There hasn’t been a better time for social media marketing in Nepal than now. For a nation striving to keep pace with technological advancements across the planet; social media marketing in Nepal is growing exponentially. Yet, businesses are constantly struggling with their digital marketing strategies, fumbling from one digital marketing agency to the next.

This raises a very important question. Why is your business struggling with digital marketing, more specifically social media marketing in Nepal? Today we’ll go through lengths to answer this question and how you can transform your digital marketing strategy and be more satisfied with your business as you navigate through the digital stratosphere.

The first step to succeed with social media marketing in Nepal is understanding what succeeding entails. What criteria do you use to measure and judge your success? To understand this, let’s begin with the basics.

What is Social Media Marketing?

In its simplest form, social media marketing is the process of gaining traffic or attention to your business through social media websites. Social media marketing involves activities like posting updates, images, videos, and different content that drives audience engagement. For people who want faster engagement and bigger target audience, social media marketing offers paid social media advertising too.  It is one of the most powerful tools for businesses to reach current and potential customers. Moreover, it simplifies a problem that traditional platforms like traditional print ads and TV commercials were never quick to solve.

The growth of social media networks have rivaled, if not, out performed the Internet itself. Facebook’s reach in 2019 expanded to over 2 billion, that means 1 in every 4 people on the planet has a Facebook account. In Nepal alone, Facebook has a reach of 9.8 million, that means 1 in every 3 Nepali person has a Facebook account. That is just Facebook, the number of platforms are constantly growing with emerging social media networks like Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest. Marketing on social media has the potential to bring rewards for your business, creating loyal brand advocates and even driving leads and sales.

The community is growing more and more dependent on social media. An average Internet user today has more than 7 social media accounts and close to 73% users log in to these accounts everyday. We’ve become so addicted to social media and mobile devices that there’s now a word for our obsession: Nomophobia is the fear of not being near your mobile phone.

With such widespread use, social media marketing in Nepal and across the globe is an irresistible marketing opportunity. If you’re not using social media marketing already, you’ll either have to learn it now or lose in the long run.

All things considered, social media marketing has a broader definition than simply gaining traffic and attention. Gaining traffic is one of the outcomes of social media marketing. Social media marketing is more about the entire process of achieving that result. It is about creating content that is tailored to each platform to drive user engagement and sharing.

A common misconception prevalent with digital marketing in Nepal is delivering the same content on all of the platforms. Think about it though, each of these platforms are different. What works on Facebook, doesn’t work on Quora and vice versa. From blogs, images to videos, each platform has its own forte. It is critical that your digital marketing strategy accounts for each platform and customizes content accordingly.

The key tactic for your digital marketing plan to succeed on different platforms is to understand the term ‘engagement’. The content you create and distribute must be engaging so that people want to share it. Your content must be intriguing enough to make the user want to tell all of his/her friends about it. When people share your content, it reaches more people, and more people translates to more traffic for your business. Sounds simple, right? Surprisingly, this is where the majority of digital marketing agencies in Nepal struggle.

Social Media Engagement is for targeting the right customers for your brand. Customers directly interact with your brand online. They basically like, comment and share your content on social media and your business automatically grows. Social Media Engagement is for connecting with the customers online and building healthy relationships with them. Read more about why social media engagement is important for your business here.

Overview

How many social media platforms can you remember? We’d say you could maybe think of five. In reality, there are more than 200 social media platforms, and that’s just according to Wikipedia.

This graphic is called “The Conversation Prism” and it gives an overview for your reference. The social media universe is constantly expanding, with new concepts emerging constantly. It is probably something that you and I will never be able to keep track of.

It definitely doesn’t mean that we need to plan our digital marketing strategy to cater to all 200 platforms – that would be crazy. Facebook alone claims more than 74% of social media traffic in Nepal. What you are required to do, however, is to stay consistent with your strategy that transcends through multiple platforms.

Before we start talking about different strategies and platforms individually, let us get you familiar with a few terms that are commonly used in social media marketing in Nepal.

Content

Content is pretty much everything that you are posting. Everything from a Facebook status update, an Instagram photo, to tweets or videos you post on any medium is known as content. Content is perhaps the most important factor that determines the quality of your digital marketing campaign. The only thing that could precede content might be context.

