goal such as driving traffic to your website or increasing sales.
What are the different types of social media?
Different types of social media include social networking (Facebook, LinkedIn, Threads), photo/video sharing (Instagram, YouTube, TikTok), community building (blogs), audio (Spotify), disappearing content (Snapchat, “stories” on Instagram, Facebook), discussion forums (Reddit), shops (Shopify, Pinterest product pins), live streams (TikTok, Facebook, X — aka Twitter), business-focused platforms (LinkedIn), private/closed spaces (Slack), inspirational/aspirational (Pinterest). As you can see, there are seemingly endless avenues for sharing content with your audience on different platforms. Consider your goals when designing a social media marketing effort – perhaps you’re looking to gain followers or spread awareness for a product or service you offer, or perhaps you’d like to highlight a problem you could help potential customers solve.
What are the different types of social media marketing?
There are several different types of social media marketing, including:
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Content marketing/content creating
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Advertising/sponsorship
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Influencer marketing
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Social media management/community management
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Paid media
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Building your following
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Contributing to forums
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Reviews
The most popular social media platforms for the general public are run by two key players: Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Threads) and Google (YouTube). Your company’s presence on these platforms is not only a good idea but likely expected by your customers.
For AOE’s industry-specific clients and audiences, the most popular platform is the professional networking site LinkedIn. A personal profile as well as a business page on LinkedIn is standard. Keeping both pages active and up to date with content is key to maintaining a strong social media strategy.
When choosing social media platforms, it’s important to go where you know your major target base is. That may be one of the sites mentioned above, or it could be somewhere else. You may also consider up-and-coming platforms that are growing quickly, like Threads. Maximize your efforts by expanding into new or more niche platforms where your customers may be. For example, if you’re trying to reach Gen Z, TikTok may be the best platform to consider.
Over the past few years, we’ve seen the number of platforms and their influence grow. Many brands and businesses are struggling to decide on which platforms they should be. The simple answer is that you don’t have to be everywhere. In fact, it's simply not possible.
Three things to consider when determining the social platforms on which you should be active include:
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Your target audience. Where are your customers, clients, prospects and competitors? If, for example, they are primarily on LinkedIn, you should be there too.
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The differences between platforms. For example, Facebook targets audiences based on interests, which makes it a great choice for reaching consumers. LinkedIn, on the other hand, is more focused on professional targeting, making it a better fit for business-to-business activity.
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How much time and effort you can commit. Creating separate images, videos and text tailored for each platform can be incredibly time-consuming. And it’s extremely important to actively engage with your followers, which could be a considerable amount of time spent across multiple platforms.
What are the most popular social media platforms?
What are the benefits of social media marketing?
According to a Harris Poll on behalf of Sprout Social, 55 percent of consumers learn about new brands on social media. In fact, 77 percent of consumers are more willing to buy from a brand over a competitor after a positive experience with that brand on social media.
Providing more than a static website, social media platforms can elevate your organization’s online presence and create an ongoing dialogue about your services and industry. Recognizing the speed at which companies can use social platforms to reach target audiences, a growing number of champions in niche industries are using social media to connect with customers, industry partners, prospects and the communities in which they work.
How do you increase social media engagement?
Social media engagement is an umbrella term for actions that reflect and measure how much your audience interacts with your content. Engagement varies by platform, but examples can include likes, comments and shares. Engaging with others on social media is vitally important to an organization’s social media success.
User engagement will be increased when your visuals are optimized for each social channel’s feed. Creating great visual content for your brand is an essential aspect to any social media campaign. The right image or video will grab the attention of users and stick out on their busy feeds. Each platform has different dimensions and aspect ratios when it comes to visual content, so it is important to be aware of specific dimensions and adhere to them.
The following are some additional ideas for increasing engagement:
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Tag other organizations and people whenever possible and as often as possible.
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Use hashtags and incorporate the most popular hashtags for the subject. Check out online resources like hashtagify.me to locate trending hashtags.
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Create an engagement campaign. There are many examples of fun and successful engagement campaigns. One simple way is by hosting an online photo contest for social media followers to share a unique image with a special hashtag for the contest’s theme.
When structuring a social media strategy, utilize an editorial calendar: No matter what your key messages are, be sure to develop an editorial calendar that will make sure you incorporate all your messages in your communications vehicles for the year. It can be a simple task. For instance, create entries in your annual calendar with key messages or service offerings you want to focus on each month. Examine the National Day Calendar for opportunities to tie your messages to trending monthly topics.
How do you structure a social media strategy?
How can I create quality social media content?
Creating consistent, quality content that you want to see as a consumer is vital to your brand. If nobody else in your industry is creating the type of content you want to see, create it yourself—and post often!
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Find people in your organization who are not camera-shy and are willing to share their stories on your platforms. How did they get involved in the industry? What does a day in their life look like while on the job? What do they find fun, or exciting or fulfilling about their job?
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Post about employees celebrating milestones, such as work anniversaries.
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Share behind-the-scenes photos or videos (be sure all safety regs are followed). While employees are accustomed to the equipment or processes they use daily, customers and laypersons may find them fascinating.
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Find trends and relate them to your industry.
What does social media management cost?
There’s no simple answer when talking about cost. Like most other marketing strategies, it depends on what you want to accomplish. That said, as a general rule, it’s important to remember that time is money. Depending on your social media marketing goals, plan to devote at least one full-time employee to plan and oversee social media strategies, chase down or create content to share and monitor activity on your channels. When outsourcing social media tasks, organizations should plan for at least 2-3 hours per week on each platform. Spending more time on your social media strategy will mean increasing your budget in this area, but with a knowledgeable team managing your social media presence and content, the investment will be worthwhile.
What do you get when you hire AOE for social media marketing?​
Here's what you should know about us:
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We are an extension of your internal team—your goals are our goals.
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When you invest in AOE, you invest in your industry—we invest our profits back into the industries we serve. This model helps us keep our prices lower than the standard market rate. Learn more of our story.
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Our team of more than 80 professionals are all specialists in their craft and ready to serve you—we bring vast past experience and creative visions for the future to the table.
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We recognize your organization’s individuality and the unique needs that you have—we are ready to collaborate with you as much or as little as you like.
What can AOE do to help you?
Here's a bit of what we can do for you:
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Social media strategy & planning. What is your vision for your social media presence? We can work with you to design an efficient game plan to reach your goals.
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Social media management. You know you need to be posting, but who has the time? We do! Let us handle the planning and publishing of your posts, and further engaging your audience by responding to comments and messages.
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Content development. Looking for creative social media post ideas for your business? Let’s collaborate.
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Campaigns. Running a great social media campaign is an effective way to let the world know about a product or service you offer, your values as a company, or just to get your name out there, and AOE can help get you started.
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Monitoring and analytics. If you want to track an ad campaign’s performance, we have the tools to help you see how you’re measuring up.
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Social media graphics. Visual aids can help take online audience engagement to the next level. If you can imagine it, we can design it.
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Social media training. We are happy to “fish” for you, but also would love to teach you to fish! The AOE team’s expertise in social media marketing expands to many different topics. Reach out today and let us know what you’re interested in learning.
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Many organizations know that social media is important, but don’t understand the full weight it has, or the value of having professional social media management. It can be time-consuming and perhaps even frustrating to navigate the world of social posts, campaigns, likes and comments on your own. The pressure to post regularly and engage with your audience can be daunting, and social media can sometimes fall low on the to-do list as this seemingly self-serving effort can lose out to an organization’s priority: client work. Let us take the stress out of your social media marketing—with our expertise and your vision, we can make a great team.
Contact us so we can create a unique social media management package to fit your needs and your budget.