Are you looking to improve your business’s bottom line via social media in 2023? If yes, look no further than this guide to achieve your goals!

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Social Media Best Practices in 2023

Social media influences consumers in North America to purchase products or services. It is one of the most effective and inexpensive digital marketing tools. Companies can use social networking platforms to increase their online presence, reach their target audience, and attract new customers.

It also enables businesses to highlight new products and services, collects customer feedback, and build relationships via relevant, engaging, and positive experiences or content.

Social media is a popular and convenient digital marketing tool for businesses. However, many businesses in Canada, particularly small businesses, do not use social media for digital marketing.

According to Tarek Riman, a professional entrepreneur, experienced digital marketer, and skilled social media expert, businesses neglect social media because they think it is confusing, daunting, and time-consuming.

Most small businesses also do not understand how to create and implement a solid social media strategy. Tarek Riman says social media can help a company attract followers and convert them into loyal customers.

However, effective social media marketing requires companies in the U.S and Canada to connect with the right audience, establish a comprehensive strategy, and treat followers/consumers as if they were face-to-face customers.

In addition, it requires offering contests, events, and giveaways to convert social media followers into loyal and high-paying customers. So, how to do this? What are the best social media practices in 2023?

Today’s article will give you the most practical tips/tricks to streamline the entire process and make the most of your social media strategy across different platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Read on!

Define Your Goals

Define your goals using the S.M.A.R.T framework. For instance, you may want to gain 100 new followers on Facebook in one month, create at least 2-3 events that generate $500 or $1,000 in sales in the next three months, or drive 2,000 people to your website.

On the other hand, you may incorporate Twitter or Instagram in your strategy to provide optimal customer experiences and services to increase brand, product, or service awareness among your target audience. According to Tarek Riman, your goals will you to track, analyze, and evaluate your digital marketing activities.

Build Your Brand

Content is king. Right? The content, especially the graphical or visual elements you post, is crucial to establishing your brand identity and reputation on social media. For instance, you can create a logo that represents your brand. Make sure you use the same logo across social media platforms.

In addition, use the same color palette for your photos and images consistently. The purpose is to ensure your followers on social media recognize your business. Use your profile, bio, and cover photos to communicate with your target audience and tell them who you are and what your company does better than others.

You can use hashtags for search terms or keywords that highlight your business vision, mission, brand value, products, services, events, campaigns, and industry. Remember, hashtags are a powerful way to increase engagement, build awareness, and categorize visual content.

Select a Relevant Social Platform

Most businesses jump into all social media platforms. However, Tarek Riman recommends finding the network that aligns with your business and customers’ profiles. Your company has unique consumer segments with specific psychographics, demographics, and behavioral characteristics.

Therefore, you must perform thorough research to determine what social networking platforms your prospective and existing customers use. The purpose is to align your events, content, and ads. Each social media platform has its strengths and weaknesses.

For instance, Instagram is a powerful social networking platform for businesses looking to reach younger audiences via graphic-rich content, such as photos, infographics, and videos.

Likewise, Twitter is the best social media channel for businesses to provide exceptional customer service. However, Facebook is an all-inclusive social media app for starting digital marketing.

Tarek Riman recommends filling your business page, making your photos and videos look good, and using ad tools and analytics to gain insights. Once you feel comfortable with a specific social media site, you can expand and diversify to other platforms, including Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and TikTok.

Consistency is Key

According to Tarek Riman, a successful business project requires consistency and dedication; the same principle applies to social media. I.T. requires you to commit resources and time and post messages daily and at the right time to ensure your followers see them.

Determine the best time to post by understanding the locations and demographics of your social media followers. You must track the engagement of your social media posts from time to time to gain valuable insights and use them to modify or maintain your strategy.

Remember, textual, graphical, and video posts must engage your target audience and provide them with relevant information to build relationships. Don’t forget to reply to comments, questions, concerns, or problems immediately. Use events and promotional strategies to engage your target audience.

Engage Your Target Audience

Customers want to buy products or services that positively impact their lives. Communicate with your followers and tell them about your business story, share your company values, and highlight the positive impact of buying products or services from your business.

