Social media marketing can be described as doing marketing on a social media platform to communicate with your customers for building a brand, increasing sales, and driving website traffic. This includes publishing great content on your social media accounts and pages, getting responses and engaging your social media followers, analyzing your results, and producing social media advertisements.
Common social media platforms that most businesses use for marketing are YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Snapchat. Apart from these platforms, there are some social media management tools that aid businesses to earn the most out of the social media listed above. Let’s take an example of a Buffer, a social media management tool helps you to achieve great results from your social media marketing campaigns.
How Social Media Marketing Works
It all starts with publishing. At first, an organization will publish its content on its social media platforms, by doing that they will generate traffic of customers to their website which could result in sales. The key to increasing the sales is to pay attention in two of the techniques i.e. Social Media Analytics (which helps you to understand how your business is performing on social media) and Social Media Advertising (which will get you a specific group of customers, those having an interest in your services).
Five Basic Pillars of Social Media Marketing
- Planning a Strategy
After doing anything you should plan a strategy to get the right direction. Similarly, in social media marketing the first step is to plan a strategy and look at the big picture. Define your goals first and increase your brand awareness by engaging a specific audience. After that you have to choose which social media platform will be beneficial for you and get you the right audience. In the end choose the content that you want to publish and will attract the target customers.
- Publishing the right content
In this phase you will implement your planned strategy and publish the right content at the right time and frequency. Publishing on social media includes posting a blog or a video on your social media platforms. All you need to do is publish a strong content that your target audience is interested in at the right time when they want, only in that way you will maximize the amount of traffic on your social media platforms.
- Getting response and engaging with your audience
As your business and web-based social networking following increase, your brand awareness will eventually increase. Your target audience may talk about your services and brand on the same social media platforms. What you need to do is monitor their response, analyze it, and engage them according to their response. If a response is good, you have a chance to improve their satisfaction. If a response is negative, you may offer support and change your strategy to get a good response.
- Advertising your brand
To get a wider customer than those who are your followers, take advantage of social media advertising. Social media ads are so incredible these days that you can determine precisely who to show your ads to. You can make your target audiences based on their behavior or interest.
Social Media Marketing Resources
Social media platforms evolve with technological advances. When Facebook launched, there is only an option to share texts on their accounts. Now we can share many content formats i.e. as images, videos, live videos, and Stories.
Therefore, Social media marketing is continually evolving. Here we have concluded some latest resources to get you started with social media marketing.
- Social Media Marketing Guide
- Social Media Listening and Engagement Guide
- Social Media Analytics Guide
- Social Media Advertising Guide
- Social Media Marketing Blog
