Social media marketing – You may have heard about this many times, especially in the area of online businesses. It isn’t a different concept from search engine optimization. In fact, effectual social media marketing efforts on the part of businesses will result in better SEO of the company and, in turn, will reflect in the success of the business.
What have you heard about social media marketing?
Using the potent power of social media for the purpose of Internet marketing is just another step in the overall concept of SEO. Every business owner must possess the knowledge of smartly implementing the tactics of social media marketing to stay ahead in the race of getting at the top ranking in different search engine.
In simple terms, social media marketing is the usage of all the different types of social media platforms to connect with the correct audience. Effectively, it is used to build sales, brands and also to drive website traffic. The process involves publishing great content on your social media profiles, engaging and listening to your followers, running social media advertisements, and analyzing your results.
Major social media platforms are:
At the moment, the major social media platforms are Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, and Snapchat. Indeed, there is an extensive range of social media platforms that is available for different purposes. There exist hundreds of tools in this form that help businesses to get the most out of social media platforms. It effectively helps achieve success with the way you do social media marketing.
Whether you are looking forward to building your brand or grow your businesses, social media platforms are perfect for you!
How did social media marketing start?
Interestingly, social media marketing started with publishing. Initially, all the major businesses were sharing their content on social media majorly to generate traffic for their site. Yes, you can guess that to be primarily for sales!
But, in the current context, social media has exclusively matured far beyond just sales or engagement. Now, it is not just meant for broadcasting your content! You will see the businesses use social media in a myriad of different ways. Let us make it simple for you to understand with an example.
For instance, a business that focuses on what people are saying about its brand would be effectively monitoring social media conversations and also the different responses to relevant mentions. The mentions may be in the form of social media engagement and listening. A business that actually wants to understands how its brand is performing on social media would be interested in analyzing its reach, sales, and engagement on social media with an analytics tool. Indeed, a business that aims to reach a specific set of audience
at scale would be interested in running a highly targeted social media tool, generally referred to as social media marketing!
On the whole, all these concepts are also known as social media management.
Now first, let’s discuss what social media marketing is?
Social media marketing is a process of driving traffic, getting better conversion through the use of top social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, YouTube, Instagram, etc. If you notice, then social media and search engine optimization are both closely related.
Social media sites are the type of online platform that people use to connect with each other, share their updates with the world. This has also proved to be an ideal platform to connect and directly interact with customers for businesses. This has undeniably become one of the most effective ways to establish a relationship with your customers.
You cannot deny the fact that various social media sites have become an integral part of today’s modern lives. Whatever we do, no matter how busy we are in our hectic schedules, we don’t forget to check our social media accounts to stay updated and connected with the world. It has become a routine in our lives.
Busy people may not sit and search online or may not have time to look around, but they always check out social media sites. This way, businesses can reach out to their customers more effectively than they could have possibly achieved otherwise through any other way. Managing your brand and improving its effect becomes easier through the use of social media.
Creating brand awareness and maintaining a consistent brand image can be quickly done through various social sites. You just need an active social media marketing strategy to come out with flying colors in making your business successful.
These social networking sites also help businesses to identify and understand their target audience. Each platform has a unique setup, a unique method to reach out to your customers. Make sure to use the power of each of these platforms to garner more success for your business.
The five core pillars of social media marketing
- Strategy
- Planning and publishing
- Listening and engagement
- Analytics and reporting
- Advertising
Strategy
Hey, are you going to publish something on social media platform? Wait, before you dive right into the publishing aspect, here is what you should know about the strategy! Indeed, it would help if you took a step back and focus on the bigger picture. The first step for this is to think about the social media strategy!
The first question here is: What are your goals? How can social media help your business to achieve its desired goals? Interestingly, some of the large-scale businesses use social media marketing majorly to increase their brand awareness. Some of the others exclusively use them for driving traffic to their site. While this is true, you will also find start-ups to use it as a method to generate engagement around their brand.
It helps businesses to serve as a customer support channel for most people.
The next question is: Which social media platform do you want to focus on? You know the major social media platforms. As mentioned above, they are LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and many more!
Apart from these, there also exist smaller and all-new platforms for social media marketing! It can be Tumblr, Anchor, and different social messaging platforms, including messenger, WeChat, and WhatsApp. When you are starting out, it is always better to be selective for social media platforms.
What type of content do you want to share? This is a major question for your business to answer. The type of content will attract the correct set of audiences for your product. The type of content means you have to be clear whether the content is in the form of links, images, or videos. The best place to start with will be to create a marketing persona to help you answer all these questions.
The best part is you can always change your strategy for using social media platforms as and when you like it! It will decide how your social media will perform. Indeed, to help you create the best social media strategy, you can opt to have the best guides on making social media strategy.
Planning and publishing
If you own a small business, it usually starts with having a consistent presence on social media. Interestingly, close to three billion people are currently using social media. Just imagine the power of social media platforms for your business!
Just by being present on social media, you can give your brand an exclusive opportunity to be discovered by our future customers. Indeed, publishing to any social media is extremely simple. Yes, as simple as sharing a good blog post, a video, or an image! But, at the same time, you have to make sure that you are maximizing on social media. It is required that you publish great content that is relevant to your audience.
Maintain the frequency and timing for publishing in social media so that you engage the correct set of audiences at the right time!
Contextually, to make it simpler, there are a variety of social media tools, such as Buffer Publish. It is one such tool that helps you publish your content automatically at the desired preferred time. This not only saves your time but also allows your audience to engage with your content effectively.
Listening and engagement
As your business grows, so does your social media following grows, right? This, in turn, will be responsible for increased conversations about your business and brand. People would be interested in commenting on your posts and also would be tagging your business in different blog posts. So, you will be monitoring social media conversations about your business and brand, right!
Indeed, now you can also opt to manually check all the notifications across all the social media platforms. But remember, this way it won’t be efficient for your business to consider all the necessary points. Why?
It is because you will not be able to see the posts that did not tag your business’s social media profile to their post! Instead of that, it would be best to use social media listening and engagement tool that effectively aggregates all your social media mentions and messages. This will also include the post that did not tag your business’s social media profile.
Analytics
Whether you are negating audience or publishing relevant content, you have to know how your social media marketing is performing in the market, right? If you are reaching more people on social media, it would be an excellent way to get started with one of the most successful aspects of learning social media marketing.
For instance, you can check on how many mentions your business gets in a week or a month. How many people are using your business brand name for hashtags in their posts! Interestingly, the social media platforms themselves provide a basic level of such information to you.
If you are interested in getting more information for the analytics, you can easily compare them over different social media platforms. There is a wide range of social media analytics tools that are available, such as Buffer Analyse.
Advertising
When you are capable of spending more funds to grow your social media marketing, an important area that you can consider is social media advertising. Social media ads allow you to reach a wider audience who are following you effectively.
Indeed, nowadays, social media marketing is so popular that you can consider using a social media platform to display the perfect ads for your business.
The bottom line
Social media platforms are continuously evolving, and there is no end. When first time Facebook got into the screens of billions of people, we could only share text updates. But now, the scenario has changed drastically, right! There are different content formats such as videos, images, live videos, and also different stories.
Hence, if you want to be updated according to the current era’s needs, choose the social media platform that suits your business. Stay up-to-date with us on social media marketing with the above-said information to step up the ladder of success for your business.
