Social networks and messengers: channels, a content plan, UTM tags

Social media marketing is work with an audience on social networks and messengers that leads people to the site. UTM tags show where a visitor came from.

Where your people are and what you can do there

In the earlier lessons you invented a flow and a value ladder. Now people have to come to them. One way is social networks and messengers: channels where you regularly talk to your audience and invite it to the site. The short name for this work is social media marketing.

First, a word on what isn’t stable. Platforms rise and fall: Facebook was once the place to be, Twitter became X, TikTok and short video changed what people watch, and in each country the picture differs. The exact picture updates faster than textbooks, so we write this paragraph carefully: check, on the day you launch, which networks your people actually use and what the current rules of each say.

From this follows the rule the lesson exists for: a channel is rented land, while the site and the email list are yours. A social network is good for attracting people and talking to them, but not as the only place you can be found. The rules, the reach and the availability there aren’t yours to decide. So every post leads to the site, and the site gathers those who want to stay (the subscription and the flows from the earlier lessons).

Choosing channels

For a small project two channels are enough. Three or more you won’t keep up, and one is risky. Choose by three questions:

1. Where are the people from the “for whom” field today? Not where it’s convenient for you, but where they already read. Ask a few clients.
2. Which format can you keep up for a year? Video takes a lot of time. Short posts are easier. Articles that rank in search work slowly but for a long time.
3. What does the channel give your main action? For booking a consultation, the best is the chance of a quick conversation; for a shop, a shop window and photographs.

Open the diagram and choose a type of project. The scores are for teaching and show the line of reasoning: what matters more for different projects and how much work a channel asks.

An expert with servicesA small shopA café, a salon, a venueA community, a nonprofitAn eventA service, an app

1. LinkedInstart here reach ■■■■■, effort ■■□□□ short professional posts, direct messages to clients and colleagues
2. Emailstart here reach ■■■■□, effort ■■□□□ your own list: it does not depend on a platform
3. Articles and search reach ■■■■□, effort ■■■■□ long texts that search finds, working for months
4. Facebook and Instagram reach ■■■□□, effort ■■■□□ a page with a shop window, events, local audiences, ads built in
5. Video (YouTube, TikTok, Reels) reach ■■□□□, effort ■■■■■ show the process and the face; expensive in time

For “an expert with services” it makes sense to start with two channels: LinkedIn and Email. The site and the email list stay yours whatever the platforms’ rules do.

The scores are for teaching: a way to practice the reasoning, not market statistics. Audiences and platform rules keep changing, so on the day you launch check where your people really are.

Briefly about each.

• LinkedIn. Short professional posts and direct messages. A good fit for an expert or a service for businesses. Slow, but the people are often decision-makers.
• Facebook and Instagram (both run by Meta). A page with a shop window, events, groups and built-in advertising. Strong where the audience is local or broad (a shop, a café, a community, an event).
• X, Reddit and other communities. Quick conversation and, on Reddit, communities by topic. Powerful but hard to control: use them to listen and help before you promote.
• Articles and search. Long texts that search engines find. Good for an expert with something to explain, and they work for months (the next lessons are about this).
• Video (YouTube, TikTok, Instagram Reels). Showing the process and the face is very strong, but expensive in time.
• Email. Not a social network, but the most stable channel: the list is yours. You built it in the earlier lessons.
• Messengers (WhatsApp, Messenger, Telegram). Good for quick conversation with people who already know you. A business must not message first without opt-in: WhatsApp, for example, requires it.

The Russian market. In Russia the picture is different. VKontakte (launched in 2006) and Telegram (founded by the brothers Durov in 2013) became the main places where people read and talk, and since 2022 Instagram and Facebook have been blocked there, their owner Meta has been designated an extremist organization, and the law restricts advertising on such resources. Russian platforms (VK, Dzen, RuTube, the state messenger MAX) grew, while YouTube, WhatsApp and Telegram were at times slowed or restricted. Yandex has its own advertising and metrics tools beside Google’s. If your audience is in Russia, check on the day you launch what opens for your people. This is the clearest example of why a channel is rented land.

Where it comes from. The phrase “social networks” became mass-market in the late 2000s, when Facebook (founded in 2004, open to everyone from 2006), YouTube (2005) and Twitter (2006) grew. For marketing this meant that instead of searching for sites, people began to find projects through a feed. And every platform named here has changed its rules more than once since.

