Best Social Media Marketing Strategies 2022 for Beginners

If your social media marketing isn't working as well as you want, I've got good news. It's not your fault. It's just that there have been a lot of changes recently and a lot of the advice that's being passed around about how to grow an audience, connect with customers and clients, and a whole bunch of other tips on how to use social media to grow your business is just plain wrong.

It's terrible advice for empty calories, click-bait titles designed to help the creator but not you, the business owner, entrepreneur, or marketer.

The problem is, though, that some of the tips out there look good, sound good, and maybe even taste good going down. But at the end of the day, the kind of shallow advice to just post more or create viral content doesn't do you any good. If it's not based on a solid foundation of proven social media marketing principles.

That's why today I'm going to share with you some of my best and most proven social media marketing tips and tricks and tactics, and the strategies behind them that allow them to work so well. Now let me walk you through how to create a strategic social sequence so you can make sure you're doing the right things in the right place for the right people.

The reason you are not succeeding

The mistake and the way that most businesses approach social media is that they first hear about a new social media platform or channel that's taking over the world and how they have to hop on it quickly, or they risk losing market share and being left behind by the platform or channel.

Then they try to figure out what they're going to say or what kind of content they're going to create. This part of the equation is the message, and then usually they completely ignore this last step, which is figuring out whether their market, their customers, and the audience that they're trying to reach are even active or present on the platform.

In the first place, the people they want to reach here are the market, but this is a recipe for disaster. Arriving in a new land or, in this case, a new platform in search of gold, only to discover that you are not only unarmed and unprepared to deal with the challenges, customs, and culture of this new place but that you shouldn't even be there.

In other words, it ain't got no gold. The people that you're trying to reach aren't even there, and so content is made and presented to an audience that is either not there or doesn't care, which starts a death spiral of social media.

Training an algorithm that nobody wants to see your stuff, which causes the future content you make to perform even worse, further trains the algorithm to further hide your stuff, and on and on it goes until frustration, exhaustion, or defeat finally settles in.

It's not pretty, but it's completely avoidable by simply reversing the process instead of starting with media, then message, then the market, and just flipping it around. Your odds of success go up five, maybe even ten times.

Identify Your Ideal Target Market

Step one is to identify your ideal target market and the people that you want to reach. What are their demographic details, like age, gender, income, and occupation? Their geographic details, like what city, state, province, and country they live in, and if you're feeling fancy, their psychographic details, like their attitudes, values, beliefs, and lifestyle.

Once the market is identified, then figure out the message and what kind of content you're going to create. The way that I do this is by identifying what I call their miracles and their miseries.

Their miracles are all of their wants, hopes, dreams, and desires; everything I can create content for to help them progress and achieve.

Their miseries are all of their pains and problems, fears and frustrations, all things that I can only imagine.

Then create content to help them move away from and avoid them.

Only then should you look at the media.

Find your ideal customer

Once you've got all the info on your market, it's pretty straightforward to just look at the different social media platforms and start connecting the dots to match up your ideal customers.

For example, broadly speaking, if your market is age 35 and up, use Facebook; under 35 use Instagram; b2b or business to business use LinkedIn; mostly females use Pinterest, tech news or software use Twitter, and to reach everyone and anyone, use YouTube.

But these are just examples, so make sure to dive deep into your market before selecting a primary platform for you and your business.

The Future of Content Creation

Let’s talk about the content you need to be creating on social media right now. Here's the cold, hard truth: the future of social media is videos, and almost every single social media platform out there is continuing to prioritize videos. Their primary objective, from the obvious players like YouTube and TikTok to the less obvious ones like Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn, video, is taking up more and more of the news feed. It's not slowing down anytime soon, and this change is frustrating a lot of people.

Video Content Is A Must!

People that don't want to make videos and people that are feeling the pain of watching things change right in front of their eyes yet make content using text and pictures. A lot of business owners, entrepreneurs, and even marketers' behavior right now looks a lot like going through the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance.

The first denial is that video just isn't that important. I'll just keep posting text and images. That's always worked before. Then anger, wondering why aren't my texts and images getting any reach or engagement. The stupid algorithm hates me. Then they started thinking that maybe I could just find a new way to make more interesting text and image posts. Maybe I need more emojis or maybe more memes. Then depression kicks in with the realization that this just isn't working. Social media sucks and I hate everything and finally accept and admit that, hey, maybe MEHEDI was right. I guess it's finally time to hop on the video train to profit town.

It is with most of the social media accounts that I take a look at daily. If they're feeling stuck, frustrated, or like they're getting left behind and not getting the reach and engagement that they're used to. It's usually because they're not making enough video or not making it at all.

