Social Media Planning — Which Social Network Delivers the Best Results?

Vũ Khôi

Author at Wotech Electronics Blog

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Social Media Planning is the most effective strategy in today's technology era. That's why knowing and understanding popular social networks will help you enormously in your Social Media Planning efforts. Getting your social media strategy right maximizes the reach your brand can achieve. In addition, choosing the right digital marketing channel helps you engage the right audiences — those that are necessary and have potential — so you can achieve your marketing goals.

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What Is Social Media Planning? An Overview of Social Media Marketing

Social Media Planning is a summary of everything you intend to do and hope to achieve on your target social networks. This plan serves as the roadmap for your advertising actions and tells you whether you are succeeding or failing. Every post, reply, like, and comment should have a purpose and be measured. The more specific your social media digital marketing strategy is, the more effectively it can be executed. Don't make your plan so lofty and sprawling that it can't be achieved or measured.

You can't just plunge into a social media strategy without first researching which social networks you should and shouldn't use. When assessing the popularity of a social network for Social Media Planning, people typically rely on a few characteristic statistics such as:

• DAU (daily active users) – the number of users who interact daily

• MAU (monthly active users) – the number of users who interact monthly.

The higher the DAU/MAU ratio (%), the better the engagement between that platform and its users. However, nowadays, with so many other analytics tools available, this metric is only a relative reference point.

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No Effective Social Media Planning Can Skip Facebook

Facebook is the largest social media platform today, with more than two billion users every month (2.23 billion MAUs, to be precise) — nearly one-third of the world's population. Over 65 million businesses use Facebook, and more than 5 million advertisers are actively operating on the platform. This makes betting your Social Media Planning on Facebook relatively safe and fairly low-risk compared with other networks.

What's more, the way Facebook works is fairly straightforward, and nearly all advertising content formats — text, images, video, live video, or Stories — perform well on the platform. When doing Social Media Planning on Facebook, what you need to remember is that the platform's algorithms prioritize content with the potential to generate meaningful interactions and extend conversations between connected users. As long as you meet all of Facebook's requirements for the marketing resources you use, you can rest assured that investing in this platform is not a waste.

Another note about Facebook: don't forget to optimize your content for mobile devices, since 94% of Facebook users access the platform through mobile apps.

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Don't Overlook Social Media Planning on Messenger and Instagram — Two Social Channels Just as Popular as Facebook

Messenger (1.3 billion MAUs) is part of Facebook, focused on developing messaging features and connecting related users on Facebook. Since 2011, Facebook has developed Messenger into a standalone app with many additional features integrated into it. Social Media Planning on Messenger gives businesses countless new ways to attract and connect with customers in a more intimate, personal manner.

Alongside Messenger, Facebook also owns Instagram — one of the largest image-sharing channels, with 1 billion monthly active users. Not only can you share images and videos as regular posts, but you can also share them as Stories, IGTV (for longer videos), and live streams. Social Media Planning on Instagram is considered a creative and highly promising move, because you have all the tools to build a business profile as well as tools to check and analyze the performance of your digital marketing campaigns.

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Social Media Planning on Dedicated Image and Video Platforms Is a Potential Opportunity

While Facebook and many other social networks still allow users to share images and videos, when it comes to strength and specialization in sharing tangible content such as photos or videos, they aren't rated as highly as YouTube, Tumblr, and Pinterest.

YouTube is currently the largest video-sharing platform, where users spend billions of hours watching videos uploaded there every day. To start your Social Media Planning, you can begin by creating a dedicated YouTube channel for your business. Then build and publish videos with useful, engaging content that many people enjoy watching, liking, commenting on, and sharing. Beyond being one of the most effective marketing channels, YouTube is also the second-largest search engine after Google. Once you master digital marketing on YouTube and execute it well, you will certainly help your business and main website significantly improve their SEO performance.

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If YouTube dominates the video space, then with image-based Social Media Planning you have more options. Specifically, Pinterest (250 million MAUs) and Tumblr (642 million MAUs) are both leading social platforms for sharing images, video, audio, and links, serving everyone from individuals to professionals. These platforms are both an opportunity to build a more professional image for your business and a highly effective source of inspiration for marketers.

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Where Else Can a Business Build Its Social Media Planning?