A content plan: three lines and one link

A content plan isn’t a schedule for a year but an agreement with yourself: about what, how often and why. For a small project three lines are enough:

• Useful. What a person can apply on their own: a checklist, an answer to a frequent question, a walk through a mistake.
• Proof. Case studies without bragging (the lesson on the case: what there was, what was done, what came of it; for regulated professions, remember the ethics).
• Alive. People, the process, a look behind the scenes.

For each line you already know the forms from the part on storytelling: a case study (STAR and “before and after”), an ABT (And, But, Therefore) and plain usefulness. Choose a rhythm you can keep: one or two posts a week are better than daily ones in the first month and silence afterwards.

Every post has one job and one link: to a specific section of the site that continues the post’s thought. A post about a property boundary leads not to the home page but to the page about the service or to an article. How many posts to publish a month, decide by how many you can make well.

Take the tone from the brief and from your style guide (the lesson on tone): a channel that speaks differently from the site breaks trust.

UTM tags: where a person came from

When a person follows a link from a post, the counter on the site sees only “came from LinkedIn or somewhere else”. To know which post exactly brought them, you add UTM tags to the address (Urchin Tracking Module: the name stayed from the company Urchin, which Google bought in 2005 and whose software became Google Analytics).

https://riverbend.example/services/?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=case_boundary

Five tags, three of them main:

• utm_source: where from (linkedin, facebook, newsletter);
• utm_medium: the type of channel (social, email, cpc);
• utm_campaign: the campaign or post (case_boundary);
• utm_content and utm_term: tell ads and keywords apart, optional.

Google Analytics 4 and Yandex Metrica read them without any setup. Rules, so you don’t suffer over the reports later:

1. Lowercase Latin letters, digits, underscores. “LinkedIn” and “linkedin” count as different sources.
2. A table of tags in one file: what each value means. In a month you won’t remember what “camp2” is.
3. Only on external links. A tag on a site’s internal link starts a new visit and erases the real source.
4. No personal data. Tags are visible in the address, in other people’s logs and in other people’s counters. No names and no emails.
5. Not on every link. The link in the channel description and each post is enough.

Check yourself: why must UTM tags not go on links inside the site?

A tag on an internal link gives a new source for the visit and erases the real one: the report will say “came from the services page”, and where they really came from will be unknown.

A chatbot: do you need one

A chatbot is useful where one and the same conversation repeats: “I’d like to book”, “how much is it”, “which documents are needed”. A simple bot takes a request, asks two questions and passes it to a person. It removes routine and speeds up the first answer. The details of how bots work are in the platforms’ documentation (see the sources), and you can build one without programming in a bot builder.

But a bot has a price.

• It is personal data. A name, an account, a phone number, the text of messages. You need consent and a policy, as for a form on the site.
• A bot is not a specialist. It collects a request, and a person gives the assessment. Especially if you’re an expert.
• It has to be kept up. A bot that doesn’t answer is worse than none.

If you aren’t sure, begin without a bot: a link to a form on the site gives the same with less upkeep.

Is it an ad?

It’s easy to go wrong here, so carefully. A paid placement by an influencer or in someone else’s channel is advertising, and the connection has to be disclosed clearly. In the US the FTC’s Endorsement Guides (16 CFR Part 255) require a clear and conspicuous disclosure of a “material connection”, such as payment or a free product, in the post itself; a vague tag or a link buried in a bio isn’t enough. In the UK the CAP Code says marketing communications must be obviously identifiable as such (rule 2.1), and the ASA applies the Code to brands’ own social media too. The EU’s rules on unfair practices ban hidden advertising, and the Digital Services Act (Article 26) requires online platforms to show clearly that something is an ad and who paid for it.

As for your own posts on your own channel, the answer depends on the text and on the country, and it changes over time. A post that promotes a particular product or service is marketing, and the rules on truthful claims apply to it even if no label is needed. So remember two things: a paid or gifted endorsement must be clearly disclosed, and where the line runs between ordinary talk about yourself and advertising, ask a lawyer or the regulator. This is general information, not legal advice. Email is regulated separately: it needs the consent you met in the email lesson. Russia has its own labeling regime, with a mark and a token for every ad placement, which we leave to the Russian edition.

Practice

Build a plan for two channels.

1. Channels and reasons. Two channels and a reason for each: your audience from the brief, and why it’s there.
2. A channel description of 12 to 120 characters and a link to the site with tags.
3. Three posts: a case study, an ABT and a useful tip, each leading to its own section of the site from the brief with the tags utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign.
4. A note on advertising and a decision on the chatbot.

The check looks at form: two channels, reasons with “for whom”, the length of the description, the form and the links of the posts, the tags. Whether the posts are good is for you to decide: read them aloud in the project’s name and ask yourself who will read this, and why.