Social Media Marketing is the process of creating and sharing our content on social media platforms to promote our brand/website. It is a social platform where the business and customers socially interact with each other. Customers get to know more about the website or brand and businesses get direct feedback about their product or services that they provide.
Advantages of Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing helps businesses to reach their marketing goals. As it increases website traffic, boosts conversions create more awareness about the brand or website. And improves the interaction with the target audience. Therefore, It is considered as a powerful tool for the business for all the sizes to reach the customers and interact with them as much as possible. Businesses can interact with target customers through different social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.
Thereafter, Social media marketing includes activities like sharing the image, poster, videos, and other content that attracts the audience towards them. It can be said that it is an organic process of increasing the audience or customers for your brand or website, respectively.
Social media Marketing (SMM) is all about creating, building, and maximizing your social media plan in a most strategical way. It helps businesses in strengthening their brand, creating leads. While, getting more visibility online, and most importantly in connecting to the audience.
Businesses don’t just use one social media site for their promotion rather they use multiple social media platforms to reach more audiences. So, these businesses use internet-based tools that help them to schedule content across multiple platforms. At the same time and it also helps them to respond to the customer’s comments or any engagement of their post.
It is a paid process that means that we have to pay to boost our social media. For an E-commerce site, it is extremely important for them to opt for social media marketing. As now people use social media recommendations for getting products online. Moreover, being on social media will facilitate us to form a band of our own.
Difference Between Social Media Marketing And Digital Marketing
- Social Media Marketing is a part of Digital marketing but they are not identical.
- It uses the media, blogs to promote the brand which creates more awareness. Whereas, Digital Marketing uses digital platforms to promote the product to targeted audiences like online marketing, etc.
- In Social Media Marketing the reach is limited to social media sites. Whereas, Digital marketing does not have any limitations and the reach is relatively wider.
- Social Media Marketing mainly focuses on content. Whereas, Digital Marketing focuses on the banners to create the impression in the minds of the customers.
- In the speed, Social Media Marketing will be the first due to the active responses of the user. On the other hand, Digital Marketing is very slower.
Some Social Media Marketing Sites
Facebook Marketing
Facebook was founded in 2004 and since then it is expanding day by day, and now it is the largest social network in the world. It has become the largest social media network as it has a global reach, it offers highly targeted paid advertisements, and it also allows integration with different marketing channels.
Facebook Marketing is about creating your own page and actively using it to communicate and create contacts to your potential customers, attracting your customers using different strategies, and most importantly promoting your products and services to attract more customers. It is mostly used by different brands(food, clothing, travel, hotels, etc), small businesses or startups, celebrities, and non-profit organizations. Facebook marketing includes organic posts as well as paid advertisements for targeting mass audiences by different organizations.
LinkedIn Marketing
Linkedin was launched back in 2003. It was mainly created for career networking, building, and sharing with different professionals including your colleague, potential employers, business partners, competitors, and competitors.
Linkedin marketing is referred to as the processes of making connections, generating leads, improving brand awareness in the audience, encouraging business relationships and partnerships, sharing content, and mainly driving traffic to your websites. It is also that you join or create different LinkedIn groups and regularly communicate in them.
Twitter Marketing
In the beginning, Twitter was just a place where people use to share their thoughts but now it has become one of the most powerful marketing platforms which help the companies to interact with their audience in real-time. Twitter marketing is basically a strategy that is planned to create, publish, and distribute content for the target audiences and followers through the social media platform.
The strategies that should be followed in twitter marketing are the same as other social media marketing i.e., to first research about your target audience then creating unique and informative content that will attract most of the audience and then scheduling your post timing and lastly analyzing the impact.
Instagram Marketing
Instagram was launched in the year 2010, and since then it has taken the world by storm. It is basically photos and videos sharing social networking site. Just like Facebook and Twitter, on Instagram also people have their own profile and newsfeed.
Instagram marketing allows the business to connect with their target audience, upload their business profile or products to create awareness about their business among customers. In Instagram marketing, hashtags play an important role as it builds links. More links indicate more audience engagement in your profile, content, product, or services.
Quora Marketing
Quora is not just a place where people search nor is it just a social media platform, it lies somewhere in between both of them. It is a very powerful platform for reaching your brand’s audience. It helps in creating awareness, improving your reputation, and even helps you to find out your target audience.
