What is social media?
Social media are communication networks that enable users to connect, relate, and share content with others via the internet. These contents can be in the form of short messages, long-text posts, news, videos, and images. The social media platform reduces the stress undergone by people in communicating with their friends and relatives located far and near.
Another advantage of this platform is that it increases collaboration and diffusion of ideas between people and the organization. These public networks are the next to search engines in providing information and updating users with trendy things. Moreover, its usage has spread to different parts of the world, with each notable one like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram having millions of users.
What is social media marketing?
Although social media offers communication comforts and numerous other benefits, no one could have thought it would be a ground for transacting business at its invention stage. It all began with companies using the platform to share a product’s contents and benefits to people on social media to drive traffic to their website. But nowadays, it is a tool used by businesses to evaluate people’s reactions to their products and services. Meanwhile, its feature that enables enterprises to converse and relate with buyers gives it more advantage over other marketing platforms on the internet.
Therefore, small and large scale enterprises must create and focus on the maximization of their public network presence. And this calls for small business owners to dive into another form of promotion strategy known as social media marketing (SMM).
Social media marketing refers to all the activities performed in the acquisition of traffic or attention to business products and services on the public network websites. It is simply a strategy that involves the usage of the content on social media platforms to generate more sales, make brand awareness, and attract more buyers to your business. The purpose of this approach is not just to advertise your business or products to the billions prospect on the platforms, but to ensure that a large percentage of them are converted to your customers.
The marketing strategy focuses on how businesses can find their ideal buyers on public networks, select the right social media platform for their business, curating fantastic content for their followers, enhancing enterprise’s customer support services, and evaluation of their online presence.
The Five Core Pillars of Social Media Marketing
1. Strategy
The strategy is one of the key things that determines a business’s success on social media. Dare not go into social media marketing if you don’t have a layout of what you intend doing on the platforms. Remember that Benjamin Franklin quote that says, “if you fail to plan you plan to fail.” Therefore, you must have a clear picture of what you want to do before diving into it. Setting your business goals is the first thing in social media marketing, but without a strategy, it will forever remain in the white and black format and never achievable.
The strategy includes how picky a business is in selecting a particular platform to launch their campaign. It encourages an enterprise to do in-depth research on competitors to discover a way to overcome it. It shows their innovation in deciding on what kind of content to implement. And it is the driving force for making your social media dreams come true.
2. Researching and publishing
There is no end to researching and publishing as far as public network campaign is concerned. It is all a business that has to attract followers to their product on social media. Most importantly, it is an aspect that demands more attention. This is because public networks love feeding its users with thousands of newsfeeds. Therefore, content is your only leverage to make them stop scrolling. An enterprise should spend most of its time and resources into the publishing of amazing and captivating content. Also, she must ensure that her followers are frequently enriched with trendy posts.
Continuous research is also one of the core pillars of social media marketing. It is not only exercised in the development of content, but also in studying your competitors in the same niche. The research will make a business realize what is working on the public network.
3. Engagement
Engagement is another thing a small business will like to study on social media. It defines how much likes, comments, mentions, clicks, and sales you get on the public network. The engagement level of followers to an enterprise page on Facebook illustrates their potential to attain success and reveals the need for corrections. This particular core pillar wants business people to know how people on the social network are reacting to their services. Customer support services also fall under this category. Your aptness to respond to followers will increase their level of engagement. Moreover, you should strive always to prolong the conversation to the point of purchase.
4. Measurement
It is just like researching and publishing. An enterprise must always engage in continuous evaluation of its failures and success. This practice will enable the business to do away with what’s not working and fully embrace the working strategy. The number of followers accumulated on Twitter or the number of likes and comments got on Facebook is not all that matters. Albert Einstein says that “not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted, counts.” What determines your success in social media marketing is your grade in the key metrics, which include engagement, clicks, sales, and sentiments.
5. Advertisement
Social ad networks also receive a share of public network marketing. With these advertising media, businesses can reach other social media users who are not her followers. An enterprise can easily direct ads to people based on their behaviors, demographics, location, or interest. Apart from that, the campaign usually focuses on the introduction and advertisement for new products to people. For this reason, most content teaches how to use a new product, the advantages of using a product, dealing with troubleshooting problems encountered in the usage of a product.
Over to you
Are you currently using social media for your business? If not, what is holding you back? If yes, is it helping you to achieve your business goals?