Context

The technical definition of context is the circumstances and facts that surround a situation. You might have the best content in the world, but if it is used on the wrong platform or reaching the wrong target audience, it will definitely not yield the desired results. You can’t post a blog on Instagram; instead, Instagram is a platform to showcase your visual content online. Therefore, take advantage of it! Furthermore, some blogs might be better as videos while some videos can’t have the impact of an image, therefore using appropriate platform and context is crucial to get the best possible results.

Hashtags

There was a time where ‘#’ was a simple sign you only used to check your account balance. But social media has given this symbol a new definition. Hashtag is a tool you can use to add meta information to your content across all social marketing platforms. The hash mark in your post allows it to be indexed by the social network, so that it can be discoverable to everyone with similar interests , even if they’re not your followers or fans.

Shares

Shares are the fuel that social media thrives upon. It is the online equivalent of word-of-mouth references. Digital marketing agencies in Nepal will keep talking to you about impressions, click-through rates, and potential reach. Yet, none of these agencies will tell you whether people actually pass on what you have to say. Shares can also be a Key performance indicator (KPI) for your digital marketing campaigns, as people ultimately only share when they engage and connect with your content.

These keywords should help you understand and evaluate your social media marketing strategies to some extent. However, the success of your digital marketing in Nepal also depends on global trends.

Global Trends for Social Media Marketing

We’ve talked about the fast paced world of social media before. Innovation sometimes seems scheduled and happening at a blistering pace, and keeping up with it, isn’t an easy task.

Yet again, when a lot is happening really fast, you can’t possibly be in control of all of it. However, here are a few major trends that you should be aware of when developing your next great marketing plan.

Organic Reach is plummeting

Let me tell you a story, there once was a time when a business posted an image on social media and all of their followers saw the post. The compelling content increased their engagement and following, and catapulted their business towards success. The post continued to receive likes, comments and shares for months. Everyone was happy.

Well, it’s 2019 and time to wake up from your slumber. Organic campaigns and following are slowly becoming a thing of the past, as social media platforms have changed their algorithm over time and building an organic following has been a difficult task. All of this is intentional.

It’s simple mathematics, as organic reach decreases – you guessed it – ad spending goes up. Of course, some platforms are more flexible than others, but this trend is present across all platforms. We have to understand that social media platforms are ultimately businesses. They earn revenue when we spend money to promote our business.

It is time to accept that if you want any success in social media marketing in Nepal, you will probably have to spend money.

It’s about Your Audience

If you don’t show any love to your audience, why would you expect them to show any love or loyalty towards you? Your customers and audience should be at the forefront of all your digital marketing plans. After all, social media is all about relationships and engagement.

The ‘newness’ of social media is over. We have to understand that it is not a gimmick or phase that we can maneuver or avoid. Smart businesses have started to understand that social media marketing in Nepal is about interacting with your audience and establishing a connection with them rather than adding another follower to your page.

As Erin Jones, Founder of RepBright, mentioned, “Let your audience know that they matter to your brand, and they’ll help you grow your brand.”

“If you want to increase your reach, become an invaluable resource for your audience, and interact with them accordingly,” Jones said. “They’ll promote your brand for you, and your reach will grow considerably.”

Oh! Video!

Do you remember the time when we used to have to wait for an image to load? Heck, do you remember dial-up internet? We’ve come a long way in terms of internet speeds, and with faster internet speeds, video content has become the trend. In fact, social media videos get shared 1200% more than text and images combined.

For most marketers, video isn’t anything new. Marketing agencies in Nepal have been making video advertisements for decades. Yet, many fail to realize video advertisements and video marketing are two different things.

Let us try to explain. Imagine a big circle and label it as video marketing, then draw a smaller circle inside: that is called video advertising.

Advertising is merely a small part of video marketing that attempts to push your product/services to potential customers. Video marketing goes beyond traditional advertisements to strategic content that can captivate users with compelling stories relating to your business.

It is time to take your video strategy beyond video advertisements. Your customers are no longer buying your advertisements. They don’t have to wait for you to tell them about how good your product is; they can go to the internet and discover it themselves. Your audience converts to customers when they buy your story.

With these trends in mind, let’s take a look at some of the most popular platforms for social media marketing in Nepal. For each platform, we’ll tell you their: short history, current state, what the context of the platform dictates, and how to come up with great content for it.

