Leveraging audience insights and content optimisation
“In 2024, over five billion people were using social media worldwide, a number projected to increase to over six billion in 2028 (Statista 2025).” Lean Creative’s social media specialist, Rachel Preston, discusses how social media can be used as part of an effective marketing campaign.
What would you say to a company thinking of using social media in their marketing strategy?
Think about what your business would be missing out on if you don’t use it. Are your competitors using social media? If they are and you’re not, your competition will be ahead of you, and if your competitors aren’t using social media, you can get ahead of them by using it!
Social media is a powerful tool for tracking your competition and staying informed about industry conversations. It also helps humanise your brand by giving your leaders a voice and positioning them as thought leaders. By enhancing authenticity and trust, providing a platform for consistent messaging, and expanding your brand’s reach, social media plays a crucial role in building meaningful connections with your audience.
What types of activity can an organisation have on social media?
There are three very clear types of social media activity: employees, leaders and brand. Each of these categories has a voice, giving amplification and extending the reach of your messaging. When you look at organic activity, you need employee and leadership activity, including your subject matter experts, to extend your reach, otherwise you’re only confined to your followers unless someone else shares or likes your post. That’s why the employee piece is so important. Encourage your employees across the board to engage with the content – when your employees are advocates of your brand, it builds trust in the brand for people who are looking to buy. Paid social is a way of extending reach beyond your organic followers, but not all organisations have the budget required.
How should a business choose which social media platform to use and what to post?
Everything about marketing messaging is about relevance and making sure you’re speaking about a topic or using the same language and tone that would resonate with your audience. And it’s the same with the social media platforms – for your social media plan to be effective, you need to consider where your target audience is, where they’re active. There’s no point broadcasting on X (formerly known as Twitter) if your audience base is on Facebook.
It’s very important to research and understand where your audience is as part of your social media strategy, so you know who you’re trying to reach. Research into where your target audience is most active – if B2B (business to business), then find out where the decision makers are active, and what kind of content they’re looking at and sharing, so that you can engage with them. LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a useful tool that can integrate with your CRM to help you engage with your target audience via LinkedIn. Creativity and variety are also important: have a mix of formats, with carousels or static images, animations, or video, if there’s budget to do that.
I would recommend changing the way your content is written based on the channel it’s being published on. For example, X is more informal than LinkedIn, so you would word your post differently. Facebook is more community driven, providing a different type of audience. Instagram usually lends itself to culture and ‘life at’ posts, because it’s so visual – you can share nice reels and photos on Instagram. You might want to look at changing the objective that you have for Instagram, as opposed to it just being another channel that you put everything on, perhaps keep it more for your culture or event posts. LinkedIn and X complement each other, because LinkedIn can be a longer form of what you’re saying on X. Instagram and Facebook can complement each other too and are very easy to manage together via the Meta Business Suite.
Do your analysis first to find out where your audience is and have a social media strategy for each platform – make it audience-led. There’s no point posting where your audience isn’t reading. If your target audience is younger, think about TikTok, YouTube and wider social media, as they’re constantly evolving.
Also, consider where your audience is globally. For example, you can’t use LinkedIn in China, but you can post on WeChat (also known as Weixin) to reach your target audience in China. In Germany, people prefer to use an app called XING, rather than LinkedIn – it’s all about tailoring your approach to your audience.
What social media scheduling and analytics tools would you recommend?
Below are some that I have either worked with or analysed and recommended, with differing features to help streamline social media management. Selecting the right social media tool depends on your organisation’s specific needs, whether it’s streamlining posting, analysing performance, or scaling team collaboration. HubSpot is a great example of an all-in-one tool as it can also do social media scheduling too.
Scheduling and management tools:
- Schedule posts across multiple platforms.
- Monitor engagement and performance in one dashboard.
- Offers basic analytics and team collaboration tools.
- Amplify for employee advocacy.
- Simplifies scheduling with an intuitive interface.
- Offers analytics and engagement tools in premium plans.
- Ideal for small businesses and solo marketers.
- Combines scheduling, analytics, and CRM (customer relationship management).
- Offers detailed reporting and collaboration features.
- Advocacy tool.
- Social media scheduling and publishing.
- Offers centralised scheduling across multiple platforms.
- Includes features for content approval workflows and team collaboration.
- Supports publishing at scale for global campaigns.
- Advanced analytics.
Analytics-driven tools:
Google Analytics (social reports)
- Tracks traffic, conversions and ROI from social platforms.
- Integrates with UTM links (URL with added text that provides specific data about the source of traffic to a website) for detailed campaign analysis.
- Provides deep social listening and analytics insights.
- Tracks sentiment, trends and audience behaviour.
What are the benefits of paid versus organic social media?
Organic social media focuses on building authentic relationships and developing community engagement through unpaid posts. It’s ideal for strengthening brand identity, building trust and nurturing long-term connections. While its reach can be limited, organic content is invaluable for establishing credibility and engaging directly with loyal followers.
Paid social media involves investing in targeted campaigns to reach specific audiences. Paid strategies are highly effective for driving immediate results, such as increasing brand visibility, generating leads, or boosting sales. With precise targeting and measurable outcomes, paid campaigns offer a scalable way to achieve specific business objectives. You can use leadership on paid social on LinkedIn now – a feature where your ads can go from your leaders’ accounts, so it’s still paid, but it humanises the ad because it looks as if it is from an individual’s account rather than a brand account.
As a general rule, organic social builds trust, while paid social drives reach and action. An organisation should consider a balanced approach, leveraging both, to sustain meaningful engagement while achieving measurable growth.
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At Lean Creative Marketing, we advise that you use a diverse mix of content that resonates with your target audience and is tailored to the specific social platforms they use, rather than adopt a one-size-fits-all approach.
Planning to use social media as part of your marketing strategy, or think you might need to change the way your organisation uses social media?
Get in touch to discuss analysis of your target audience and how you can reach people through social media, increase engagement and drive business growth.
