The 7 Most Common Social Media Marketing Questions: Answered

Social media has no doubt changed our lives and our culture forever. Before social media, you would hear about new brands and products through television commercials, newspaper ads, billboards and word of mouth. Now that accessibility to brands has turned digital, you could be missing out on major opportunities to increase your reach, exposure, and more importantly, your customer base.

At Hyperchat Social, we hear so many questions different questions about social media from our clients. There are a few that are more commonly asked and we are answering them for you today! Here are the 7 most common social media marketing questions - answered for you!

1. What is the most popular social media platform?

A question we get a lot revolves around the popularity of different social media platforms. For a long time, Facebook was the reigning site when it comes to user count, boasting over 2.8 billion monthly active users. With that many users, backlash is soon to follow. As we have seen in the news, there is a heap of privacy issues when it comes to Facebook. The growth of daily Facebook users, which has trended positively for years, has recently taken a downtrend.

With platform diversification, new players in the social media space have stepped up and shown that Facebook is not the only platform to be aware of. TikTok, which started off the back of the older platform Musical.ly, just reported in September of 2021, that it has over 1 billion active users. To give some perspective, Instagram holds about the same active user count, but has been around for years longer. This is a trend to watch out for as the demand for short-form video content increases.

2. What social media platforms should my brand have a presence on?

What social media platforms your brand is active on is an important decision. As a brand or a business owner managing your own social media, it's impossible to use all of the tens of social media platforms to the best of their ability. So how should you decide which platforms to prioritize? When determining which platform your brand should prioritize, one of the most important factors to consider is your audience. Different platforms tend to attract different types of people.

For example, TikTok is the younger, generation-Z crowd. So if you're trying to reach a younger crowd, or bring your brand to the next generation, TikTok is a great place to post. If you're trying to reach a more affluent baby boomer, Facebook is going to be your best bet. For a millennial audience, Twitter is a great place to start. Take a look at this blog that outlines how to best find your target audience!

3. What should I be posting on social media?

When it comes to social media, it is difficult to determine what kinds of content you should be posting. Put simply, brands should post a blend of thought-leading content along with the occasional branding content. This should be a 70-30 blend - 70% of content should be more thought leadership content and 30% should be promotional of your brand or service. Here are a few ideas of content to post that is not straight promotional:

- Infographics

- Quick tips

- Reposting user-generated content

- Blog posts

- Customer reviews

- Run a contest or giveaway

Check out our blog post to find ways to spice up your content blend!

4. How do I track my success on social media?

Tracking success can be difficult on social media because the name of the game is brand awareness. Brand awareness, simply put, is the extent to which consumers are familiar with different aspects of a particular brand. This includes logos, fonts, colors, and even product offering. Brand awareness can be difficult to measure, but there are certain key performance indicators to keep an eye out for. By tracking your reach, impressions, and user behavior on your website through Google Analytics, you can determine which posts and platforms are out performing the rest.

Pro-tip: Take a look through the different platform's analytics features weekly to determine trends between data.

5. How often and what time should I post?

The simple answer to this question is.. it depends. Frequency and timing of posts depend on lots of different factors. The biggest of which being platform. On platforms like Instagram and Facebook, it's best to stick to no more than 1 post per day. On platforms like Twitter and TikTok, users can ramp up their posting schedule. Some say that active users on Twitter should be posting 15-20 tweets per day.

When it comes to best time of day to post, it also varies by platform and there's misinformation everywhere. Here is a breakdown of the best times of day to post by platform:

- Facebook: 9am, and between 1pm and 3pm

- Instagram: Between 10am and 3pm, and around 7pm

- TikTok: Between 6am and 10am, and between 7pm and midnight

- LinkedIn: Weekdays between 9am and 5pm

- Twitter: 9am to 11am

- YouTube: Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays between 2pm and 4pm

6. How do I increase my followers?

This is definitely the most common question we get at Hyperchat Social and it's one with a more complicated answer. There is not one easy fix-all to grow your following overnight. The main component to growing a following that lasts, and most importantly, is posting consistent, thoughtful content that makes people want to follow along. We've gone through our own follower journey, and wrote a whole blog post to teach you the lessons we have learned along the way! Check it out here.

7. Should I outsource social media?

A lot of business owners try to take the do-it-yourself route and wind up in way over their head. For us, handling our clients' social media profiles, running lead generation programs for them and handling their Facebook ads is quite literally our full-time job. As we have discussed before, social media is a lot more than just throwing a few posts on the internet and hoping that it helps your business. It takes time and thought!

If you want to improve your social strategy, you could go the do-it-yourself route and hope for the best. Or you could go to tryhyperchat.com and schedule a demo with us to see how we can help you Turn Social Into Sales!