Let’s begin with the biggest platform – Facebook.

Facebook

All of us are probably familiar with the origin of Facebook, there’s even a movie about it. The site originated from Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room at Harvard, and when it started in 2004, it was only available for Harvard University’s students. The founders soon realized the platforms’ potential, which has been available worldwide for everyone since 2006.

Since then, Facebook has risen meteorically. As mentioned earlier, 1 out of every 4 people around the world have a Facebook account. It also offers marketers the most data and the most targeted ads. This basically means that you can be as specific as defining your customer down to the socks he/she’s wearing.

For example, with Facebook Ads, you can even target housewives who live on the outskirts of Kathmandu Valley between the ages of 34 – 45; who shop cosmetic products at a mall, and have a birthday coming up. The possibility to set your target audiences are endless and precise.

Facebook gives your marketing strategy a lot of freedom. It supports a wide array of content, from texts, images, videos to newer innovations like instant articles, stories, events, and much more. What matters the most is how you incorporate your content into the platform as much as possible.

For example, instead of sharing the link to a YouTube video, upload the video to Facebook itself. Publish your blog as an instant article, feature multiple products and services as carousel posts. Utilizing all the features of Facebook allows you to reach your audience in different ways. This will increase engagement and ultimately help you achieve your social media goals. The most effective way of using all the tools provided by Facebook is through the use of Business Pages.

Facebook Pages

Facebook’s most obvious tool for brands is Facebook Pages. Similar to a personal profile, a Page is the center of information of your brand, regardless if it’s a company, product, service, or even a celebrity.

As you all may already know, Facebook users can “Like” a page and “Follow” it. This means that they will receive updates from that page in their news feed.

But in order to see the new posts every time they are added, users need to select the option to view posts first. Otherwise, it’s very likely that they will not see any updates as Facebook wants Pages to ‘boost’ posts (spend money) for more visibility and reach. It can be a good idea to encourage your audience to follow you and see your posts first. It’s a difficult proposition, yet it could help you potentially save money in the long run.

Setting up a Business Page is fairly easy, you can find more information regarding that here.

Business Manager

You’ve probably heard about the Facebook Business Manager. Facebook itself describes it as a tool to “manage ad accounts, Pages, and the people who work on them – all in one place.”

It’s a one-stop shop for all of your Facebook marketing and advertising, with features like controlled multi-user access to resources like your Instagram account and product catalogs. It is also the hub where you can track your performance through detailed and customizable reports.

The Business Manager is essential for anyone that is advertising on Facebook. Whether you are managing your Facebook business page in-house or outsourcing it to a digital marketing agency; you should get comfortable with the Business Manager, to stay on top of your business’s activities on Facebook. You can find more details about the Facebook Business Manager here.

Ads Manager

Facebook has 1.4 billion daily active users. An average user spends close to 50 minutes. It’s no wonder that more and more businesses are prioritizing Facebook as part of their marketing strategies. Whereas for some, it is their entire digital marketing strategy. With everyone trying to push their content to the audience through the same medium, there’s an incredible chance that your business might get lost in the crowd. It’s no secret that these days, you need to pay to have your audience see your content. You’ve even set up your Business Manager profile. Yet, you’re stuck on how to actually create, manage and analyze your Facebook Ads.

The answer to that dilemma is the Facebook Ads Manager. One of the many tools that you have access to through your Business Manager account. Facebook Ads Manager is an ad management tool to make, edit and analyze the paid promotional Facebook campaigns. Facebook recently combined Ads Manager and Power Editor into one platform to make it easier, and to create and monitor ad campaigns across multiple advertising platforms owned by Facebook, including Instagram ads.

Here is a guide to help you navigate through Facebook Ads Manager, from setting up to running ads.

Targeting Options

One of the best features of Facebook is targeting options that allow you to target your ideal customer. You can customize the audience for your paid content based on factors like demographics, devices, age, interests, and even behavioural characteristics.

As Facebook is the largest social media platform, it has an abundance of demographic information about its users. Using this data, Facebook provides one of the best targeted advertising programs online. You can target users based on virtually anything you might find in their profiles, as well as track your success with each segment. Granted that this is also the root of all the controversy surrounding Facebook, as it is still a uniquely powerful tool. It gives you unparalleled insight to your campaign, you can track and analyze everything from specific age group your content is popular with, to the time of day that your content is engaging with users the most.

