As social media platforms continue to evolve,  more businesses investing heavily in strategies built to increase brand awareness, community engagement, and brand loyalty. Of course, the end goal of any online marketing initiative is to generate sales, which is becoming easier for brands to accomplish on social media platforms such as Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. While social marketing may never be the main driver of online revenue, there are a myriad of strategies business can execute to complement digital marketing efforts.

Below are some handy tactics that can help you build your brand’s presence leveraging social media.

1. Launch Paid Advertising Campaigns

Although social advertising is still in its infancy compared to Google Adwords, it has quickly grown over the past couple of years to the point that it now provides brands with the ability to reach larger and more targeted audiences. For example, Facebook continuously rolls out updates to their ad platform, introducing promoted page features and advanced targeting for its wide array of advertising products. Launching campaigns to boost your social presence and leveraging the virality of social ads can increase traffic to your website via referrals and contribute to your online performance in the long run.

2. Build Active Communities

Social media ghost towns will negatively affect your brand’s online presence. Inactive social profiles will instill a lack of faith in the mind of potential consumers, especially when they rely on social proof to reinforce their perception of your brand. Active communities, on the other hand, work well to cement positive attitudes in relation to your business and can complement your digital marketing campaigns. Contests and promotions in particular are effective methods to generate more activity across all your profiles, and also allow you to reach new users by promoting your brand through your fans’ respective networks.

3. Integrate Social Sharing on your Site

Implementing social sharing buttons throughout your site, whether it’s to broadcast testimonials or to share specific products, gives users the opportunity to introduce your brand to new networks and extend your online reach. This can prove to be particularly advantageous for ecommerce stores that need to generate more traffic for their websites. If you invest in producing high-quality product images, you can leverage the viral power of social media and encourage users to share those particular images to Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.

4. Create Social Referral Programs

Social referral programs encourage users to share what they purchased with their networks in the hope that this positive word-of-mouth marketing will bring new users to the website. Upon checkout, members are incentivized to follow through with social sharing by earning credits and/or discounts that can be applied to future purchases. In some cases, brands will also provide the referred user with a credit or discount, making the social referral program mutually beneficial for both the referring and referred users. These programs expand your brand’s reach into new social networks and provide new opportunities to monetize your traffic.