1. A large majority of consumers say that social media, especially content from influencers, has a big impact on their purchasing decisions. Therefore, marketers are increasingly treating social media as a valuable source of insights about their target audience, rather than just a isolated tool.
In 18 years, social media has grown dramatically, reaching a level where it rivals television and radio. By 2022, there were 4.6 billion social media users globally, which is over 58% of the world’s population. In just one year, this number increased by over 10%.
As social media use increases, marketers are finding ways to more quickly and effectively engage with this key audience to get a competitive advantage.
What Is Social Media Marketing (SMM)?
SMM is the use of social media platforms to build a company’s brand, increase sales, and drive website traffic. It also has purpose-built data analytics that allow marketers to track the success of their efforts and identify more ways to engage.
Why Is Social Media Marketing So Powerful?
The power of social media marketing comes from social media’s ability to connect people, interact with them, and collect data about them.
The benefits of social media for businesses are vast. Not only does it enable them to connect with customers in ways that were previously impossible, but there is also an extraordinary range of avenues to connect with target audiences—from content platforms (like YouTube) and social sites (like Facebook) to microblogging services (like Twitter).
The way that people interact with each other on social media can provide businesses with free opportunities for advertising. This is because people are constantly sharing their own experiences and recommendations with each other electronically. Not only is it valuable for businesses to be able to harness this positive power of word-of-mouth recommendations, but because these interactions take place on social media, they can be measured. For example, businesses can track their “social equity” – this is the ROI from their social media marketing campaigns.
The customer data collected from a well-designed social media marketing plan can be extremely useful in boosting marketing outcomes. The data can be used to do things like improve market analysis or come up with new marketing strategies.
How Social Media Marketing Works
Social media has transformed the way businesses influence consumer behavior. Businesses can use social media to promote content and extract information about users that can be used to make messaging more resonant.
An action plan for successful social media marketing (SMM) should be targeted and have an execution framework and performance metrics. Hootsuite, a leading software provider in the social media management space, recommends the following action plan to build an SMM campaign:5 1. Define your social media objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs). 2. Research your target audience and create buyer personas. 3. Develop a content strategy and editorial calendar. 4. Create and curate engaging content. 5. Promote your content across social media channels. 6. Monitor, listen, and engage in conversations. 7. Analyze and report on your results.
- Align SMM goals to clear business objectives
- Learn your target customer (age, location, income, job title, industry, interests)
- Conduct a competitive analysis on your competition (successes and failures)
- Audit your current SMM (successes and failures)
- Create a calendar for SMM content delivery
- Create best-in-class content
- Track performance and adjust SMM strategy as needed
While traditional marketing only tracks customer value through purchase activity, social media marketing can track it both directly and indirectly. This enables more targeted customer relationship management tools.
The interconnectedness of social media can be used by businesses to create “sticky” content – content that is attractive and engaging, causing customers to make purchases and then share the content with others. This word-of-mouth advertising can reach a wider audience than traditional methods and is more trustworthy because it comes from people the recipient knows and trusts. Creating shareable content is therefore one of the most important ways that social media marketing can drive growth.
The most efficient way for a business to reap the benefits of customer-created product reviews and recommendations is through social media marketing.
Triggers the rapid spread of word-of-mouth product information to generate the message.
Customer segmentation on social media marketing channels is much more refined than on traditional marketing channels, so companies can focus their marketing resources on their exact target audiences.
Social media marketing tips
If you want to start marketing on social media, here are a few tips to get you started.
Create diverse content
When it comes to social media marketing, content is the most important element. This includes:
- How-tos, quick tips
- Local and industry news
- Data and insights
- Polls, questions, contests
- Updates and announcements
This also includes utilizing the various formats that social media has to offer such as images, videos, stories, live streams, online stores, and more.
Stay consistent
You can use social media to help your business project a consistent brand image across different platforms. While each platform has its own environment and voice, your business’ core identity should remain the same.