Tarek Riman recommends posting behind-the-scenes photos to communicate your business passion. You can pose questions to your target audience or customers and inspire them to participate in conversations.

Post videos of your events, campaigns, and videos to tell your business story. Fill in your posts with relevant content, photos, and videos that express the foundation of your business and your reason for selling products and services. Let us now discuss how to make the most of social networking sites for marketing purposes.

Facebook

Facebook is the most powerful and widely used social networking site. It can help your business spread the word about your brand, products, or services and provide information about your business to persuade your target audience and educate and entertain them. Here are a few best practices to consider when using Facebook.

Optimize Your Posts

Optimize your post according to Facebook’s algorithm. Determine the anatomy of your Facebook posts and analyze whether your target audience uses the web or mobile app. Riman says most people use mobile devices to access Facebook.

Therefore, you must optimize your post for smartphone users and display your posts using the correct dimensions. Likewise, post graphical content with the right font and size so your target audience can read it easily.

Post Content Daily

Although you may find it challenging to post content daily, it is worth your time. People make more friends and “Like” pages daily, meaning if you fail to post content daily, you may not stand out from the competition.

Tarek Riman says posting at least 3-5 times a day is enough for businesses to engage consumers. Riman recommends checking Facebook insights to analyze when the right time is to post content on Facebook.

Likewise, you can see when your target audience is online. Thus, you can post at optimal times; once in the morning, in the afternoon, and the evening.

Talk to Your Audience

Have you ever wondered why it is called social media? Social media is social, meaning you must communicate with your target audience and connect with them to resolve their issues and get positive responses. Tarek Riman recommends:

• Asking questions
• Posting helpful tips
• Linking to blog posts
• Encouraging your audience to like and share
• Tagging users on other business pages
• Highlighting relevant posts
• Using hashtags
• Sharing
  • Infographics
  • News articles
  • Images
  • Videos
  • How-to blog posts
  • Brand stories
  • Quotes
  • Stats and facts

Add a Call-to-Action (C.T.A.)

Adding a C.T.A. to your posts is essential to drive traffic to your website or encourage consumers to act and buy your product or service. A CTA is an integral part of your Facebook posts. However, it would help if you did not overuse it.

Riman recommends following the 80-20 rule. 80% of your Facebook content is educational, and 20% is promotional (this is where you add a C.T.A.). So, make sure you use the C.T.A.s properly.

Use Facebook Analytics

Facebook Analytics is a powerful tool that gives you an overall picture of your page interactions. You can look for content, engagement, and other trends and keep posting more content your target audience likes and shares.

Instagram

Instagram is another powerful marketing tool for businesses to drive brand awareness, build and track engagement/interaction, and increase sales. It is an excellent platform for companies to find customers and leverage valuable insights to develop a tailored marketing strategy. Here are a few best practices to ace Instagram.

Promote Your Profile

According to Tarek Riman, promoting your Instagram profile is an excellent way to drive more people to your business. You can use other marketing platforms to drive traffic to your Instagram.

Like you promote your website via email marketing and blogging, you can use business cards, newsletters, and other social platforms to share your Instagram link and encourage users to check your profile.

Use Hashtags

Instagram is hashtag paradise. If you have a small audience, you can use hashtags to grow your audience, but you must use hashtags your audience searches for on Instagram. Using random or irrelevant hashtags won’t do anything well.

In addition, think about branded hashtags, event hashtags, campaign hashtags, industry hashtags, product hashtags, and location hashtags. The purpose is to improve the user experience.

Post relevant hashtags as the first comment on your business post. The purpose is to keep your message alive and reduce the risk of getting lost in the ocean of hashtags on Instagram.

Post Relevant Content

There is a season for everything, such as spring cleaning, Halloween, holidays, bathing-suit season, Easter, Eid, Christmas, etc. Tarek Riman recommends linking your Instagram post to a current event or seasonal trend.

Make sure you find the trends on Instagram and define or implement your strategy accordingly. Become a part of the event or conversation that aligns with your business and is relevant to your target audience.

