By Isabella Susino

Keywords

• Interactive media marketing
• Social media marketing
• User generated content
• Small business marketing strategies

The use of interactive marketing in the form of polls, quizzes, gifs, text, videos, and other forms of media, draw in and highly engage their target audiences. Having the audience participate in something like a poll to determine what kind of product you should sell in the future indicates that their opinion is included and valued. Engagement with consumers on social media platforms increases the reliability and value of the products or services that the brand is endorsing, selling or featuring. For small businesses, social media is crucial to their market outreach, and engagement is what can make or break the business.

What is social media?

Social media first started as a means of communication between family, friends and colleagues.It was meant to stay in contact with those you may not see in your day-to-day life. When more and more applications are developed, each app has a different function to the user. “Different social media platforms are used for specific purposes. For example, expressing creativity is most common on TikTok or Instagram; promoting one’s career is common on LinkedIn” (Bump, 2023). The same goes for Facebook, Pinterest, tumblr, Reddit, YouTube, Threads, and “Twitter,” or rather, X. Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) define social media as “a group of Internet based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and allow the creation and exchange of user generated content.” Each platform has a different medium that users are able to create or share with their followers, or consume content from creators or brands they follow. “It is much more to do with what people are doing with the technology than the technology itself, for rather than merely retrieving information, users are now creating and consuming it, and hence adding value to the websites that permit them to do so” (Campbell et al., 2011).

Paid Marketing on Social Media Platforms

While social media has been growing as a marketing strategy for small businesses, the exchange of information on products has been prevalent, even before paid ads appeared on these platforms. As a new type of advertising started in the early 2000s, companies had celebrities endorse their products or services due to their fan following.

In the mid-2000s began the rise of Facebook and Twitter, furthering the following of celebrities and also marked the beginning of “influencers.” Within the last decade, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube emerged as the most popular and go-to platforms for influencer marketing. All three platforms are highly visual, and offer more feedback on products/services than written content platforms. While Instagram and TikTok offer short-form content consisting of photos and short videos, YouTube offers long-form content and has created a new form of influencer: the vlogger. Content creators using these platforms are often sharing their lives with their followers, making them highly relatable and entertaining. “Brands have taken notice of this trend and have begun partnering with vloggers to promote their products” (Wilkens, 2023).

In more recent years, there has been a rise in micro-influencers: content creators with a smaller following, but have high engagement on their content. “One notable trend is the emergence of micro-influencers with a loyal but small number of followers (10–50K followers)” (Venkateshi, 2020). Micro-influencers are focused on one niche, while influencers with a larger following tend to cover a wide range of topics. The reason for the high engagement in micro-influencers’ content is due to their niche targeting a very specific audience. [Recent industry reports suggest that micro-influencers with small network sizes show higher-quality engagement by communicating intimately with a narrowed group of followers than macro-influencers (Venkateshi, 2020). Consequently, 90% of influencer marketing employed micro-size influencers in 2021 (Santora, 2021)] (Kim & Kim, 2022).

Unfortunately, a lot of small niche accounts get lost in all the pop-culture ‘for you page’ (FYP) content. Nate Petroski’s content is a great example of this. As a homesteading account on TikTok, Facebook, Youtube, and Instagram he’s experiencing a loss in views when he posts content to his account’s specific niche. “I found that if I make other videos that are kind of off topic but really popular, it ends up pushing those really hard, and then my homesteading ones fall off the tail.” He follows this statement up with screenshots of his videos with their view count. One he mentions in particular, is about a lamp. The view count on that video reached 725.4k views, while his other more high-value videos only reached between 125.9k — 272.4k. The videos that had the most value, one specifically about the use of solar panels on a homestead, did adequately. “If you only rely on the for you page to show you my content, you’ll never even know I do homesteading videos.”

“The FYP pushes the videos that are popular the hardest, and if you want to see the educational / homesteading videos I put out, most definitely you’ll have to go to my page and scroll through and see if you can find them. ’Cause they’re there. All I can do is make the videos, you actually have to seek them out if the FYP doesn’t push them” (Petroski, n.d.-d). If the FYP isn’t pushing creators’ content because of viewcounts, creators rely on their followers to find the content between suggested content and ads. Micro-influencers rely on their followers to stay engaged with their content, else their niche topic will be lost in the sea of content that is offered on social media platforms.

