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Getting started with Social Marketing

Course overview
Lesson
3 min read

Understand Klaviyo Social Marketing

What is Social Marketing?

Here’s a question for you, as a consumer: How many brands do you follow on social media? Keep that number in mind. Now, consider: How many of those brands do you opt to receive emails and texts from? Chances are, that number is much lower.

A follower is fleeting, but a subscriber is dedicated. They have genuine purchase intent and want to hear from your brand, without missing a message.

Klaviyo Social Marketing ties your social content, followers, and engagement with your wider marketing strategy, casting a wider net online and building a strong subscriber base. Learn more in the video below.

Identify each core social feature

Now that you understand an overview of this tooling, let’s walk through each core feature one-by-one.

Social Auto-replies

Engage followers through comments or direct messages, prompting them to subscribe to your email, text, or WhatsApp lists. Popular strategies include giveaways and early access offers.

For example, in your brand profile, state “DM us [branded term] for more information", or in a post, add “Comment [branded term] to enter the giveaway!” Either will launch a direct conversation within Instagram DMs, encouraging them to sign up for further marketing.

Note: This feature is free to all Klaviyo accounts.

Use Social Auto-replies to:

  • Collect subscriber information and marketing consent.
  • Offer exclusive content specific to social (e.g., early access to a sale).
  • Collect custom questions via automated DMs (e.g., What collection are you most interested in?)
A phone screen displays a text message from "Eastie" promoting 15% off for text updates, and a user response "aaron.watts@gmail.com".

Social events

Every DM, comment, and tag will sync into Klaviyo as an event, tracked to the customer’s profile.

Use social events to:

  • Trigger your flows to create unique journeys based on engagement.
  • Filter flows to create distinct paths across flows based on engagement.
  • Build segments to better target and personalize content across channels.
  • Build reports using this data to refine your marketing analysis.
A customer profile card for Aaron Watts (@SeeAaronRun) listing recent activities like social DMs, tags, comments, an email, and site activity.

Custom questions

Capture the customer data that matters most to your brand. More specifically, add lightweight follow-up questions to your auto-reply to learn more about the customer.

Answers to custom questions are automatically logged to their Klaviyo profile as new profile properties.

Use custom questions to:

  • Segment your customers for targeted messaging.
  • Enrich Klaviyo profiles with deeper insights.
  • Trigger and filter flows.

Note: While you can ask custom questions before someone submits their email or phone number, Klaviyo cannot create a profile for them in your account or store their response until they submit that contact information.

A mobile phone screen displays a chat interface with a brand named "Eastie," showing a promotional message to "Join the team" with a "Sign up" button, a user's email address as a reply, and interactive buttons offering choices like "New arrivals" and "Best sellers," with "Best sellers" highlighted as chosen.

Social Content

View every Instagram post, story, and reel that tags your brand, all in one place.

Use Social Content to:

  • Track customer sentiment and engagement.
  • Review trending topics among your active followers.
  • Respond to comments and tags as part of your brand strategy.
  • Identify top creators who reference your brand in social posts.
A digital platform displaying a grid of social media posts and analytics for @Eastie, alongside a pop-up showing a running video and engagement data from Aaron Watts.

1:Many account support

Connect one Instagram business account to multiple Klaviyo accounts for more robust account support.

Use 1:Many account support to:

  • Build a cohesive social presence for different regional accounts.
  • Share a social strategy among child brands of one larger business.
Social accounts settings page showing Instagram account @Eastie connected to 3 Klaviyo accounts.

What’s next?

Now that we’ve gone through what Social Marketing is, where and how to get started, and what you can do within the toolset, let’s talk next steps. In the next few lessons, we’ll dive even deeper with:

  • Video demonstrations to set up core features.
  • Use case examples to provide inspiration as you ramp up.
  • Real best practices so you hit the ground running.

Continue to learn more in the next lesson!

Understand Klaviyo Social Marketing