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 publishing great content on your social media profiles, listening to and engaging your followers, analyzing your results, and running social media advertisements.
The major social media platforms are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and Snapchat. There is also a range of social media management tools that help businesses to get the most out of social media platforms. Let us know more about social media marketing –
PILLARS OF SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
The 5 core pillars of social media marketing are as follows –
1. STRATEGY
Some businesses use social media for increasing their brand awareness, others use it for driving website traffic and sales. Social media can also help you generate engagement around your brand, create a community, and serve as a customer support channel for your customers.
2. PLANNING AND PUBLISHING
Social media marketing for small businesses usually starts with having a consistent presence on social media. By being present on social media platforms, you allow your brand to be discovered by your future customers. Also, to ensure that you are maximizing your reach on social media, you need to publish great content that your audience likes, at the right timing and frequency.
3. LISTENING AND ENGAGEMENT
As your business and social media following grow, conversations about your brand will also increase. 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.
4. ANALYTICS AND REPORTING
Along the way, whether you are publishing content or engaging on social media, you will want to know how your social media marketing is performing. The social media platforms themselves provide a basic level of such information.
5. ADVERTISING
When you have more funds to grow your social media marketing, an area that you can consider is social media advertising. Social media ads allow you to reach a wider audience than those who are following you. You can create target audiences based on their demographics, interests, behaviors, and more.
ADVANTAGES OF SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
The main advantages of social media marketing are –
1. TRUSTWORTHINESS AND BRAND RECOGNITION
You can increase the trustworthiness of your social media presence by ensuring your profiles contain a secure link to your website and other relevant social media profiles. Always reply to customer comments and feedback – both when it is positive and negative. Have a clear and consistent brand voice across all social and owned media.
2. INCREASE CUSTOMER SERVICE AND SATISFACTION
One advantage of social media for brands is that it provides a direct line to your audience; opening up the ability for customers to interact with brands in real time. Consumers can comment with praise or criticism of your brand, how quickly and appropriately your response can impact your brand reputation.
3. AUTHENTICITY
Brands that know the importance of online communities and the people within them, strive to tell authentic stories by highlighting the core issues and values that are important to the brand and their consumers. Speak to the heart of your target audience on social media, and you will be rewarded with higher engagement and loyalty.
4. INCREASED REVENUE
Social media platforms are quickly realizing that streamlining the customer journey is the way forward. Outside using your brand’s social media accounts for social shopping, involving key figures, known as “influencers”, from your target market can increase your social commerce.
The benefits we have discussed here are merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the potential of social media marketing. To be successful, it takes a lot of creativity, skill, and training to master some of the more complex advertising practices.
WRAPPING IT UP
Social media marketing is a powerful tool and holds many benefits for your company; it is a constant process that needs to be part of your overall marketing strategy and your daily routine. As a continually evolving practice, you must always strive to be creative and on-trend, and ultimately, showcase the great brand that you are to your audience.