Strategies for Facebook Marketing in Nepal

Your Facebook marketing strategy has to be unique. There’s an ocean of potential customers you can reach on Facebook. But with a larger pool, it’s harder to dissect and find your spot within its space. It’s paramount that you plan your steps before investing in Facebook Marketing. Here are a few guidelines that might help you succeed with Facebook marketing in Nepal.

Identify Goals

Any good plan begins with identifying what your desired outcome is. It is critical that you recognize your biggest need from social media marketing, and how you can use Facebook to help you resolve those needs.

With every campaign, Facebook asks you to choose your objective for the campaign. Do you want to drive traffic to your website, drive conversions, promote your Facebook Page, get engagement on your post, or something else? There is no one-size-fits-all Facebook marketing strategy. Therefore, setting a goal is how you make sure that your strategy is catered to your specific needs.

Target Audience

We’ve talked about this, and continue to remind you. If your content isn’t reaching the right audience, it’s not going to have the impact that you desire. With nearly 1.15 billion people scrolling through their feeds every day, it’s very important to know who you need to reach and how.

The best way to identify your target audience is by creating audience personas. An audience persona is a fictional character (based on real data and market research) who represents a segment of your target audience. Developing an audience persona is a method marketers and content creators use to implement solid marketing strategies and create better content.

Facebook allows you to choose your audience based on their location, age, gender, language, interests, behaviors, and connections. You can use this feature to pinpoint your ideal audience, ensuring that you are on top of your social media marketing in Nepal. Do keep in mind though, Nepal is a relatively small demographic. If you become too specific with your audience, you might not have enough reach for your campaign.

Be Active

In a lot of ways, Facebook is a living being – always evolving and always moving. You’ve seen it in your own feed. It seems like every hour there is new content ready to be consumed.

What this means is that your Facebook page is not something you can work on every couple of weeks. You have to commit to your Facebook marketing strategy by consistently posting new content to your company’s Facebook page. It is important to note that you must provide plenty of useful information through your posts, you can’t hammer people with sales-y copy in their news feed. According to the Sprout Social Q3 2016 Index, 57.5% of social media users said posting too many promotions was the most annoying action from brands.

You may want to use a social media scheduling tool to help automate your Facebook posting activities. If your Facebook presence grows large enough to the extent that you are having difficulty generating content and campaigns, you should consider hiring a digital marketing agency in Nepal or just contact us, Lone Tree Marketing.

Content

Once you’re clear about your objectives, audiences and frequency, it’s time to define what type of content you’ll be publishing. While every social network has its own style of content, Facebook tends to jump the line. With Facebook Stories, Facebook Live, image and video posts, your brand’s content strategy has endless opportunities. Highlight your brand values, tell your story and create a space that is unique to your company. Let’s take a look at the various types of organic Facebook content and how you can best use each one:

Status: The simplest communication is often the most powerful. With features like larger texts and colored backgrounds, you can get your message out in a more vibrant and eye-catching way.

Images: Images on Facebook generally receive 2.3 times more engagement, so integrating visual content to your social media marketing helps. However, don’t over rely on images, put effort into high-quality photos and awe your audience.

Videos: Video content receives the most engagement on Facebook and the demand for more video content is only growing. Videos should be easy to digest and always have captions. Create videos that grab the user’s attention and provide something worthwhile.

Facebook Live: Live content drives three times more engagement on Facebook. With ‘in-the-moment’ content growing in popularity, see how your brand can give sneak peeks into industry or office events, product launches and other behind-the-scenes content.

Facebook isn’t just powerful – it’s flexible. No matter what type of company you run, it has a variety of marketing options that you can tailor your marketing efforts to fit your company, your budget, and your time constraints.

The development of a powerful Facebook Marketing Strategy is not a one-time thing  you get done and walk away from. Social media marketing in Nepal requires your strategy to be dynamic, evolving and adapting with the changes in your business, your market, and the Facebook platform.

Instagram

As the fastest growing social media platform, Instagram’s meteoric rise prompted Facebook to purchase the platform in 2012. The platform reached 1 billion active monthly users in 2018, and still hasn’t looked back. Today, more than 25 million businesses use the platform to capture attention, incite interest, create desire, and compel action.