TWITTER:

The counterweight to Facebook, though somewhat less prominent, is Twitter — a social media platform with 335 million MAUs. Twitter is a social network that carries news updates on nearly every area of life, from entertainment and sports to politics, education, healthcare, and more. What makes Twitter different from most other social networks is its strong focus on real-time information — updating events as they happen as quickly as possible. Another unique feature of Twitter is that it limits each post to a maximum of 280 characters. Compared with Facebook, Twitter today also offers a fair number of Social Media Planning tools that help businesses build and manage their interactions and connections with customers.

LINKEDIN:

LinkedIn is another major online community, with 294 million MAUs. LinkedIn is no longer just a résumé and job-search site; it has grown into a professional social network where experts from many industries share work content, connect with one another, and build their personal brands. It isn't just a playground for professionals and large companies — young graduates also have high hopes that LinkedIn will be a place offering fresh job opportunities.

LinkedIn gives businesses the opportunity to advertise and do Social Media Planning by boosting published content, sending ads and invitations to personal inboxes, and displaying ads directly on the web interface. Overall, LinkedIn doesn't seem like the ideal place to advertise products to end users. On the other hand, it is highly suitable for businesses selling services or ideas, and for B2B companies.

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Social Media Planning Can Also Be Applied to Other Messaging Apps

If you succeed at marketing on Messenger, then WhatsApp, Zalo, and Viber are no longer a problem for you. WhatsApp is the fastest-growing messaging app today and the world's third-largest social media channel, with 1.5 billion MAUs (behind only Facebook and YouTube), used in more than 180 countries. WhatsApp was initially used for people to stay in touch with family and friends. Gradually, small and medium-sized businesses began expanding their operations through WhatsApp. Similar to WhatsApp and other messaging apps, Viber — with 260 million MAUs — is also a highly promising choice for a social media marketing strategy.

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Currently, to keep up with the Social Media Planning trend, these messaging apps have all developed many utilities for businesses, such as custom sticker development, community engagement, displaying requested products in shopping sections, and providing other customer services.

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What Is the Solution for Social Media Planning in the Chinese Market?

Because of the government's policies on controlling and blocking Internet content, most of the social media platforms mentioned above are not licensed to operate officially in China. This creates a considerable barrier for businesses trying to reach the most populous market on the planet. However, it is not entirely impossible for businesses intending to expand into this country. If you can't use the channels listed above, then to do Social Media Planning there, businesses must learn to work with the social media platforms built and licensed by this nation's government.

WEIBO - RENREN:

Sina Weibo is the most powerful social network in China, with roughly 700 million DAUs, accounting for more than 40% of the country's total Internet users. The reason Weibo's user base is so enormous is that it combines features of both Facebook and Twitter within a single attractive, user-friendly interface. Alongside Sina Weibo, Renren is also a "giant," with more than 500 million registered users — highly promising for promoting your brand to the Chinese market.

QQ - WECHAT:

If Facebook and Twitter have been replaced by Weibo and Renren, then YouTube has been replaced by Youku, and messaging apps like WhatsApp and Viber have been replaced by QQ and WeChat. Both of these platforms were developed by Tencent Holdings and are increasingly integrated and upgraded with many extended services such as online games, music players, movies, blogs, and online shopping. Notably, WeChat is no longer used only by Chinese people — other Asian countries such as Vietnam now have communities using the app as well.

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What Basis Should You Use to Choose the Most Suitable and Cost-Effective Social Media Planning Channel?

Many factors go into deciding whether you should expand your product advertising to a particular social media platform. A platform's popularity is arguably the biggest factor, because the larger a social media channel is (Facebook, for example), the more topics and fields it tends to cover, making it suitable for a wide variety of businesses. But of course, this isn't the only factor in your choice. How the platform works, who its main users are, and whether its brand image matches the image you are building also have a certain influence on your Social Media Planning.

That's why selecting and analyzing the right social media channels should be done by a professional, experienced team. Markdao Vietnam is confident it can help you do exactly that! Contact us via our HOTLINE for the fastest consultation and quotation:

Address: 14 Phan Ton, Da Kao Ward, District 1, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

HOTLINE: +84 2871 099 090

Email: [email protected]

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