Rwanda is known for having the cheapest cost of data in Africa, this makes it easier for the population to access data, and news, and stay in touch through different social media platforms. There are many social media apps, some popular in the country are Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, whatsapp, Instagram, and Snapchat, and each has unique elements that make it attractive to use.
Social media marketing (SMM) also known as digital marketing or e-marketing is the use of social media to achieve branding goals and promote the product or services of a company.
The main purpose of marketing is to attract the interest of the audience to the products or services of the company. Social media is a better tool for marketing; it promotes brand awareness, increases sales, enhances traffic to a website, and builds a loyal community of followers to share and engage your business’ content with the audience. Social media provides a platform for the audience to ask questions, speak out their complaints, and generally be heard, besides, it also allows brands to respond, adapt and innovate the process of the business or products.
When a company uses several social media platforms to deliver the message, it easily reaches the consumers and they quickly react to the message.
In social media marketing, the marketer should focus on effectively delivering the message, then use those apps to deliver it to the targeted audience, this would help the brand to engage with their audiences and learn more about their needs.
The essential strategies for a successful social media marketing(SMM):
Define your goal, first know exactly what you want to achieve, is it to increase brand awareness, enhance the website traffic, create a good reputation, attract customers, or know the customer’s needs? The moment you know what you want, it will direct you to the process you can use to achieve that.
Select social media platforms which are relevant to your audience, not all are beneficial to your business! there are many and it would be unmanageable and bizarre if you use all of them, choose the best for your demographic to relate with the audience.
Using unique and interesting content, it is crucial to stand out from the crowd by creating good content. Each business’ social platform should have a unique way of distributing content; their videos, imagery, links, and direct messaging should be individual. Their content must be clear, trendy, and engaging, by the way, all businesses are not the same so make sure you show your uniqueness in a targeted way. You should identify which content your marketing persona is most likely to engage with.
Be consistent in publishing your content, being consistent is the key to effective social media marketing. Posting a new blog, sharing information, or posting about a new product, would sound ‘Job is done’ while it is just the beginning, as to build an audience, you must do it frequently and not just any post but which is relevant and align with other marketing promotions. Instead of being inconsistent across 5 platforms as a consequence of struggling to be consistent on all your platforms, just dedicate yourself to posting good content on 1-2 platforms, it would be more manageable.
Listen and engage with the audience, Users will comment on posts, share, or tag the company. These types of interactions alert social media managers and marketers and then enable them to practice good customer service, which in turn boosts the experience of the customer. Engaging with your followers is important in building a community and making them feel more personable.
Tips to engage your audiences on social media:
Like and respond to comments
Do live streaming
Create quizzes and challenges
Be a storyteller
Create relatable content
Use better quality graphics/images, visual material keeps the audience interested and engaged than text-based information, psychologically we are more drawn to images than text. Online images easily attract customers and are simpler to recall than words, so with high-quality photographs the post is more likely to receive more views than those without. Social media marketing photos should be exciting and catchy to the audience.
Conclusion:
Social media today is all over Rwanda, so marketing techniques using these platforms are extremely important for businesses. Social media marketing in Rwanda has been transforming how businesses are done and effectively influencing consumer behavior. Social media marketing (SMM) is used to build a company’s brand, increase sales, and drive website traffic, therefore more content is published on social media as the audience expands. There is still progress to be made in SMM in Rwanda; many businesses don’t yet use or even understand how they can benefit from social media but it is worth trying.
