What is Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is connecting with your audience via social media platforms in order to grow your brand, drive sales, and raise website traffic. This includes publishing engaging content through social media accounts, interacting with your followers, monitoring your performance, and executing social media ads.
Currently, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and Snapchat are the most popular social networking sites.
The first stage of social media marketing was publishing. Businesses share their material on social media in an effort to drive visitors to their websites and, ideally, increase revenue. Social media, however, has evolved far beyond just a platform for content distribution.
Social media is utilized by businesses in a plethora of ways. For instance, a company concerned about what consumers are saying about its brand might observe social media discussions and respond to pertinent references (social media listening and engagement).
A company would use an analytics tool to analyze its reach, engagement, and sales on social media to evaluate how well it is performing there. A business aiming to reach a certain audience on a wide scale might utilize highly targeted social media ads (social media advertising).
Collectively, these are sometimes referred to as social media management.
The Five Fundamental Foundations of Social Media Marketing
The five core pillars of Social Media Marketing are:
- Strategy
- Planning & Publishing
- Listening and Engagement
- Analytics and Reporting
- Advertising
1. Strategy
Creating a social strategy is the first thing we recommend you do if you desire to publish something on social media. You may be wondering how to develop a social strategy at this phase. Developing a customer-centric approach, You should ponder on a few issues, such as:
- What are your objectives?
- Which social media platform would best assist you in accomplishing your objective?
- What sort of content will lure your potential customers?
2. Planning & Publishing
Every business is focusing on demonstrating its constant social media presence in light of the rise in social media users. They are employing this strategy to present their brand to prospective customers.
It’s as easy to publish engaging and educational material as it is to upload images or videos to your social media page. If your goal is to utilize social media to promote a business or a product, you should focus on creating a plan for your post. You need to be mindful of things like:
When are your prospective clients active on social media?
Doing a Reach analysis of your post.
Make sure your post is interesting.
Put serious thought into your social media posts.
3. Listening and Engagement
Early on, a few people may be following your company page and engaging with you through comments and direct messages. However, if you start publishing interesting material, you can see that your audience is expanding.
As the number of people following you on social media increases, you could discover that they begin interacting with you in comments and direct messages as well as by tagging you in posts. Additionally, there’s a potential that they’ll start sharing your work if you routinely upload interesting material.
As a result, always monitor your comments and direct messages to see what your audience is saying. If they are having a problem, attempt to fix it, and if they are complimenting your company or product and offering you some nice feedback, thank them.
4. Analytics and Reporting
One of the key KPIs for each internet marketing channel is analytics and reporting. if you manage a business page and consistently upload new content there, then you need to be informed of how your page or article is doing. Every business seeks for reports to aid in analytics.
- Whether their post received more views than it did the previous month.
- Number of favorable mentions they receive overall in a month.
- How many people are utilizing the company name and hashtag?
- How many people are enjoying, sharing, and commenting on their posts?
- An increase in followers since the previous month.
5. Advertising
Social advertisements are one of the most well-known features of social media. Use social ads to promote your brand when you are ready to invest in social media. It will assist you in connecting with the most individuals possible and presenting adverts to your intended market.
How can social media improve your marketing efforts?
- Social media may aid in boosting brand recognition.
- Aids in developing a brand identity and favorable brand impression.
- Your website’s traffic may be increased by using social media.
- The most effective channel for enhancing interaction and engagement with your potential audiences.
- The use of social media can increase conversion rates.
- On social media, promote videos for your brand or products.
Conclusion
Social media is regarded as the ideal medium for building brand recognition for both small and large-scale organizations. You may improve your brand’s exposure, cultivate positive relationships with your potential consumers, and establish two-way contact with them by creating a thorough social media plan.
You can see from this that social media has a lot of benefits. And if you run a company that makes life easier for customers, start using social media to advertise it. Be consistent and release top-notch material that may inform and amuse your audience.
Freelance social media marketer in Kerala, Jesin Krishna works with brands and companies to develop customer-centric marketing strategies. If you want to expand the audience that sees your company and want to improve your digital marketing strategy, get in touch with me.
