Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms to connect with your audience to build your brand, increase sales, and drive website traffic.
This involves different types of social networks such as Facebook marketing , Instagram marketing, etc.
publishing great content on your social media profiles, listening to and engaging your followers, analyzing your results, and running social media advertisements.
What is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing (SMM) is the use of social media websites and social networks to market a company’s products and services.
Social media marketing provides companies with a way to reach new customers, engage with existing customers, and promote their desired culture, mission, or tone.
Also known as "digital marketing" and "e-marketing," social media marketing has purpose-built data analytics tools that allow marketers to track how successful their efforts are.
The Benefits of Social Media Marketing for your business
For businesses, social media presents vast opportunities to promote their product or service. Just as popular social media sites allow users to connect with friends and family in faraway places, they also are powerful ways for marketers to create two-way conversations with potential customers.
Users now expect to interact with brands, which means that marketers have incredible opportunities to create ways to drive demand and expand the reach of what they are selling.
Through social media, marketers can:
- Engage their audience. Engagement is a great way to establish trust with customers and build a relationship that can develop over time.
- Foster brand loyalty. Engagement leads to loyalty with the brand. Users can get to know the brand more intimately through news updates, informational and entertaining videos.
- Integrate with other channels. Social media integrates so well with other channels. So, it gives marketers the ability to boost campaigns in ways that were not possible before.
- Control the message. When crisis strikes, marketers can serve as their own newsroom by publishing releases that control their side of any story.
- Create new leads. Marketers can raise awareness and generate traffic among general users, and some of that buzz can develop into tangible leads.
- Improve Link Building. Social media can have an indirect impact on SEO. Search engines will then pick up on the fact that your content has linked back to a good amount and (hopefully) rank your post higher than your competition.
- Go Viral. Social media can have a huge impact on making ads viral. In fact, that’s where most of those ads are shared.
How to Choose the Best Social Media Platforms for Marketing
Here's a brief overview about how to use social media for marketing according to each platform’s unique user base and environment. Different social media marketing sites require different approaches, so develop a unique strategy tailored for each platform.
- Using Facebook for Social Media Marketing
Facebook’s casual, friendly environment requires an active social media marketing strategy. Start by creating a Facebook Business Fan Page. You will want to pay careful attention to layout, as the visual component is a key aspect of the Facebook experience.
Facebook is a place people go to relax and chat with friends, so keep your tone light and friendly. And remember, organic reach on Facebook can be extremely limited, so consider a cost-effective Facebook ad strategy, which can have a big impact on your organic Facebook presence as well!
- How to get started with TikTok for Social Media Marketing
The golden rule of TikTok Marketing : relevance is more important than reach in TikTok Influencer marketing.
Don’t simply approach the people behind accounts with the largest following. Not only will they be incredibly expensive to work with, but many references to your brand could fall on deaf ears.
Find out who is posting popular videos in your niche by navigating to the Discover tab, and searching a handful of keywords that relate to your industry, products, or services.
Document the users with the most followers or most popular videos within this topic, watch their posts to determine a fit for your brand, and think about reaching out.
While this is great encouragement when producing your own original content, this also gives us clues about when to nab an influencer as they’re on the cusp of becoming popular.
Marketing on different platforms
- Using YouTube for Social Media Marketing
YouTube is the number one place for creating and sharing video content. Moreover, it can be an incredibly powerful social media marketing tool. Many businesses try to create video content with the aim of having their video “go viral,” but in reality those chances are pretty slim.
Instead, focus on creating useful, instructive “how-to” videos. These how-to videos also have the added benefit of ranking on the video search results of Google, so don't under-estimate the power of video content!
- Using Pinterest for Social Media Marketing
Pinterest is one of the fastest growing social media marketing trends. Pinterest’s image-centered platform is ideal for retail, but anyone can benefit from using Pinterest for social media purposes or sales-driving ads.
Pinterest allows businesses to showcase their product offerings while also developing brand personality with eye-catching, unique pinboards. When developing your Pinterest strategy, remember that the social network's primary audience is female. If that's your demographic, you need a presence on Pinterest!
- Using Instagram for Social Media Marketing
Adding Instagram influencer marketing into your overall strategy for Instagram can help to increase your brand awareness, grow your follower base, and drive major sales!
When it comes to influencer marketing, Instagram is by far the best performing platform for brands to reach new audiences quickly.
So what makes influencer marketing so effective? Well, part of it has to do with trust.
Instagram influencer marketing removes the barriers of traditional advertising because customers are introduced to your brand from a trusted source (the influencer) on an authentic, casual platform (Instagram).
The Five Pillars of SMM
What are your goals? Which social media platforms do you want to focus on? What type of content do you want to share?
You will want to plan your content ahead of time instead of creating and publishing content spontaneously. Also, to ensure that you are maximizing your reach on social media, you need to publish great content. The content that your audience likes. You should publish it at the right timing and frequency.
You can manually check all your notifications across all the social media platforms but this isn’t efficient and you won’t see posts that didn’t tag your business’s social media profile. You can instead use a social media listening and engagement tool that aggregates all your social media mentions and messages, including posts that didn’t tag your business’s social media profile.
The social media platforms themselves provide a basic level of such information. To get more in-depth analytics information, you can use the wide range of social media analytics tools.
Social media advertising platforms are so powerful nowadays that you can specify exactly who to display your ads to. You can create target audiences based on their demographics, interests, behaviors, and more.
Summary of Marketing on Social media
In short, Social media marketing requires both strategy and creativity.
While it may seem overwhelming, its importance cannot be overstated. It’s so important that 97% of marketers are using social media. Also, 78% of salespeople outsell their peers by using social media for their business.
Plus, its benefits extend far beyond increasing sales.
However, not all businesses are aware of the benefits of this type of marketing. You can use the tips and information mentioned in this article to use for marketing on different social media networks.
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