But telling you to just go out there and make more videos isn't that helpful. So, next, let me give you a social media video plan to help you get started a little faster and a little easier.

Video- Plan to Start

When it comes to creating videos for social media I wish it was just as easy as picking up your camera or your phone and hitting record, making a few quick clips, and starting immediately.

But I'm afraid it doesn't work that way. You need a plan, a strategy, and some tips and tools to help you build some momentum and get some quick wins under your belt. So you can start to see just how powerful and profitable making videos for social media can be when you do it right.

So let's start with the easy stuff. These are the kinds of things that you can do right now, right here, today. We can grow from there. No need to jump off a cliff on your very first try. Let's start small and build some confidence; we can always make more later. The best way to do that is with the story. But first, let's rewind in time just a few minutes. When I first talked to you about the strategic social sequence and making sure that you were choosing the right social media platform based on your market's behavior rather than whatever new platform everybody is screaming at you that you just have to check out, instead of starting with media then message then marketing it, just flip it around and your odds of success go up five, maybe even 10 times.

Make use of Social Media Stories

Ah, those were good times, weren't they? You see, when it comes to marketing, I'm a bit of a slow adopter.

Sure, I might download and play around with a new social media app when it first comes out to see if it's worth keeping an eye on or not, but it's only after it's proven itself to the market that I devote any time, money, or energy into mastering the platform.

Deep stories are short. Vertical videos are shot on your phone and directly uploaded to social media platforms. So the big players here are Facebook and Instagram with their stories, and YouTube also has stories, but they're not available on everyone's account just yet. LinkedIn used to have stories but shut them down pretty quickly, and Twitter discontinued their stories quite a while ago, which they called fleets.

So my advice here is clear: start with either Facebook or Instagram and prioritize whichever platform you think is the best fit for your market.

Here's what you're looking for with your story: a short 15-second video clip with you offering a raw and uncut version of something or anything that your audience might be interested in.

If you're stumped and not sure what kind of content to create, then rewind this video to where I was talking about the message and specifically your audience's miracles and miseries. Their miracles are all of their wants, hopes, dreams, and desires—everything I can create content for to help them progress and achieve.

Utilize Reels and Youtube Shorts

Once you feel comfortable with that, it's time to move on to longer short-form content on Instagram and Facebook. These are called reels. In Youtube shorts, the length of a reel or a short is going to vary depending on the latest platform updates and whatever length they're playing around with. But it's typically around a minute. But if what TikTok is doing is any indication of where things are going, we can pretty much expect these to get a whole lot longer, probably pretty soon.

For more context, I want you to try to think of a reel or a short as a longer story or a shorter long-form video, whichever works best for you.

If it takes you, say, 15 seconds to record a story, and I don't know three, four, or five hours to record a longer form video, Get it edited and polished up well. A short or a real one might take you around one to two hours to record, edit, add some captions, and upload, sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on the quality that you want to put into it.

So creating reels and shorts certainly isn't fast, and it does require some thought and maybe even some editing. However, they are the next step in engaging you in the video game.

Without having to go full hog into the long-form videos, full hog, I don't even think I've ever heard that before. Not to mention that a minute or so of longer-form vertical video works pretty much everywhere.

This means that if you can record that video on your phone or your camera, make all your edits there as well. It then gives you the ability to upload it natively and manually to a bunch of different platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

The Influence of Social Media Algorithms

It's interesting to see, at least to me as a marketing geek, the difference in the performance of the same content across different channels just based on their algorithm and how is the audience going to interact and engage with it.

This brings up an incredibly important point in that not all views are created equal. You see, each social media channel, platform, or network has its own culture and its content preferences, and consumption style.

Some content can go viral on Instagram but doesn’t even get 1000 views on YouTube. You have to understand content preferences on social media platforms. If the algorithm understands that people are interested in your content, it will promote your content to more people.

Long-form content

A quick 30-second or 60-second video is simply never going to be able to deliver the same amount of authority, trust, and relationships as longer-form content.

This means that you should move into the third and final phase of the video plan. which is to create longer-form videos as soon as possible. Naturally, there's no better place to do this than on YouTube.

If I had to put all of my money on a single social media platform and bet the future of the world on it, it'd be YouTube. Aside from being owned by Google and being the leader certainly in the long-form video, it's also the platform that allows you to build the deepest connection and the most amount of trust and engagement with your audience.

Conclusion

If this whole getting started with video thing is completely new to you don't worry. I'm willing to give you a pass. You can start slow and build your way up from then. Just don't sleep on this for too long.

Start with stories, reels, and short videos then start making long videos. If you read carefully all the strategies there is no way you cannot succeed.

If you have any questions leave a comment. I will try my best to answer it all.