How are small businesses utilizing social media marketing?

Engagement is time spent on social media platforms, viewing different accounts’ content. It’s a “connection between brands and consumers, [while] offering a personal channel and currency for user centered networking and social interaction” (Chi, 2011). With the increase of influencers and micro-influers, consumers are receiving hyper-specific information catered to their interests. “Social media also allows for more authentic connection with your dream clients. Other marketing channels may not allow you to establish a real know-like-trust relationship with the people you’re trying to reach” (PR Newswire, 2022). Content creators are generating content for niche groups of people, target audiences that are either hitting their professional goals or just mutual topic interest. Either way, this hyper-specific generated content is creating what Thompson (2006) coined as the “Human Brand.” [The term is “any well-known persona who is the subject of marketing communication efforts” (Thompson, 2006)] (Kim & Kim, 2022).

Whether your business is located in a small town or you’re internationally recognzized, “online communication offers the prospect of replacing physical proximity with virtual interaction and even intimacy as evidenced by the popularity of websites such as Facebook and LinkedIn” (Barnes et al., 2012).Your audience is looking to interact with your brand, it allows the exchange of information in various forms.

A web-based study was conducted on small businesses located in rural Maine on what those businesses thought about the internet, social media, their definition of success, and their desired performance in that region. According to the Small Business Administration (2011) about 97 percent of all businesses in Maine are considered small. Therefore, Maine small businesses represent the major driver of economic health and development in the state (Jones et al., 2015). Social media offers a national and international form of brand engagement, which can increase the state’s commerce — particularly in nature-based tourism. “Tourism is one of the main economic resources for Maine; thus, attracting and retaining tourists is very important for most of the businesses” (Jones et al., 2015). In 2012, it’s estimated that Maine generated about 85.5k jobs and $5 billion in direct expenditures; overnight visitors brought in $3.7 billion and day travelers brought in $1.2 billion. By marketing themselves on social media, these small businesses can see a major increase in sales traffic. “The internet played the largest role in tourists’ search for a vacation destination with Google maps, Maine tourism websites, Trip Advisor, Google search, and AAA playing the largest role” (Jones et al., 2015). By advertising themselves and their brand on social media and increasing engagement levels with their audience, tourists would discover these rural towns based on what they’re searching for in the area.

Outside of Maine, businesses using social media or other digital marketing tactics are finding that these methods are working well. “[A Visual Objects 2022] survey found that 25% of small businesses [in the US] consider social media their most successful digital marketing tool in 2022; small businesses found that social media (25%), their company website (20%), and online advertising (18%) were their top three most successful digital marketing tools; nearly half of small businesses (48%) still use email marketing” (PR Newswire, 2022).

Interactive marketing on social media

Small businesses and content creators are marketing on social media and using add-ons to increase their engagement with their followers. “TikTok’s adding another way to help brands to engage consumers, with new Interactive Add-Ons for promotions, which are essentially stickers, pop-ups, and other visual markers that invite users to engage with ads” (Hutchinson, 2023a). Another example of these add-ons would be on Instagram, specifically the stories feature. Users can post polls, answer questions, add music or gifs, and other media to their story posts. In return, followers can swipe up and send an emoji as response to said story, or they can interact with the different add-on forms — like asking a question. These social media platforms are introducing more and more of these add-ons because it drives engagement up.

The use of trends as a form of social media marketing makes it incredibly easy for small businesses and small-scale content creators to maintain their relatability to their audiences. For example, the Wes Anderson trend (Kaplan, 2023) “trend went viral throughout April and May, with more than 180 thousand TikToks using the audio. TikTokers filmed anything from their own train journeys to walking around the neighborhood to going to the grocery store to working in a wood shop — proving even the most mundane of moments can be made beautiful and interesting when filtered through Anderson’s style.”

Trends are the simplest way to start marketing a business on social media. Most of the trends come in a template, just film your video pieces and put them back together in the template. The next step is engaging your followers by posting story add-ons that are clickable, with a topic that’s highly relatable or helps your audience understand your brand better.

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