Don’t just post—participate
This means that you shouldn’t only log in to your social media channels once a month to schedule all of your posts. Instead, you should pay attention to who is engaging with your content and engage back with them. This can include responding to comments, liking and sharing their posts, running live streams, posting polls and real-time questions to spark discussion, and reposting other people’s content.
Use content creation tools
Don’t let anyone tell you that Instagram is not the most visual social media platform. All platforms require visuals to stand out in a person’s feed. Templates and features like Canva make it easy to create visuals that look professional and are consistent with your brand.
Repurpose, repost, recycle
If you want to get noticed on social media, you need to post high-quality content on a regular basis. The three Rs:
- Repurpose: Create a Facebook post from a customer review, splice up a blog post into a series of Tweets, distill a case study down into a customer spotlight on Instagram; turn a webinar deck into a carousel post on LinkedIn. The possibilities are endless.
- Repost: To be done in moderation, but a great way to fill gaps in your content calendar. Repost on Instagram and retweet user-generated and influencer content. You can also curate content from authoritative sources and share those links in your posts.
- Recycle: Post your TikTok videos and Instagram Reels to YouTube; re-share your top-performing blog posts every month to get in front of new followers; add your Facebook Live recordings to your YouTube channel.
Curate your own feed
We should focus on our own feeds and not worry about others. By following our competitors we can see what they are doing and get ideas. Also, we can learn from influencers and find out about new trends. Lastly, we can get inspiration from other brands.
Measure success with analytics
To know whether your social media marketing strategies are working, you need to track data. Google Analytics can help you work out which strategies are successful, so you can keep using them, and which ones you should stop using. To do this, add tracking tags to your social media marketing campaigns. You can also find out useful information by looking at the analytics for each social platform.
Advertise
Advertising on social media is a cost-effective way to reach a wider audience. By using social media marketing techniques, businesses can reach a larger audience for a lower cost. Below are some tips and resources for getting started with paid social media marketing:
The best social media marketing platforms for business
The most popular social media marketing platforms for business are Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, and Snapchat. Each social media marketing site has a different user base, main purpose, pros, and cons, so it’s important to consider these factors when choosing which platform to use. The most important thing is to create content that is engaging and relevant to your target audience.
Organic reach on Facebook is not very good, so if you want to generate leads or find new audiences, you should use Facebook advertising.
YouTube
While you may not initially think of YouTube as a social media marketing channel, it can actually be quite effective. You can post videos to your channel, share, comment on, and like other videos, and follow other accounts you like. Plus, you have a curated feed in your homepage with recommended videos. It’s best for:
- Tutorials, how-tos, and explainer videos
- Shoppable YouTube live streams
- Advertising (video ads and display ads on the platform)
- SEO (video is dominating the “how to” SERP!)
Instagram became more popular than LinkedIn and Twitter shortly after it was created and now has one billion monthly active users. People like it because it has a lot of different content types, like Feed posts, Stories, Lives, Reels, and IGTV. People use Instagram to follow brands and influencers whose values they share.
The average cost per ad on Instagram is higher than on Facebook, but Instagram offers better organic reach.
Twitter is a great way to connect with people by sharing quick thoughts, useful information, and engaging in conversations. It’s important to be active on all social media platforms, but especially on Twitter, since many people use it to get news, follow brands, and get customer service. For effective social media marketing on Twitter, you may want to:
- Follow influencers to keep up with news and trends.
- Share a story through a series of Tweets in one thread.
- Make yourself available for customer service and FAQs.
TikTok
TikTok’s growth as a social media platform has been unprecedented, becoming one of the most popular networks in only five years. The app is most commonly associated with dancing and music videos, but there are many other popular categories that are continuing to grow in popularity. Businesses are beginning to utilize TikTok as a marketing tool, but it’s important to keep in mind that people primarily use the app for entertainment purposes. Therefore, your videos should align with that purpose.
SMM is the use of social media platforms to interact with customers to promote brands, increase sales, and drive website traffic. Social media usage is growing globally, both via computer and mobile devices, providing businesses with the opportunity to increase sales from certain user populations. However, this is a highly competitive area, with businesses vying for views and clicks.
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