So what is Instagram all about? If in case you didn’t know, Instagram is and was always about pictures. Out of all of the big networks, Instagram has the highest engagement rate. Liking a post on Instagram is incredibly easy (you just double tap on a picture as you scroll through your feed) and people tend to do it more on Instagram than on Twitter or Facebook. More recently, Instagram is also treading on establishing a video platform with the launch of IGTV.

Since Facebook purchased Instagram, you can use the Business Manager platform for Instagram as well. Simultaneous campaigns on Instagram and Facebook have yielded incredible results, and is something that should definitely be a strategy for your social media marketing in Nepal.

Succeeding with Instagram Marketing in Nepal takes more than publishing attractive images – it requires thoughtful strategy, well-defined brand identity with visual creativity and effective community management. Here are a few tips to help you develop an Instagram marketing strategy based on clear goals and measurable results.

Define Objectives

We can’t reiterate this enough – if you don’t create goals, you will not know if your Instagram Marketing investment is paying off. Defining objectives for your Instagram Marketing in Nepal starts with choosing the right metrics to measure your success. Ask yourself, what do you want to achieve on Instagram? What’s the purpose of your brand using Instagram? While considering metrics to measure your social media marketing strategy for Instagram, there are two major metrics that you should look at:

• “Vanity” metrics (e.g., likes, comments, shares, followers)
• “Business” metrics (e.g., reach, engagement, traffic, lead-gen, revenue-gen)

Vanity Metrics will tell you if your content is resonating with your target audience. It will also help you measure your Instagram presence against competitors. Similarly, Business Metrics helps you track and understand how social media is contributing to your broader business results.

Both of these metrics are very important for you to succeed with Instagram marketing, and you should carefully evaluate your business goals and position your Instagram account accordingly. Depending on your industry, brand and key performance indicators, your Instagram marketing strategy should target several of these objectives:

• Increase brand awareness
• Demonstrate company culture
• Showcase your team and recruit new talent
• Increase customer engagement and loyalty
• Showcase products and services
• Enhance and complement event experiences
• Incentivize consumer engagement
• Share company or industry news
• Build a more engaged community
• Connect with influencers
• Drive sales through traffic

Develop a Content Strategy

“Instagram is easy, you just post pictures.”

As a digital marketing agency in Nepal, we’ve heard this countless times. The simplistic nature of the platform often leads businesses to undermine its capabilities as part of social media marketing strategy. However, content is the core of Instagram. If you do not have a concrete plan and structure, your Instagram account might never take off. Here’s how you can develop a solid content strategy for your Instagram page:

Build Content Themes

Review your objectives and determine what aspects of your brand to showcase in your Instagram content. Products, services, team members and culture all offer rich potential for subject matter over time. Your content themes should align not only through your brand voice, but also showcase it visually.

For example, Warsteiner consistently uses similar visuals to help tell a better story on Instagram. Using themes and colorful content; can successfully highlight the  product and increase interactions.

Here’s another fact, Instagram posts with faces generate 38% more likes than those without. Building content themes around what you know works, and is essential to the success of the brand.

Content Variety

Instagram is predominantly a photo-sharing app, but it has expanded to a point where users publish everything from videos to graphics to Boomerang videos. Consider a balance/right mix of the types of content that will work best for you, and the engagement you want from your audience.

If video enables you to tell an engaging story about your brand or your product, incorporate it into your content more often. If you don’t have the resources to execute video at a high-quality level, you may want to only use video for specific campaigns and promotions.

Beyond its flagship app, Instagram offers several supplementary apps that help you get even more creative with your posts. The Instagram suite of apps includes:

• Hyperlapse: This app allows users to shoot stop-motion time-lapse. While the camera moves a short distance, the action between each shot is rapid.
• Layout: Combine photos and videos together in a single Instagram post through custom layouts and features like mirrored landscapes.
• Boomerang: Much like a GIF, Boomerang plays a short cut video forward, but also backwards, repeatedly to create a nonstop motion.

Hashtags

As we talked about before, hashtags are a great way to expand the audience base for your content. It also makes your content easily identifiable, creating a theme that gives your audience something they instantly recognize and even look forward to. It’ll also help you generate ideas for more content.

