What is Social Media Marketing ?
Social media marketing is basically the use of social media to connect with your audience, bring them to your website, or just promote yourself. And this obviously involves a lot of posting, engaging with followers, analyzing, and running advertisements.
Today, we have several major social media – Facebook, Instagram, Linked In, Twitter, Youtube, Pinterest, and TikTok. Social Media Marketing starts with the publishing of the content. Different accounts are sharing their content for free on social media, so this way they get traffic, and with traffic, we are able to get sales.And its only one use of social media and there are many more today.
What Else Can Be Done
You can monitor what people are saying about your business on social media, respond to that, and (hopefully, although there were different cases) make things better, let’s say if you have a problem. You can analyze your engagement, understand what people like and don’t like. You can target people on social media to achieve various goals. Many more things, and all that is called social media management. Now let’s see how can you do social media management, and what are steps that you need to follow to be successful:
Strategy
It’s hard to emphasize how important is to have a strategy, because where are you going without it?
So we need to answer few questions:
- What are your goals?
- What social media platform you want to focus on?
The thing here is that you don’t want to put all your attention to all social media available, you want to focus on a few. Think about where mainly is your audience, and define 2-3 major social media and focus on them!
- What type of content do you want to focus on?
This is a tricky question, but really you need to understand what type of content people would come to see on your page. Don’t try to post little kitties when you are selling financial services, be consistent and true to your business.
Plan and Publish
Social media marketing requires a consistent presence on social media. Close to three billion people are using social media every day. And consistency and activity will allow you to be seen by people there. And publishing for your business is no different from your personal account. The only difference here is that you want to know what to publish and what to achieve with your posts.
Engage and Observe
With time, your posts will start being seen, and it will bring your followers, engagement, and just some kind of popularity on the internet. It also means that people will probably start talking about your brand on the internet, leave reviews, and so on. What do you want to do is to monitor such activities, respond to both good and bad comments. And it’s important to address everything when the time is right.
Analyze
While you are busy publishing your content, engaging with your customers, you would like to know your performance. The best way to do that is to go to the analytics tab on your social media. This will give you an understanding of if you are reaching more people, how good are your followers, etc. This is super valuable information for you because you can correct your strategy, add or test new ideas that eventually will make you successful.
Advertise
At some point, you will start thinking about doing advertisements for your brand. Advertisement in social media serves many reasons and can help you to achieve your goals for spending money in return. And this type of ad is super powerful because you can target various people (thanks to the same people like you, who are sharing their information on social media), and with the right targeting, you will be able to sell, bring to the website, or just engage with them.
Now let’s talk about some popular Social media channels, their advantages, and disadvantages.
Instagram is a social media that is used by almost 1 billion people. So Instagram is just a great tool for your business – lots of people using it, it is super graphic, allows you to receive messages, etc. I would say, that Instagram can be used in almost every business and it will definitely bring results. The disadvantage of Instagram is that it generates “cheap traffic”.
What I mean by that is that people tend to follow random accounts sometimes without actually being interested in them, the same goes for business accounts who follow many people with a hope to be followed in return. Besides that, people just tend to scroll through their feeds not really paying attention to what is going on. Work on your content, make sure it’s visible and you will get a lot of success.
Although Facebook had better times in terms of the number of people and how involved in the social media they were, it still does a great job when it comes to Facebook groups or pages. 2 billion people are using Facebook and often coming there to get some information about the business, check their updates. Facebook has great analytics, great tools for pages, great advertisement.
YouTube
YouTube got huge in recent years, with a huge amount of content, creators, and opportunities. The thing about YouTube is that it became what its creator is in some way. So as Google, people using YouTube as a search engine when it comes to some problem and finding a solution to that.
But a bad thing about Youtube is the time that you have to spend on growing it. You cannot just make great quality videos in big quantities overnight. It’s a process that takes time to build and to learn. The good part about it, it will definitely pay you off in the future.
All videos that you are recording eventually will start getting views, interest, subscribers, and eventually sales. Take your time, create content, do not expect to give you results soon and in few months you will start seeing new people getting interested in your business.
You can think of LinkedIn as the high-tech equivalent of going to a traditional networking event where you go and meet other professionals in person, talk a little bit about what you do, and exchange business cards. It’s like one big virtual networking event.
Conclusion
In this article, I tried to give you basic information about social media marketing and its applications. Even if they seem troublesome and you don’t get paid quickly, remember that if you continue with patience, they will meet your expectations in the long run.
About the Author
Ahmet Faruk Özsoy is a Digital Marketing Analyst at the International Institute of Digital Marketing™