Leveraging Social Media to Advertise Your Brand

Love it or loathe it, social media can be a useful tool when it comes to promoting a brand or a product. Today, over 90% of US marketers use social media as a part of their overall campaign strategy as 75% of B2B buyers are influenced by social media when making a purchasing decision.

The potential reach of social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter is so wide that it makes no sense to not use their advertising facilities, or at least leverage their free posting abilities for promoting your brand or product. While this can be done on your account, subtly or directly, some of the better methods involve utilizing paid promotion or other people.

Paid Ads – The Lifeblood of Social Media

One of the best ways to promote your business online is with paid social media ads. At the moment there are over 3 billion active users on Facebook alone, each one a potential customer. Using social media in this way has an enormous reach potential that can rotate advertisements based on specific user actions.

Most social media platforms also utilize versatile tools for tailoring ads that can be customized to fit any budget. By setting minimum and maximum amounts, age ranges, and gender among other criteria, you can laser focus your advertisements to your identified audience which seeks to reduce any wasted advertising capital.

Influencers – 21st Century Celebrity

A truly 21st Century creation is the influencer. While traditional advertising for TV and infomercials relies on either well-known celebrities or ad professionals like Vince Offer, you can pay a social media influence to promote, hint at or even review your product online. Why would you do this? Well, social media influencers are the new advertising celebrities and they can reach an audience that TV commercials can only dream of.

The decentralized nature of the creator economy means that we no longer have to rely on networks to provide our content; we search for it ourselves. This has allowed people like PewDiePie, Ninja, and MrBeast to become the celebrities of the web. Influencers like this have hundreds of millions of people who watch them regularly and the benefits are seriously seductive:

Brand-focused influencer marketing has an 8x ROI.
89% of marketers agree that influencer marketing works better than any other medium.
49% of consumers make decisions based on influencer recommendations.

Followers – A Valuable and Loyal Resource

Of course, you don’t need to rely on someone else’s followers to buy your products and if you have been around on social media for a while, especially Instagram, you can leverage your followers into making purchasing decisions based on your recommendations or your brand promotion.

This isn’t easy though and if done properly it can be a gold mine. The Beaufort Bonnet Company is a prime example of social media sales success as their Instagram shipping accounts for 80% of their total sales figures. To use social media as a sales force you must post consistently, use proper hashtags, and post about content relevant to your business and your audience. With this, you can make affiliate money or direct cash.