Instagram’s algorithm prefers posts with high engagement, this means that the more likes and comments your post receives, more people will see your post. Instagram posts with at least one hashtag have 12.6 percent more engagement than those without. Although each Instagram post allows up to 30 hashtags, research on the topic suggests that the optimum number of hashtags is fewer than 10 per post.

Instagram introduced the ability to follow hashtags in 2017. Now, instead of users having to scroll through a feed to discover your tagged content, your posts could show up automatically in the feeds of potential new followers.

There are three main strategies you can use for choosing hashtags:

• Use popular hashtags that have the best chance of getting searched for (e.g., #love, #tbt, etc.)
• Use less popular hashtags yet highly-relevant hashtags. These may drive fewer users to your posts, but the ones who do find you will be more targeted.
• Use hashtags commonly thought to attract new followers. Some of the most commonly used are #followme, #follow4follow and #follow.

We also recommend using hashtags within your Instagram Stories. This gives your content another medium to be discovered by potential customers.  

If you didn’t know, most Instagram geo-locations and hashtags have their own Stories attached to them. While this is an underutilized feature, you can expect it to gain popularity as users become more comfortable with creating Instagram Stories. So along with hashtags, make sure to use the location features on both posts and stories.

Write Great Captions

Captions are almost as important as the image or video you post on Instagram. We get it, Instagram is all about the visuals. Those perfect pictures, with light, bright and airy feeds are what draws in the followers, but brands especially need to put a voice behind that picture.

Uploading a beautiful picture without a caption will probably receive less engagement compared to a post with a little personality behind it. People approach writing captions in different ways. While captions are limited to 2,200 characters and truncated with an ellipsis after three lines of text, it’s still an important part of your post.

Great captions don’t make the reader think. They are easy to consume and understand. Writing great captions requires a good understanding of your audience and your brand voice. Understanding your audience ensures that your content is interesting and memorable. Your brand voice determines that your content is consistent, recognizable and contextual.

If Instagram is an integral part of your social media marketing in Nepal, you must make a genuine effort in communicating your brand’s message through your captions.

YouTube

YouTube is a conundrum – it is an amazing mix between a social media platform and a search engine. Touted as the world’s second largest search engine, it is an excellent platform for social media marketing in Nepal. It is a valuable opportunity for marketers to get their brands and organizations discovered and to connect via video.

The fact that YouTube is such a hugely popular platform also means that there is a lot of competition. According to Statista, as of 2019, 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. With more than 50 million content creators churning out videos on a regular basis, your content has to stand out if you want to succeed with social media marketing in Nepal.

Another obstacle for businesses is that the audience on YouTube aren’t very welcoming to advertisements. You have to come up with innovative ways to promote your brand while entertaining the audience. The biggest reason businesses are avoiding YouTube in their social media strategy is that they simply don’t have enough understanding of how to produce video content.

Creating video content tailored for YouTube isn’t difficult, nor does it require a huge budget. As part of social media marketing in Nepal, using the YouTube platform is all about having a well thought-out strategy. Here are a few tips that might help you:

Research

If you want to be successful with social media marketing in Nepal, it is extremely important that you do plenty of research. You have to produce content that relates to your audience, and diving headfirst into video content without any research isn’t the brightest idea.

The first step towards developing your YouTube marketing strategy is to analyze what your competitors are doing. What kind of video content are they producing? How successful is their video content? Are there voids in the content they produce? Look at what is already out there and what is or is not succeeding before you begin to build out your own content.

Optimize for Searches

Remember how we told you that YouTube dwindles the lines between Social Media and Search Engine? The latter means that your YouTube videos need to be optimized for search if you want to get the most out of them. You have to understand that search engine optimization takes time, your first few videos might not get the views you’re seeking. However, constantly working and tweaking your SEO tactics on YouTube will yield long term benefits.

Here are a few tips to help you get started:

Title with Keywords

Optimizing a YouTube video begins with choosing an appealing title containing relevant keywords. YouTube video titles can contain up to 70 characters; we recommend 60 or fewer so nothing’s cut off on the search pages. However, do remember to keep the title relevant to the video, you do not want to put people off with clickbait titles.

Thumbnail

When you upload a video you can choose a freeze-frame to use as the thumbnail. However, we strongly recommend making your own custom thumbnail, as it’ll help your content stand out.

Attractive thumbnails can prompt people to select your video over other videos that appear on the search results. You can also repurpose the image and share it on other platforms to link them to your video.

