Social media usually isn’t top of mind when thinking about product marketing. After all, product marketing at its core is about bringing products to the market and markets to the product. But if you dig a little deeper, it’s easy to see that social media marketing and product marketing have much in common — the key way companies distribute their story and messaging is through social media.

Connecting social media and product marketing

Social media marketing uses social media platforms to connect and engage audiences to build brand awareness, increase sales and drive website traffic.

Creating a winning social media strategy involves:

Having a thorough understanding of the intended audience
Creating valuable content that drives action
Listening to and engaging followers
Analyzing results to optimize and improve performance

Similarly, through research and discovery, product marketers help businesses define and understand the target audience and create the right positioning and messaging to increase product awareness and adoption.

Product marketing and social media in action

Social media can be leveraged as a key resource in product marketing to help with customer feedback, discovery, and brand awareness. Recently Jai Patel, founder of JUV — an alternative to traditional juicers designed to simplify the process of juicing — tapped into the power of social media.

Jai connected with Ella Henry, a social media influencer specializing in internal health, to create a TikTok campaign showing her using the product.

In the video, Ella demonstrated how easy it is to use the juicer to create a healthy juice shot. The video went viral on TikTok with more than 80,000 likes.

In less than two minutes, Ella explained the concept of the product, showed the audience the product benefits and shared it with an engaged audience which resulted in all of JUV’s units being sold out in a matter of days.

What Jai says about his TikTok campaign:

“TikTok is THE place to be for consumer brands. I was blown away by the surprising success. The algo is terrific at finding the right audience to maximize engagement.”

— Jai Patel, Founder of JUV and customer of Olivine Playbooks

Leveraging social media in product marketing

If you’re a product marketer or business owner, regardless if it’s a small business or a national brand, you can leverage social media as a valuable tool in your product marketing toolkit. Below are seven pieces of advice you should know about social media marketing.

#1. Establish your goals on social media

It goes without saying, but it’s important to establish your goals and objectives when thinking about your social media strategy. Here’s where you want to think about and get clear on your broader product marketing and business goals to see exactly how your social media strategy can help you to achieve those goals.

Common social media goals:

Increase brand awareness
Increase website traffic
Increase conversions
Create a community

Deciding on your goals upfront will help you tailor your social media strategy to focus on tasks that will aid in fulfilling those goals. It will also help you to be more intentional about the content you’re creating on social media. Each time you create a piece of social media content, you know exactly how it relates to your broader business goals.

Key Tip: To make creating content a little less stressful, you can leverage your brand and product positioning and messaging work to guide the type of content you create for your social media channels.

#2. Decide which social channels are best for your business.

Don’t try to be the jack of all platforms. Instead, be the master of a few. Ask yourself, “which social media channels best serve my business?” Figure out where your audience is and go there.

Social media platform recommendations based on industry

Remember, each platform serves a different demographic and is designed to provide a different experience. If you’re a B2B business, it probably makes sense to be on LinkedIn and Twitter. If you’re trying to reach Gen Z, focus on TikTok, Instagram or Snapchat. You don’t have to be active on every social media channel.

Take a look at our social media recommendations based on your industry

Olivine social media traffic by channel

As a product marketing agency serving startups and B2B businesses, we focus our social media efforts heavily on LinkedIn because that's where we know our audience spends a lot of time online.

We take a thoughtful approach to creating social media content that we know will add value to our target audience on LinkedIn.

Over time we've added other social media channels to the mix to expand our reach and test our content strategy's effectiveness. However, as you can see from the image below, LinkedIn remains our largest driver of traffic to our website.

We’re still active on other social media channels, but we focus most of our time on creating content that will resonate with our audience on LinkedIn while still leveraging other channels.

Examples of top performing Olivine LinkedIn posts

Our co-founder Raechel Lambert shared on her LinkedIn profile data to the community in a table, making it easier for them to read and engage. It got 10,498 impressions, 140 reactions, 19 comments and 5 shares.

