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 ultra-social media platforms (at the moment) are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and Snapchat. The foremost goal of Social Media Marketing is to improve communication with users, increase brand visibility and reach to more customers.
The Five Core Pillars of Social Media Marketing:
1.Strategy:
Before you start posting on any social media platform, you will need to develop a plan. Research your market and define your target audience to identify which social media networks give you the best reach and engagement.
For example, consider that every social media network has different audience demographics, so companies need to strategically select which platform to engage on based upon their target clients. Once you have chosen an appropriate social network, you can then work on determining what specific strategies are working for your rivals and layout a content calendar. This will help you plan and stick to producing content for social media on a regular basis.
2.Planning and Publishing:
Publishing to social media is as simple as sharing a blog post, an image, or a video on a social media platform. It’s just like how you would share on your personal Facebook profile. But you will want to plan your content ahead of time instead of creating and publishing content spontaneously. 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.
Once your social media content calendar is set, you can then begin to publish. It also goes without saying, but after your content is published, you’ll want to keep an eye on engagement, and reply appropriately.
3.Listening and Engagement:
Listening helps you understand why, where and how these conversations are happening, and what people think—not just when they’re tagging or mentioning your brand. Your audience is much more suitable to appreciate and share your content if it sounds with them. But you don’t always know what will vibrate with your audience.
Engagement enables brands to engage with consumers in social networks for always-on customer service across the entire journey. It broadens the reach of brands to listen to consumers in social channels, engage with them on their terms and seamlessly transfer conversations to any other channel as and when needed.
4.Analytics and Reporting:
Data matters more than ever and the social media analytics process is the key. That’s why smart marketers bring their creative team and data geeks together.
This is where you go beyond simply reporting the numbers to analyze what the data actually means.
For example, rather than simply reporting the number of engagements, you might want to analyze the number of engagements per post or per follower. And rather than simply reporting the number of clicks you drove to your website, you might want to analyze how much of total website traffic is coming from social campaigns.
Again, make sure to provide context by comparing your results to previous campaigns, or to what you know about competitor campaigns.
If you can, try to analyze your data to determine why you got the results you did. The facts are interesting, sure, but the reasons behind the data are what can help you tweak your strategy and set meaningful social media goals.
5.Advertising:
Social media advertising has grown to be a favorite marketing option for many business start-ups and organizations globally. This is due to the ease of using social networking sites to sell products and services. The results are almost always immediate, which allows companies to measure the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns. It is a term used to describe online advertising that focus on social networking sites. One of the major benefits of advertising on a social networking site is that advertisers can take advantage of the users demographic information and target their ads appropriately.
When you are running many social media advertising campaigns at once, you can consider using a social media advertising tool to make bulk changes, automate processes, and optimize your ads.
Advertising on social networks is cost-effective because you only target people who are interested in your products and services, you’re only charged when someone clicks on your ad, and you’re only paying for clicks from people who are ready to buy.
Social media advertising platforms are so powerful nowadays that you can specify exactly who to display your ads to. You can create target audiences based on their demographics, interests, behaviours, and more.