Description

Your video description should contain a short explanation of your video topic, as well as links to your website and social media accounts. The purpose for these are different from those on Instagram, but they are a perfect tool to give audiences more information.

Here’s a summary of the most important points:

• 5000 characters max (but you probably don’t need this many)
• Front-load important keywords and use them in the title and description
• Add a “contents page” of timestamps so viewers can find relevant points easily
• Link out to different playlists on your channel
• Add up to 15 hashtags

Ask viewers to Subscribe

Sometimes, the easiest way to get what you want is to ask for it. There’s a reason every YouTuber ends their videos with a verbal call to “Like, share, and subscribe”—it works, and takes zero effort.

Here’s some more information with tips relating to YouTube.

YouTube is undoubtedly an important part of social media marketing in Nepal. The reach and impact it has is almost unparalleled. Keep in mind that none of these strategies will be effective in helping you build your YouTube presence unless you’re producing great content. Put in the time and effort to create videos that really speak to your audience and niche, and you’ll be well on your way to the top.

LinkedIn

Here’s something you might not have known: LinkedIn is older than Facebook. Founded in 2002, LinkedIn’s growth never exploded like Facebook’s. However, they’ve been around for 17 years and have grown to over 590 million members.

LinkedIn is not just about who you know, but about who your connections know. It has grown from a platform for jobseekers, to an immense content platform. People share status updates, articles, and interact with each other within a business or professional context. LinkedIn is the #1 channel B2B marketers use to distribute content at 94%.

LinkedIn has made huge updates to Groups, rolled out native video functionality for company pages, launched a Vimeo integration, and have even started dipping their toes into Stories.

Since the platform primarily comprises working professionals and/or students, 61 million LinkedIn users are senior level influencers, and 40 million are in decision-making positions. What this means for you and your brand is that it provides you with a pre-filtered target audience. A pool of like-minded business professionals, with a higher intellect that could instantly connect with your content leading.

Linkedin is even more relevant for social media marketing in Nepal, as very few brands are active on the platform. With almost 5,40,000 Nepali users on LinkedIn, it is an excellent platform to establish your brand.

Consistent posting

According to LinkedIn, businesses that post at least once per month have been shown to gain followers 6X faster than those that don’t. You should aim to post at least once per week to your Company Page to keep your followers engaged.

We’ve found that LinkedIn content performs really well if we include the following:

• Descriptive caption: Helps to provide people with extra context around your content
• Eye-catching images: Clean, simple aesthetic helps your content to stand out
• Hashtags: A great way to increase the visibility of your content to new audiences
• Bonus: Add emojis, questions, and bullet points to switch up the look and feel of your content

Use Images & Videos

LinkedIn is a professional platform that specializes in business articles and blogs. However, you still need to make your content stand out from the crowd—and text-only posts are not the way to do that. LinkedIn figures show that posts with an image included receive 98 percent more comments.

If YouTube is also part of your social media marketing in Nepal, try linking those youtube videos from your LinkedIn posts. While other social channels require you to upload native videos for autoplay, on LinkedIn, YouTube videos play automatically in the news feed, and can generate a 75 percent higher share rate.

Understand the LinkedIn algorithm

While most social networks keep their algorithm confidential, LinkedIn provides quite a bit of information about how its algorithm works. Here’s how the algorithm focuses on and ranks your content, and how you can use it for your social media marketing in Nepal.

1. A bot evaluates your content as spam, low-quality, or clear. What does this mean for you? Quality is vital, as you obviously want to achieve a clear ranking here.
2. The algorithm measures initial user engagement. Is your post getting likes and shares? Good. Are users hiding it from their feeds or marking it as spam? Err, not so good. Again, quality is key, but so is relevance. Make sure your posts speak to your followers, giving them reasons to engage with rather than hide your content.
3. The algorithm does some further checks for spam and credibility based on the quality of your account and your network. Engagement is also very important in this stage.
4. Human editors review content and determine whether it should continue to be displayed, or even boosted.

Fairly simple? Not quite, it is vital that you understand how these algorithms work and how to make your content relevant to your audience.

LinkedIn ads

LinkedIn requires its members to give detailed information about their professional interests, associations, and skills. What this means for your social media marketing in Nepal is that LinkedIn has exceptional targeting capabilities that allow you to make strategic decisions about incorporating LinkedIn ads.

