Any Fortune 500 visitor'south core aim in today's consumer and concern landscape is to accomplish tiptop-of-mind awareness. That means a brand or product has to come to mind first when a client thinks about a particular manufacture.

To achieve that, a digital marketing strategy is essential, in particular one that stresses the importance of social media marketing (SMM). In the 2019 Social Media Marketing Study, 93% of respondents said social media had grown exposure for their businesses, and 87% said that traffic to their websites had risen.

Remember care make Dove's #ShowUs campaign? It encouraged women to create a photo library on social media to shatter dazzler stereotypes. With 5,000 images in the photo library and about 700,000 uses of the hashtag on Instagram, the campaign became an internet sensation. Casper, the mattress store, also used social media inventively and to dandy effect. Information technology designed a "magical, cyberspace slumberland of sounds, meditations, and bedtime stories" and shared it on its social media feeds to help people get to sleep.

But any social media strategy has to exist designed with the target platform in mind. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin, TikTok, or Youtube are all unique, concenter different types of users, and suit dissimilar kinds of content. Strategists can harness these platforms' potential as a PR tool to develop intimate relationships with potential customers, every bit a means to capture the zeitgeist, and fifty-fifty every bit a communication channel for customers to query and complain.

Behind the scenes, those same strategists can analyze the marketplace more than deeply. Sentiment analysis helps them navigate public stance and design-detection software allows them to rail unusual activities on their feeds.

The platforms

Facebook has the widest achieve of whatsoever social media platform. It is the dominant communication platform in some countries and has an audience spanning the generations. The platform sells targeted advertising, making it very attractive to companies launching social media campaigns, with options to target an audience along demographic lines.

Instagram has a strong, user-based concept, adopting content loop strategies with prominent Instagrammers fundamental to the platform. It is largely prototype-driven, although several new features over the years such every bit reels and stories accept raised user engagement with video content, assuasive a wider range of formats to help market goods and services. Ane big limitation for strategists is that sharing third-party production content is not immune, so gaining traction is a major challenge.

Twitter is the but platform centered on text. If virality is the aim, this is the best platform to promote content, due to the ease with which users tin reshare. That gives strategists a perfect tangible metric to rail a campaign's success.

TikTok is the new kid on the cake. Information technology has a video focus and is more often than not used by a younger audition. It lives on brusk, creative videos.

YouTube, on the other paw, is the top domestic dog when it comes to video content. The platform is defined as social media by strategists because content can be reshared across different channels and then easily. It's where they tin show off deeper, more substantive content, with a powerful recommendation engine to aid their efforts.

At the front end

Fortune 500 companies use social media to forge an intimate relationship with customers, futurity collaborators, and potential staff. They permit an audition in behind the scenes, giving a more authentic view of the people behind the product, their personalities, and views. The content is relatable and personable.

Cerise Balderdash is 1 company that exemplifies that arroyo. It collaborates with sportspeople across 97 unlike sporting disciplines, exhibiting their biographies and offering the audience an intimate behind-the-scenes relationship. The Blood-red Bull Perspective skateboarding documentary follows four pro skaters to show "how they see the world". Information technology was one of many campaigns that went across the sporting subject area, for viewers to form a deeper human relationship with athletes.

With a different tone and tact, Wendy'southward, the U.s. fast-nutrient eating place, accomplished the aforementioned aim. Cutting through corporate politeness with their roasts, it won broad media exposure with their no-holds-barred responses, in an approach that fans constitute refreshing. Though controversial, the fashion came across as authentic and relatable to many.

Another tactic is to tap into the zeitgeist past reacting to current events. At the Superbowl in 2013, Oreo did then instantaneously. When there was a coma during Beyonce'southward halftime functioning, Oreo made its vocalisation heard, tweeting "Power Out? No problem" with a starkly lit image of a alone Oreo and the caption, "Yous can still dunk in the dark."

Countless organizations lent their voices to the Blackness Lives Thing movement; Google, Netflix, Walmart, Nascar, PwC, Nike, Ben and Jerry'due south, IBM, and PayPal included. As for the Covid-19 pandemic, an unexpected bending came from Uber who, counter to their business concern model, demanded their followers "terminate moving" due to restrictions.

Companies squeeze all the potential they tin can from social media, as well using it every bit a venue for customer complaints and concerns. Information technology is highly suited to the chore, as the platforms generate a measurable KPI, where organizations tin analyze how fast they are responding to complaints.

Back-end use

Abroad from the flashy videos and beautiful Instagrammers, Fortune 500 companies are using social media in smart, analytical means.

Design-detection software is one such method. It is used to track any novel action in relation to companies' social media feeds. Whether a product is trending widely and the company has cause to celebrate, or a previous post has gone down like a lead balloon, information technology is essential that the arrangement is aware. With negative feedback or positive, pattern detection keeps companies informed.

Another analytical method is sentiment analysis. Companies use sentiment assay to see where opinion falls on certain topics. Analysts accept phrases across social media platforms to see whether they are discussed negatively or positively.

Fortune 500 companies are using social media for PR announcements, to build personal relationships with users, as a complaints-and-feedback channel, and to make themselves relevant to the moment, and, if successful, newsworthy. Simply what we can't see is where companies are using social media most finer. They are getting to know their audiences, agreement trends, and keeping an eye out for anything unexpected, both positive and negative, on their feeds.

What ensures the success of their campaigns is the clarity of their aim – to achieve peak-of-mind sensation. Every section in an arrangement should ask itself: How can we use social media to expand our presence and to be present for our customers? The wide coverage social media offers on any trending topic provides the perfect tools to analyze and create opportunities to achieve that top-of-mind sensation.

Cover image source: Alexander Shatov