Run Contests

Running contests is an excellent way to build and grow your audience on Instagram. The primary objective of contests on Instagram is to increase engagement. Set the rules to engage users and encourage people to follow you on Instagram.

Likewise, encourage participants to like, comment, and share your posts or use a specific hashtag. You can use user-generated content by asking your followers to submit photos and videos with a specific contest hashtag.

Twitter

One of the most significant advantages of Twitter for companies is that it enables them to share information quickly or start conversations with their followers. Your audience will find your tweets easily, but you must have educational, valuable, and promotional content that engages your target audience.

Optimize Your Tweets

According to Tarek Riman, a good tweet is between 120 and 130 characters because it leaves space for the link and at least 1-3 hashtags. In addition, if you are sharing statistical data, an article, or a quote from a brand, include that company in the tweet.

The purpose is to increase the likelihood for your followers to see, comment, and retweet your tweets. The more content you share, the more following you will gain. Thus, you can spread your brand message and engage your target audience and existing customers.

Post Visual Content

Although people don’t use photos and videos frequently on Twitter because tweets are text-based, tweets with photos and videos receive higher engagement rates. Research shows that tweets with images see 55% more engagement and lead conversions. If you want to post a photo, use the correct dimensions, such as 440 x 220 pixels.

Add Links to Tweets

Add links about 25% of the way through your tweet. Links added to the tweet receive higher click-through rates. However, it would help if you placed them at the start of the tweet because links placed at the end of a tweet have fewer engagement rates. In addition, shorten the links to ensure they appear cleaner and simple to read in a tweet.

Try Twitter Ads

Using Twitter Ads is a brilliant way to grow your followers, drive traffic to your website, and convert leads. It also increases engagement, finds leads, and turns people into loyal customers. Twitter ads are relatively less costly than other platforms. So, giving Twitter ads a try or test run is worth your time and money.

Use Twitter Analytics

Twitter Analytics is a powerful tool for businesses to analyze data and generate valuable insights. You can use this tool to measure the engagement and understand how to post successful tweets. Twitter analytics also tells you about your target audience’s demographics, locations, and interests.

Final Words

Social media is integral to your digital marketing strategy to promote your brand, products, and services. It can help you build a brand reputation and increase sales. However, you must develop a solid social media strategy and follow the best practices to achieve your goals.

Riman Agency has been in the digital marketing industry for many years. We have a team of social media marketing professionals with years of experience and extensive knowledge of innovative techniques and tools to develop a sophisticated and result-driven strategy for your business. Contact us today!

 

What is a holistic digital market strategy? How do I create a successful plan? What factors should I consider? Here is what you need to know!

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How to Create a Holistic Digital Marketing Strategy for Your Business

Digital marketing plays a critical role in connecting your company with your customers. It establishes a solid business relationship with your existing and potential customers, whether on Google through PPC or SEO, social media, or email marketing.

A holistic digital marketing strategy is an integral part of your business, allowing you to cover all aspects of marketing and promotional campaigns you run to drive traffic or customers to your website or other platforms and boost revenues. Today’s article will discuss creating a holistic digital marketing strategy. Read on!

Define Business Objectives

According to Tarek Riman, a professional digital marketer, you must understand your overall business driver, whether increasing sales, gaining market share, or expanding business. Defining business objectives is critical because they let you know the difference between micro and macro conversions.

Riman says macro conversions do not exist without micro-ones or vice versa. Therefore, what your company wants to achieve is an integral part of your business goal. It also includes focusing on your company’s mission and vision.

The purpose is to link everything together and streamline the process. You can’t set up marketing objectives efficiently and quickly and continue assuming that they will act as meaningful guides to action. Riman recommends focusing on a hierarchical goal breakdown structure to link your high-level objectives to clearer daily goals.