LinkedIn offers a variety of self-service advertising options. Here’s a quick overview:

• Sponsored content: Allows your content to reach a wider audience than you would organically, and draw new users to your Company Page.
• Text Ads: These are pay-per-click ads that appear on the LinkedIn homepage, profile pages, Groups pages, search results pages, and more.
• Sponsored InMail: This is very similar to email marketing, with the only difference being that it is within the LinkedIn ecosystem. Sponsored InMail allows you to send personalized ads to LinkedIn members’ inboxes. Messages are only delivered when members are active on LinkedIn, making them likely to be noticed.

Read more about LinkedIn on our blog here.

Social Media Marketing in Nepal

Social Media is a global phenomenon that is consuming the world. How does this translate to Nepal though? Why should social media marketing in Nepal matter to you? Let’s talk about the importance of social media marketing in Nepal.

Cost Effectiveness

In a small market like Nepal, social media marketing is possibly the most cost-effective way to promote your business. As per Advertising Association of Nepal (AAN), print media has the highest share of the ad market with 47 percent. Television and radio, meanwhile, have 19 percent each followed by the online portals and social media at five percent. Estimates put the total advertising expenditure of Nepal at around Rs. 5 million annually. Consider this, only 5% of that amount is spent on social media marketing in Nepal.

If we consider the Return on Investment (ROI) of traditional media against social media and digital marketing, it becomes more evident how cost effective social media marketing in Nepal really is. The potential reach of social media marketing in Nepal is over 10 – 15 million people. There is no quantitative evidence that any traditional media (print, TV or radio) has even a fraction of this reach. In fact, the largest print media in Nepal has a potential reach of less than 2 million.

Considering these factors, your estimation should be as good as mine regarding how effective social media marketing costs are.

Engage with your customers

Social media is the best way for engaging and interacting with your customers. This concept is fairly new for social media marketing in Nepal, and presents you with an excellent way to build a customer base that your rivals are lagging behind in.  The more you communicate with the audience, the more chances you have of conversion. Set up a two-way communication with your target audience so that their wishes are known and their interest is catered with ease.

Improve brand loyalty

As Nepal ventures further into the world of credibility and global brand names. It is slowly getting accustomed to terms like brand loyalty. Again, as an emerging marketing sector, social media marketing in Nepal is critical for both household corporate businesses to small start ups; to establish loyal customers. Customers are always your best brand ambassadors, they are your primary source for expanding your reach.

Social Media Marketing in Nepal allows you to connect with this audience on multiple platforms. It is an effective way to build relationships with leads and customers that lead to greater satisfaction and loyalty over time. This can set you apart from your competition by showing your audience how your brand is different and reinforcing that your business cares about its customers. By engaging with your audience through valuable, compelling content and conversation, you can work to turn happy customers into brand advocates.

Social media marketing in Nepal is growing every day. Your competition is already increasing on social media, so don’t let your competitors take your probable customers. The earlier you start, the faster you see the growth in your business.

Conclusion

If you’ve stuck around till here, you’ve learnt about 4 major Social Media Marketing platforms in Nepal. We could continue talking about a lot of other platforms, but that would probably take a while; remember, there are more than 200 of them.

It is critical that you establish your presence on multiple platforms. You know now, how each platform got to where it’s at, what the context of each channel suggests that you do, and how to come up with good content for each of them.

If you still have queries regarding social media marketing in Nepal, our experts here at Lone Tree Marketing can help you navigate through the jungle. Lone Tree Marketing is a digital and social media agency that helps you connect, converse, collaborate and co-create with your target customers. A growing digital marketing agency in Nepal, we understand the different avenues of digital marketing and also know how to bring it all together.

Our philosophy is to harness innovation through an entrepreneurial mindset. We intertwine the agility, pace and creativity of a start-up matched with best practice delivery. We help our clients see differently, think differently, unlock new revenue streams, and engage with their customers in new ways through memorable brand and digital experiences.

We’re always aiming for a better tomorrow. As we move forward with campaigns, expertise, and motivated customer service, we make sure that we never miss the mark and carve out newer possibilities.

We understand the different avenues of digital marketing in Nepal and also know how to bring it all together.

Let’s get talking. We’re sure we can help you!