Social media and their use in marketing

Social networks are constantly developing and adding useful improvements, as well as strengthening their security. What’s more, they are playing a bigger and bigger role in marketing strategies as they establish themselves as useful tools for communication and interaction between a company and its customers or target audience: social media allow you to generate branding, promote products and services, widen your reach and improve feedback. In fact the majority of social networks offer a version for companies.

However, in order to improve results it is fundamental to combine channels and resources. In this sense, you can take advantage of your SMS or email marketing campaigns to increase your followers by driving them to your social media pages. And the reverse is also true, you can make the most of your followers by using an action initiated on social media to increase subscriptions to your newsletter, for example.

So let’s explore the main new features in the three most popular social networks and find out how to use them in our favour:

Facebook

This is the leading social network with more than 1,800 million active users per month globally. Currently the video trend is still on the rise and the latest update to this network allows you to make a video and live stream it from your wall. This is called Facebook Live. And to complete the ‘multimedia’ experience, Facebook Live Audio has arrived, which allows you to stream audio content in real time.

Soon another new tool will be made available that will allow you to include GIFs, those hybrids of video and image, directly in user comments.

Ah! And don’t forget to take a look at adverts on this social network. Advertisers can use Facebook Exchange to segment their audience based on the information supplied by browser history (cookies).

You can find out about new features as they are released on Facebook Newsroom.

Twitter

This microblogging network is also introducing numerous new features. The custom profiles in direct messages function allows customers to determine when they are chatting to a real person and when they are chatting with a support chat bot, a sure way to improve customer service.

Furthermore, to avoid being left behind in the area of videos, Twitter now integrates the function of live streaming from within the platform (previously this was performed using Periscope).

Of course, with regard to the world of business, we must not forget Twitter Ads, where we can introduce promotional content, and @twitterBusiness.

Linkedin

This is the professional social network par excellence. Apart from changing its design, presenting more attractive business pages with improvements in the way information is organized, some other features have been introduced. For example, the network now offers an option that allows you to reconnect with certain contacts who have become more “forgotten”, and it suggests a reply text according to the relationship that you have with the recipient of each message. All of this with the aim of keeping professional relationships more alive.

With regard to the more “business” aspect, the SSI (Social Selling Index) is a tool that updates daily and allows you to measure the efficiency of your professional brand on this social network by monitoring your interactions, the type of information you are offering and the suitability of your contacts.

Keep up to date with all this at Business Linkedin.

As you can see, social media offer many marketing possibilities, and we will be covering the relationship between the two in more detail in future articles, exploring diverse strategies that can be put into action