Business marketing objectives can tell you about the direction in which your marketing and business activities move, but this requires thorough planning, development, and implementation. Goals guide your day-to-day marketing activities and streamline the entire process. Consider the following factors when defining objectives:

• Begin with a broad design and keep all goals in the hierarchy
• Encourage your employees to understand the objectives
• Develop realistic objectives and use resources appropriately
• Analyze your company’s external opportunities, threats, and constraints
• Consider the creative conception strategies
• Consider the cost of each activity you want to carry out
• Reconsider and redefine our objectives from time to time

Perform Market Analysis

According to Tarek Riman, performing marketing analysis is integral to creating a sophisticated digital marketing strategy for your business. So, move beyond the fundamental concepts covered in SWOT or PESTEL analyses to understand your market and define your target audience.

When working on this holistic digital marketing strategy phase, you must collect valuable feedback and analyze it to generate broad insights into your target market. Make sure you focus on:

• Age range
• Likes and dislikes
• Kind of brand they like
• Types of pages they follow on social media

When you move beyond the traditional approach and develop more in-depth marketing insights, you can better select your marketing mix and use the budget appropriately. For example, you can reduce costs and spend money on relevant marketing channels.

Remember, extensive market analysis is daunting and time-consuming. However, it can help you gain an in-depth understanding and knowledge of your target audience. Riman Agency can carry out the process via thorough market analysis to help you define your target audience and its characteristics.

Create Audience Personas

An audience persona is a fictional, generalized representation of your ideal client or customer. Because personas allow businesses to view their products or services from their perspective, building a perfect customer persona can help you target your audience and improve your methods to solve their problems.

However, you can build the best customer personas on actual research, surveys, and interviews of your target audience. The problem is that following this approach takes time, resources, and money.

Sometimes, companies don’t have enough time, resources, and money to conduct surveys, research, and interviews with their target audiences. However, you can gain valuable insights from small-scale research.

For example, you can pull together a small focus group or interview a few customers. On the other hand, if you think this is impossible, you can follow a fictional approach to creating buyers’ personas.

According to Tarek Riman, author of bestselling digital marketing books, a company must focus on accuracy and precision when following a fictional approach and use information about consumers from previous research studies, web analytics, or email queries.

In addition, an audience persona allows you to act more strategically with your digital marketing methods and execution. It enables you to customize your business or marketing messages to your target audience and streamline communication strategies.

Tarek Riman recommends starting with 2-3 buyer personas. However, if you need more, feel free to create them. Some businesses create 15-20 buyer personas with different characteristics and choose the one that best fits their needs and consumers’ requirements. Consider the following:

• Who?
  • Background
  • Job
  • Career
  • Martial status
  • Demographic data
    • Age
    • Gender
    • Location
    • Income
  • What?
    • Goals
      • Primary and secondary goals
      • Concerns and challenges
      • Solutions to overcome challenges
    • Why?
      • Realistic goals
        • For example, I am a father with two young children. I want to learn French while living in Montreal, but I find it challenging to spare time. So, I need a flexible schedule to balance my family and work life.
      • Common Objectives:
        • Why would this person purchase or not purchase my online French language course or training program?
      • How?
        • Marketing messaging
          • Describe your business solutions to the persona, such as “Flexible at home French language tuition in Montreal.”
        • Elevator Pitch
          • Sell your persona on your business solution to their problems
          • “Our company provides flexibility that fits your work and family life schedule. We aim to provide course options that best fit your needs.”

Carry Out Customer Segmentation Process

Carrying out customer segmentation is the next step after you have created and used your audience persona knowledge. The purpose is to take the information forward and start to categorically answer different questions, including:

• What does my target audience want from my business?
• What are their specific needs?
• What do I want my target audience to do?
• What are my goals onsite?
• What type of content will give them the correct information?
• What content will convince them to go through the buyer’s journey?
• How can I convert visitors into customers?
• What does success look like to me?
• What are my digital marketing key performance indicators?

 

Like the persona research, you will have numerous customer segments. Each segment will have a unique profile, needs, and desires. Tarek Riman gives an example of how to segment your audience.

