SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

What is Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is using social media platforms to connect with your audience to build your brand, increase sales, and increase website traffic. This includes publishing great content on your social media profiles, listening to and engaging with your followers, analyzing your results, and running social media ads.

The major social media platforms (at the moment) are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest,Tumbir,Reddit, Quora, YouTube, Threads,Whatsapp and Snapchat

There are also a range of social media management tools that help businesses to get the most out of the social media platforms listed above. For example, Buffer is a platform of social media management tools, which can help you achieve success with your social media marketing. Whether you want to build a brand or grow your business, we want to help you succeed.

A Quick Review Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing first started with publishing. Businesses were sharing their content on social media to generate traffic to their websites and, hopefully, sales. But social media has matured far beyond being just a place to broadcast content.

Nowadays, businesses use social media in a myriad of different ways. For example, a business that is concerned about what people are saying about its brand would monitor social media conversations and response to relevant. A business that wants to understand how it’s performing on social media would analyze its reach, engagement, and sales on social media with an analytics tool. A business that wants to reach a specific set of audience at scale would run highly-targeted social media ads.

The Five Pillar of Social Media Marketing

Strategy.

Think about what you want to post before rushing into publishing. Making content haphazardly and posting without a strategy will keep adding image and content on you page but not generate any traffic. Take a step back and imagine the big picture when you device a social media strategy. Map a mental picture of your goals. What are the main business objectives to achieve?

Business usually have I dedicated goal. For example, some want to increase brand awareness, while some want to make sales. Social media helps you to build communities with loyal customers who trust your brand.

Other platforms serve the same purpose differently than the most well-known social media platforms. Some other attractive channels for ads are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, Reddit, Quora, YouTube, Threads, WhatsApp, Snapchat and messaging are becoming increasingly advertisement-oriented.

In the beginning, analyze the most visited platform for your target audience. For example, Pinterest, Tumbir has a wide audience base of women. Therefore, if your business caters to women, it’s best to target Pinterest or tumbir.

In the next step, determine the content type you want to share. Here, you may get help from some best content writing companies for content ideas. Design the social media posts depending on audience preferences. Put your thinking hat on and articulate what your audience wants. Think whether your campaign will include images, videos, or any links. Would you like to educate your audience or entertain them? Find out techniques to create more influential posts for your audience. You can build an influencer marketing persona which will make things easier for you. Design dynamic and scalable marketing campaigns for the everchanging digital landscape.

Planning and Publishing..

Small businesses thrive by merely being present on social media platforms for a longer duration of time. As per statistics, nearly 4 billion people are on social media platforms every day. Just by showing up on social media platforms, you get a high chance of being discovered by your customers.

Publishing a post on social media is no rocket science. Add a text description, image,template or video to get started. The posting is the least of your hassles. The major area where you should focus your attention is at creating wonderful posts that perfectly represent your brand. You must dedicate your time and energy to publishing content timely and spontaneously. Maintaining good timing and frequency is the key to generating a successful campaign.

You do not have to worry incessantly about posting every day. There are ample social media scheduling tools to publish your posts automatically. You can schedule your posts weeks in advance. You can keep a record of the published content too.

Create a social media calendar to ensure a more organized process. Provide all team members with access to the calendar for transparency.

Listening and Engagement..

People talk about brands in open forums. They discuss, comment, praise, express grievances, and even mock openly on social media platforms. Sometimes, they find the logo offensive or the service, dissatisfactory. People share experiences on social media for all events. It is your responsibility as a brand to address such comments in public. This way you will be able to preserve your image and improve customer satisfaction. Let them know you will solve their problems and listen to them. This step will enhance your customer relationship management.

You can keep a check on direct messages, tags and mentions to read what people are talking about your brand. You can manually check your notifications to know if there is a tag or mention, however, it is easy to miss out on these mentions. Using a listening and engagement tool will gather information on all social media mentions and messages. It will effectively monitor the posts that do not have a tag at all.

Analytics and Measurement..

Analyze social media campaign performance to determine if you’re on the right track. Our goal is to continuously increase traffic, sales or engagement – whatever your goal is.

As you move towards publishing or social media engagement, you should keep track of the performance of your marketing campaigns. Is your growth progressive or regressive compared to previous quarterly data? If you’re an e-commerce brand, are you being tagged or mentioned in positive or negative comments? This is the ratio of your brand’s hashtags to current hashtags from the previous month.

The social media analytics and tools record all the basic information regarding this which you can easily access on the applications. However, check social media analytics tools for a better understanding of inclusive data. A wide range of such analytics tools are available today such as Sprout Social, HubSpot, IZEA, BuzzSumo, Google Analytics, and Followerwonk, etc. these tools also enable users to compare their performances across several social media platforms.

Online Advertising..

Social media advertising is a lucrative field once your money grows. Presenting your ads to a broader target audience increases your chances of reaching a wider audience. Social media ads grow your followers very quickly. Social media algorithms are so specific that they can limit the appropriate audience for your brand. You segment audiences based on interests, behaviors, demographics, age, gender, and many other parameters.

There are 4 major types of social media advertising that you can incorporate into your marketing strategy:

Static image Ads..

You can add your product images or make a carousel ad of your services and post it on your social media accounts as ads. The main reason behind using images in advertisements is that people are usually more drawn towards visuals. Adding buttons such as “Shop Now” “Download Now” and “Install” prompts the viewer to take an action. To succeed with a static image ad, you must follow two tricks-

1. Make sure your images are of high quality.
2. Your ads follow suit with the rest of your content.

Video Ads..

Moving objects attract the human eye compared to static ones. Be it an aeroplane, a flying bird, or motion pictures. Videos are by far the best way to advertise your brand. Mostly video ads are small so the users are interested in the length of the video. Apps like Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube give this unique opportunity to create short-form videos so that people can look at and interact spending only a few minutes.

Stories Ads..

Users can add both images and videos to create unique story ads. Several social media platforms allow this feat. These are full-screen ads that run for a different time duration based on the platform. On Facebook, you can run a picture ad for 6 seconds while for a video you can take up to 15 seconds. On Instagram, the advertisements can be as long as 120 seconds for both images and videos. A viewer can swipe up the ad to visit the brand’s website. These ads are available only for 24 hours. This is an excellent way to promote short-term deals and discounts on product lines or services.

Massenger Ads..

Messenger ads are the Facebook ads that are displayed in the Messenger tab of Facebook platforms. This enables a one-on-one conversation with the customers through messages. Customers can ask questions and directly visit websites through these automated messages.

Social media marketing is a smart, pocket-friendly, and sustainable service promotion practice. Devise your strategy based on the strong foundation of the five pillars – Good Strategy, Planning and thoughtful publishing, audience engagement, social media ads, and analyzing the performance of campaigns. Excel in business endeavors and achieve your marketing goals.