On Olivine’s side the posts that have more interactions are the ones that have a hot topic, for example when we announced our Newsletter #2 was out with a debate question: “should early-stage startups hire a product marketer or growth marketer first?” it got 21,483 impressions, 147 clicks, 17 reactions, 0,77% engagement rate and a 0,68% click-through rate.

But the posts that have the most impressions do not necessarily have the most engagement rate, for example when we announced some of our team members were Filming with Wynter it got 1,066 impressions, 147 clicks, 28 reactions, 2 comments, 16.6% engagement rate and a 13,69% click-through rate, which are more positive numbers.

#3. Customize your content for each channel

Once you know which channels are best for your business, you’ll want to ensure the content you deliver to each one is effective for that channel. Does that mean you have to create three different videos for three different channels? No. It simply means you’re thoughtful about the overall message you’re pushing out to each one. For example, if you decide to post the same video on Instagram and LinkedIn. You might adjust the copy to go with each. Instagram is casual and informal. Maybe you’ll use more emojis. You’ll want to tweak the message on LinkedIn to sound more professional. Why? Because it’s a channel for professionals.

Social media posts character and time limits

#4. Incorporate video

If you’re not creating videos, you’re missing out on free exposure and engagement. Every platform right now prioritizes video content over static imagery. Why? Because that’s what users want to see. Half of social media users prefer video over other types of content according to a 2021 Sprout Social report. Fortunately, this doesn’t mean you need a huge video production budget. All you need is a decent smartphone and a plan. That’s the beauty of social media – you don’t have to be a professional videographer to produce compelling content.

Key Tip: Creating engaging videos doesn’t have to be daunting. User friendly tools like Canva, an online design and publishing tool, offer video templates that make it easy for anyone to create video content for social media.

#5. Engage with your audience via likes and comments

Social media marketing is not like traditional print ads or TV commercials. It’s not a one-way communication channel. Social media is unique in that you get to interact with your audience. Engaging with your audience builds a stronger relationship and, in turn, provides you more opportunities to build brand loyalty. Ask questions in your posts to encourage comments, comment on other people’s posts, and follow accounts that are in your space.

#6. Measure and track your social media performance

Tracking the performance of your content on social media is critical to the success of your social media strategy and overall product marketing strategy.

Measuring performance helps you see if you’re on track with meeting your social media and larger product marketing goals. This is how you’ll know whether your social media efforts are working.

You’ll also develop a deeper understanding of your audience and the type of content that resonates with them the most—making it easier to double down on the content that’s working or whether you need to reassess your social media content strategy.

Social Media Key Performance Indicators

Depending on your industry, there are several benchmarks you can use to monitor and track your performance. To understand the potential of each industry benchmark on TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, you need to take a look at the average engagement rates per post.

According to a recent 2021 report by Socialinsider the average engagement rate on each platform:

Facebook = 0.13%
Twitter = 0.05%
Instagram 0.83%
TikTok = 5.96% (huge difference!)

Below are a few other key performance indicators that extend across all industries.

#7. Be ready to pivot

If there’s one thing that will never change about social media, it’s that it will always change. Platforms are constantly evolving and releasing new features. This doesn’t mean you have to use every new feature released, but it would behoove you to test them out. See where your audience is most engaged. Maybe it’s in your stories or a live video. Over time you’ll get a better idea of your audience’s preferences.

Key Tip: Remember to be consistent and intentional with your social media strategy. To achieve long term success and organic growth on social media you need to keep consistent with your posting schedule and cadence. You may not see results right away but over time as you adjust and tweak your strategy you will start to see results.

Bringing product marketing and social media all together

Hopefully, by now, you’ve seen how you can leverage social media in product marketing to understand your target audience and create brand awareness for your product through creating valuable content and engaging through the various social media channels.

This article is co-authored and edited by Tiffany Trotter, a product marketing associate & content marketer.

Seven ways to leverage social media in your product marketing strategy