Audience Category	Market Segment	Profile	Audience Needs	My Goals	Converting Content	Key Performance Indicators or KPIs
Is my target audience a person, small or large organization, community, startup company, public, or private sector?	If the audience category is a person, is it a teenager, young adult, woman, girl, or older adult?	What characteristics set each market segment apart? What features make each segment unique?	What is my target audience looking for, and what solution do they need from my company?	What are my goals based on the audience’s needs? Do my goals align with their problems? Do the solutions I provide solve their issues?	What content can convince each segment that my product or service is a reliable solution for their problems?	Micro and Macro conversions

 

Competitor Analysis is Key

The advantages of conducting competitor analysis are apparent. As a business owner, you don’t want to miss things or processes your competitors do that may cause a threat to your company and steal traffic or conversions from you. In addition, there are a few critical learning you can take, such as:

• What are my competitors doing?
• Can I replicate a competitor’s strategy?
• Do they have a highly engaged audience on social media?
• How do they engage users on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter?
• Is their website intuitive and easy to use?
• How do they display information and content?

Performing competitor analysis allows you to understand your competitors, their digital marketing strategies or methods that lead to success, and critical factors, such as:

• Annual reports depending on the company’s size
• Companies’ profiles and product information
• Product or service categories
• Published media articles
• Press releases
• Customer reviews
• Website information
• Social media platforms
• PPC activities
• Keywords
• Search engine rankings

Your first step in a competitor analysis starts as if you were a prospective customer and run a few tests searching for common or popular keywords. Determine what the market or industry leader does and how it differs from your approach.

Likewise, who appears on top of Google or other search engines’ rankings? Who appears first in the PPC positions? Do I get confused with ads after leaving my competitors’ websites? Answering these questions will give you essential information and insights.

Content Strategy

Content marketing is an integral component of your holistic digital marketing strategy for your business. It creates and shares premium-quality, relevant, and engaging content to attract and convert users into customers.

A solid content strategy involves conversations between your business and customers via brand stories. The primary objective of content marketing strategy is to build a long-lasting relationships with existing and potential customers.

You can achieve your goals by providing your customers with valuable content that improves trust, awareness, and engagement through different channels in the digital marketing mix.

For instance, a content strategy that primarily depends on AdWords PPC and displays ads to drive more traffic will see poorer performance and increase your website’s bounce rates.

The good news is that organic traffic from Google and other search engines can balance this approach. For example, visitors who organically make their way to your website through search queries or interest can yield better results. However, organic traffic requires a solid search engine optimization strategy. Tarek Riman recommends:

• Relevant approaches or tactics in your digital marketing strategy:
  • SEO
  • PPC
  • Affiliates
  • Display Ads
  • PR
  • Social media marketing
• Content strategy
  • Conversion rate optimization
  • Lead generation
  • Landing page optimization
  • Product page SEO
  • A/B testing
• Email marketing
  • Newsletters
  • Promotional emails

Digital Assets Analysis

Grouping your digital assets into the paid, earned, and owned categories is the best way to streamline the analysis. Paid media means you pay money to advertise your ads on third-party platforms.

Likewise, earned media means when people share your content, use word-of-mouth marketing, and discuss your brand, products, or services. Remember, “earned” can either positively or negatively influence your brand because the results depend on your target audience and customers.

Moreover, owned media is a platform or asset you own, create, manage, or control. Having a brand website or blog is a typical example of owned media. Social media channels are also examples of owned media. Popular channels include Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. The following table will clarify the concept of these three categories:

Paid	Earned	Owned
PPC Social media ads Display ads Content promotion Paid influencers	Organic traffic Reviews Likes and shares Mentions Reports	Website: web and mobile Smartphone apps Facebook Instagram Twitter

Final Words

No business can survive without a solid digital marketing strategy because we live in a fast-paced technology world that requires every company to improve its online presence. Digital marketing increases your brand identity, recognition, and reputation and drives traffic to your website and other platforms.

It promotes your products or services, increases sales, and generates higher returns on investments (ROIs). However, many companies, including small-medium enterprises and giant corporations, find it challenging to streamline their digital marketing strategy or create a holistic plan.

Riman Agency has been in the digital marketing industry for many years. We have a team of professionals with years of experience, extensive/up-to-date knowledge, and skills to create a holistic approach that covers all aspects of digital marketing and improves your business’s bottom line. Contact us today! t@rimanagency.com