Social media marketing techniques for a successful 2022

Are you striding into 2022 with a solid social media strategy or scrambling for some last minute inspiration? Either way, read on to get those brain boxes buzzing with brilliance, ready for your business to take on the new year with confidence.

Here are 3 social media marketing techniques to help make 2022 your best year yet…

Word-Of-Mouth Marketing

The most powerful form of marketing doesn’t just congregate in the shopping centres, educational establishments, pubs and living rooms of the general public anymore. Word-of-mouth marketing has taken to the screens. Social media thrives on communication. Getting the consumer chatting and sharing is the driving force behind content going viral, while consumers recommending and raving about products, brands and businesses is key for building genuine social proof. Imagine a world where you could combine the two - that would be comprehensive, transcendent, or (dare I say) meta.

Word-of-mouth marketing is not a new phenomenon. It’s been widely regarded as arguably the most effective form of marketing since long before the internet… and it all comes down to trust. Word-of-mouth marketing is the active encouragement of people talking, sharing and recommending products and services to their friends and family. As more people recommend, brand awareness grows, while simultaneously growing the business and building social proof. Are you more likely to use a service or product a friend has purchased, loved and shown you, or would you seek out an entirely unknown brand instead? According to impactplus.com, a whopping 92% of people believe brand recommendations from friends, while 75% of people don’t believe what adverts tell them. I think it’s pretty clear why word-of-mouth marketing works so well.

Now we have the ability to supercharge this marketing method. Social media puts word-of-mouth marketing on steroids, allowing people to share their thoughts and experiences with significantly more people, at a faster rate than ever. If you haven’t taken a deep-dive into how you can implement word-of-mouth marketing into your social media strategy, there’s never been a better time.

Consider:

• including an incentive for sharing on social media
• actively asking for reviews
• including a referral program
• making content with well-known figures
• venturing into influencer marketing
• making the experience of your business so good it’s hard not to rave about it
• encouraging user-generated content

User-Generated Content

Have you ever been to a restaurant or a coffee house and been presented with something so beautiful you just had to snap it and share it on the ‘gram? I feel like this is the basis of boomer confusion with the millennial generation, however this is the perfect example of user-generated content.

User-generated content is what it says on the tin. It’s not the business or brand that creates this type of content, but the end user - the consumer. There’s some huge benefits to encouraging and including this kind of content in your social media marketing strategy. Firstly, you get free content that viewers can connect with and enjoy. Secondly, your audience gets to be at the forefront of your brand. It’s a wonderful cycle that encourages more interaction, sharing and engagement, both from the content makers you include and other audience members wanting to be involved. Your team can curate and celebrate with the people that matter the most to your business - the buyers. This plays very nicely into the previous marketing technique we’ve shared.

Consider:

• reposting, retweeting and sharing content from customers
• creating selfie stations in physical locations
• asking customers to share their experiences on social media
• building hashtag campaigns designed to encourage user-generated content

Hashtag Campaigns

Do you remember the Coca Cola hashtag campaign #shareacoke? There were a few variations of this campaign throughout the world, with names, nicknames, holiday destinations and song lyrics added to the labels on the bottles of Coca Cola. This campaign was so huge that in 2016 it culminated in an image posted by Selena Gomez earning the most-liked photo on Instagram at the time.

It’s easy to overlook how real-world action plays a role in hashtag campaign popularity. Many popular hashtag campaigns start in the real world and explode onto social media, causing a ripple effect that melts into the minds of consumers. The hashtag acts as a way to group and share the campaign, while influencer marketing, word-of-mouth marketing, user-generated content and physical actions all play their roles in the success of a hashtag campaign.

Due to hashtags grouping together all posts associated with a campaign, they are an invaluable way for businesses to monitor and adapt to the response from the general public. Keeping a close eye on actions and posts that spark significant changes in engagement and sentiment rate, alongside other hashtags used in conjunction with the campaign, can help a business learn, develop and supercharge their efforts. With an analytics tools such as Minter.io you can track these metrics as well as learn about the demographics of the contributors to the hashtag.

If you can get word-of-mouth marketing, user-generated content and hashtag campaigns working for you, there can be a real snowball effect where they feed into one other. By creating a hashtag in conjunction with a wider campaign, you can invite people to contribute. This welcomes user-generated content which plays into word-of-mouth marketing. They all pour into one another and add up to the success of an online presence.