Social media marketing is a marketing strategy that incorporates various social media platforms to increase sales, build and rebuild brands, connect with the audience and increase the traffic to your website. One can make use of great infographics, written content, engaging videos, social media advertising campaigns to boost your business and ideas.
Direct chatting with the audience and analysis of the responses are possible with the majority of social media platforms. Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Linkedin, Youtube, and Snapchat are some examples of social media where you can publish your content.
In the initial stage, social media was a platform where individuals and businesses/ entrepreneurs could publish their content. But nowadays, social media serves as a great marketing platform with myriad opportunities. Businesses and organizations can run advertisement campaigns to boost targeting a specific audience.
Analytic tools can be used to analyze the reach of the brand or product, user engagement, or sales. This would help the businesses to get an idea about their performance on social media. Social media engagement and listening tools can be used by businesses and organizations to get a grasp of what people are saying about them. Social media management involves all these activities.
Pillars of social media marketing
Like any marketing method, social media marketing also has its specific and essential elements. They are strategy, planning, and publishing, social media listening and engagements, analytic tools and reporting, advertising.
Strategy: Social media is so vast and it is quite natural to lose direction. Therefore it is essential to set clear goals before taking a plunge into social media marketing. You must be clear about what you want to achieve through your engagements on social media platforms. It can be anything like reaching out to more audiences, improving traffic to your websites, and increasing brand awareness.
There are plenty of social media platforms nowadays so you should choose the ones that match your requirement. Larger platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, and Pinterest are always reliable and easy to reach out to the audience. One can also rely on several apps like Whatsapp, messenger, TikTok, Telegram, etc to build a community of target audience.
Understanding your audience, knowing their responses to different types of content you create and post, and being adaptive to the changing interests and trends is crucial in social media marketing.
Publishing: Planning and publishing social media content is the backbone of social media marketing. You can post anything like a blog post, an image, or a video to engage your audience. And if you are running a start-up, the regular social media posts help you greatly to reach out to your future customers. One can rely on scheduling tools that help your post appear at the right time on various social media.
Listening and engagement: On social media, people comment on every single thing they notice. So when you regularly update your social profiles, it is quite natural for people to comment on them, mention, or direct message you. Sometimes, these comments may happen without your knowledge.
So analyzing these public comments is the best way for you to either delight your customers with newer offers, benefits, and improvements or correct your negatives as soon as you notice people are concerned about them. There are social media engagement and listening tools available that help you aggregate all the social media engagements of your brand or business.
Analytics: Many social media analytic tools are available nowadays to help you analyze the performance of your social media marketing. With the help of analytics, You get to know how many people used your brand’s hashtag, how many mentions you got, whether the number of followers increased, your engagements compared to the previous months, etc.
Creating social media strategy
A well-crafted social media strategy archives you everything you have planned to attain. It is basically the plan of everything you want to do and achieve on your social media platforms. In order to make it workable, the strategy should be specific, concise, and attainable.
Setting S.M.A.R.T goals helps when it comes to building a winning strategy. S.M.A.R. T can be expanded as specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timebound.
Track metrics like conversion rate, click-through rates, and engagements instead of those metrics with less value and reliability such as likes, comments, shares, etc.
Attempt to know everything about your target audience. The ‘everything’ includes age, gender, interests, job titles, and industry, location, etc., This will help you publish more winning content.
Do not jump into assumptions instead make use of analytic tools to find your target audience. This helps you create a refined strategy and thereby reach out directly to your target audience.
You should also practice competitive analysis to assess the performance of your competitors on social media platforms. Find out on which platforms your audience is underserved and try dominating that platform instead of attempting to attract an audience on the platforms where your competitor has the dominance.
Listen to what the people are saying about your competitors on various social media platforms. You can make use of engagement and listening tools for this.
Always ask questions regarding your strategy and performance on social media. Ask questions like what works, what not? Which networks are more used? Who is more engaging and why?
Get inspired by other businesses and brands and constantly watch what they are doing on social media
Make a social media calendar and schedule your posts. It is always important to have great content being posted at the right time.
Make sure you post content in alliance with and satisfy your business goals such as making the people aware of your brand, increasing traffic, lead generation, etc.
Always ready to be changed according to the changing social media trends and patterns. Social media is an ever-live platform where changes, trend shifts, booms, and falls happen quite frequently and all of a sudden. Being stubborn when it comes to your social media strategy never helps.
Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is an increasingly popular social media marketing technique and has proven to be producing instant results. An influencer is someone who has already built a huge number of followers on their various social media hands. Influencers can be popular celebrities like film stars, sports personalities or bloggers, etc. You make use of their popularity to reach out to more audiences through their platforms. This is how influencer marketing works.
We tend to notice and follow a popular personality. This is the logic behind influencer marketing. Businesses, brands, and campaigns make use of influencer marketing
- To reach out to more people
- For lead generation
- To build trust for your brand or cause
- To increase traffic to your website or pages
- Boost sales and brand awareness
Influencer marketing begins with a formal conversation between the enterprise and the influencer. If the influencer gets interested in your product, business, campaigns, or cause, he/she posts them on their social media platforms.
Over 3 billion people use the social media world. This huge number gives social media marketing great prominence in today’s world. Companies have started investing huge amounts in social media marketing in recent times just because it produces more ROI. So if you are running a start-up, an NGO, or standing up for any cause, never hesitate to build a social media strategy that is well-planned but flexible and accordingly.
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