How to Cater to Teens on Social Media Platforms Without Harming Them?

Most businesses are running their active accounts on various social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok. Advertisers or marketers are using these platforms to reach the teen audience. The yearly purchasing power of Gen Z is equivalent to billions of dollars. So, reaching out to teens is very important for brands and businesses aiming to grow constantly in the coming years.

Just like all other technological advancements, such as smartphones, social media also comes with certain limitations or side effects for teens. Although social media has become the best source of entertainment, education, and communication for young people, increased exposure to social media platforms can lead to higher risks of depression, anxiety, and low self-confidence. This makes it difficult for marketers to support growth in the next generation instead of unhelpful or bad habits. In this post, you will learn how advertisers or marketers can use the benefits of social media for their product or brand promotion without affecting teenage users.

1. Use positive teen values.

Today’s young people are more interested in issues, such as political involvement, gender equality, sustainability, and race. Marketers can take the best advantage of these positive values of teens to promote their product or service and develop brand trustworthiness.

To get started, you can use brand-purpose marketing to show that you are more willing to help with some charitable approaches than making money. This form of marketing is a great way to engage teenage users on your social media posts. You can create an authentic outreach project or donate some portion of your net profit to a charity to make teenagers believe you pay back to the community, thereby developing brand loyalty.

Instead of influencer marketing, you can invest in brand-purpose marketing by adding post tags and links in your social media account bios to outreach programs and charities. It will not only help you to contribute to societal benefits but also strengthen brand loyalty for many coming years.

2. Allow teenagers to choose based on their interests.

One common attribute of every teenager is that they have a strong desire for independence. They will do what they love without getting much involvement from another person. Since they have developing brains, they desire more independence than anything else. Most young people tend to do exactly the opposite of what they are said to do.

Advertisers must consider this trait of teenagers in their minds to make a positive impact on the social media world. Never compel your young audience to watch any ad that creates lots of damaging and unwanted images, instead, persuade them to discover about your product or service by their interest and choice.

For example, you can tweet a post or upload Instagram content about a certain social issue with your related product in the photo caption or tag. This will keep teenage social users engaged in your posts and will likely make them follow your account. Holding the attention of teenagers could help you to make them discover your product or service freely.

This advertising strategy could make teenagers believe that they are making their own decisions about what to buy instead of getting flooded with lots of advertisements that they can’t scroll past or skip. They can use their power to select and decide their own preferences and desires.

3. Be genuine.

Authenticity is very important for all social media content creators, businesses, and marketers because the audience doesn’t want to see unreal content. People during their teenage years are highly smart enough to identify when advertisers are trying to raise their interests just to earn more revenue. The best marketer always remains genuine and focuses on their product instead of related concepts and emotions. Avoid spending thousands of dollars to show yourself cool to the teens as it may strengthen negative trends on social media. By keeping honesty, you can represent your product’s benefits.

For example, the Droga 5 ad campaign of Clearasil humorously shows honesty by showing the audience that their company did not ‘get’ teens but better understood teenage acne. It caters to teens on social media without any negative impact of their advertising. Instead of copying others, follow a simple approach of promoting your product honestly. Young users will praise your authenticity and tend to engage more in your products or services. Moreover, they are likely to share original posts with others.

Final Words

Social media platforms are emerging as the most powerful tool for businesses and companies to strengthen brand loyalty in teenagers. However, many social media trends support negative behavior and side effects among teens in the coming time. Thus, marketers need to promote their products or services ethically without providing a boost to these unwanted trends.

Respecting teens’ values and their autonomy, and staying honest can be the best strategy to cater to young users on social media without any negative impact. If you are running social media platforms for your brand marketing, follow these above-mentioned strategies to improve the success rate of your social media campaigns. Hopefully, these strategies will help you to cater to teens on social media and market your brand while contributing to the positive trends.