The best way to find your target audience is to start searching for the relevant questions or topics which have a high possibility of increasing the number of follower count. It helps businesses to share their knowledge in order to build their brand. It also helps in engaging the target audience through industry thought leadership and content marketing.
Pinterest Marketing
Pinterest is considered one of the most versatile, affordable, and impactful marketing tools for any business in order to convert more leads, increase traffic to the website, and to also increase brand awareness. This is the reason why it is a social media site in which the business shares its visual ideas, all types of content, photos, or blogs.
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Strategies for Social Media Marketing
Social Media Marketing may sound fancy. There are few strategies that are required to be adopted to make the best out of the Social Media Marketing operation.
Setting Goal
The first and foremost step in any marketing strategy is setting a goal according to your business objectives. While setting a goal, you can simply apply the SMART goal approach that will help you in setting the best goal for your business. SMART goal approach means:
S – Specific
M – Measurable
A – Attainable
R – Relevant
T – Time-Bound
Social Media Platform
After knowing your goals, you can plan out on which social media sites you will get the maximum target audience. In order to get the most audience, you must do thorough research on where your potential customer is today and where they will be tomorrow. Knowing where your customer is or where they will be in the future will help you target them directly.
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Content Planning
Once you have decided on the platforms, it is now important to know which type of content your audience is interested in. Therefore, Is it image or videos, educational or entertainment, long or short content, and the list goes on. However, there are billions of social media users, but attracting potential buyers is the most important task. So, it’s important that you create content that will attract the most potential customers.
Posting Schedule
Another thing to keep in mind while doing social media marketing is to know how often you should post your content on different platforms. You should plan in advance or create a social media content calendar in order to maximize the impact of your post. This calendar will help you to post your content on an optimal time interval.
Tips for Social Media Marketing
Content Planning
We all know that planning is the most essential part of marketing. Similarly, it is in social media marketing. Researching for keywords, brainstorming content ideas that will attract your target audience, knowing what your competitors are doing on social media platforms to attract customers. These are some of the important things while planning before taking the next step in social media marketing.
Content in Social Media
Posting too many contents on one day and then not posting for many days should always be avoided in social media. One of the most important thing in social media is to maintain consistency. Consistent posting and valuable content will always attract your ideal customers. You can also include images, videos, infographics, and step by step guide in your content.
Curated Links
If there are other sources that are providing informative and valuable content that will attract your target customers then you should definitely link to them. There are many chances that you may even get some backlinks.
Competitors
Keeping an eye on your competitors is very important as it helps in getting important information, strategies, and tricks for keyword researching and different marketing insights. If you know which marketing strategies are working for them. Which trick is helping them then you can also implement them. But remember to do it better than them rather than just copying them. You may end up being in a lower position than them.
Analytics
In order to determine your success on the social media platforms, you have to track your data, as without tracking your data you won’t be able to determine the success of your social media marketing strategies. Google Analytics is mostly used by different companies, as it helps in measuring your social media marketing techniques, and also helps in determining which strategies to leave abandoned. To properly monitor your social media marketing campaigns you can also put tracking tags to them.
Crises Management
Things don’t always work as you have planned or thought. So, it is important that you provide a playbook that will help your employee to handle different situations. It will help in not creating chaos when things go a little off track.
Chat-bots
Chatbots helps to keep the customers engaged on your website and at the same time communicate on to solve the problem of the customers without human intervention.
Customer Experience
Make your customer’s experience more personal so that they can connect with you, which will boost your sales and increase customer loyalty.
Quality content is the key
The quality of your content is the key to keep the customer engaged. High-quality SEO content will bring the right customers.
Community of Audience
Engage your audience by creating a community where frequent interaction is done like, sharing and liking posts, product knowledge, etc.
Diverse your contents
Contents on your profile should be diverse like images, videos, text, etc. This will be eye-catching to customers and keep them interested.
Brand advocates
Promote your brand through your current customers and employees so that you can bring in new customers to your brand.
Relevant channels
Use relevant channels to connect to your target audience so that like-minded customers can be reached easily.
Allocate the right budget
Allocating the right budget is very important so that there is sufficient engagement with customers on the personal level, as reaching the target audience in the right budget is essential.
Run Cross-channel campaign
Cross-channel campaigns across all media channels will help to reach each type of customer on different channels thereby increasing the traffic on your profile.
Go live
Going live with your customers. It increases the customer’s engagement with the brand and also brings positiveness in their mind towards your brand.