What is Social Media Marketing?

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is a form of digital marketing that utilizes social media and networking websites to promote an organization’s products or services through paid and organic means. This involves publishing great content on your social media profiles, listening to, and engaging your followers, analyzing your results, and running social media advertisements.

Social media marketing is a powerful way for businesses of all sizes to reach prospects and customers. Your customers are already interacting with brands through social media, and if you are not speaking directly to your audience through social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest, you are missing out! Great marketing on social media can bring remarkable success to your business, creating devoted brand advocates and even driving leads and sales.

Important Social Media Platforms

• Facebook

Monthly Active Users (MAU): 2.6 billion  (as of Apr 30, 2020)

Age Group: 18-45+ years

Industries (B2B and B2C): E-commerce, retail, Banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG), entertainment, fashion, real estate, news, health, sports

Regardless of whether you are a B2B or a B2C brand, you’ve got to be present on Facebook. It combines the best features of almost every social media platform and there’s a high possibility that your audience is on it as well!

Businesses can use Facebook to share content, engage with customers, run ads or even use it as a platform to provide customer support.

• Twitter

MAU: 330 million (as in 2020)

Age Group: 18-45+

Industries (B2B and B2C): News, technology, e-commerce, retail, entertainment, travel, sports, health, telecom, BFSI

Twitter allows you to express your opinions in 280 characters. Known for pioneering the use of hashtags, Twitter is the go-to social media platform for users to share their thoughts, reach out to brands and celebs and consume news and snippets of information.

Brands primarily use Twitter for customer service because its a platform that customers have come to use extensively for timely brand interactions. For example: see how Wendy’s responds to customer complaints and how they project their brand image.

Twitter users tend to be more tech-savvy, so Twitter has become a hub for information discovery. Therefore, B2B and B2C brands should definitely use Twitter to publicize their content.

• LinkedIn

MAU: 310 million (as of April 2020)

Age Group: 25-45 years

Industries (Mostly B2B): Legal, BFSI, technology, manufacturing, marketing, education, employment

Being present on LinkedIn is mandatory for a B2B organization as it offers a multitude of opportunities to grow your business. Although B2B brands dominate LinkedIn, B2C brands also use it even though just to discover prospective employees.

For individuals, LinkedIn is a great platform to showcase expertise and establish themselves as thought leaders in their niche. Brands can use LinkedIn company pages like Facebook pages while keeping the tone professional.

• Instagram

MAU: 1 billion (as of March 2019)

Age Group: 18-35 years

Industries (B2C): E-commerce, fashion, retail, food and beverage, beauty, travel, photography, entertainment, real estate

Instagram is a mobile-based visual platform that lets you share images and videos. Instagram’s popularity has risen in recent years and is expected to grow even bigger as consumers continue to embrace vertical videos, live videos, and stories. Instagram launched a vertical video platform called IGTV that allows you to share videos that are longer than a minute in length.

If you sell physical products, then you should definitely try Shopping on Instagram. Its a powerful feature that many experts claim to be the future of social commerce.

• YouTube

MAU: 2 billion (as of March 2019)

Age Group: 18-55+ years

Industries (B2B and B2C): Almost any industry that can create video content for marketing

YouTube is an online video-sharing platform that allows you to view, share, and upload video content. The exponential growth of video marketing has led brands to create and share video content on YouTube extensively. If you are contemplating joining YouTube, here are three facts for you to consider:

1. YouTube is the second most popular search engine after Google
2. It is owned by Google
3. If your competitor is already on YouTube, it can be challenging to stand out

• Pinterest

MAU: 367 million (as of Q4, 2019)

Age Group: 18-45 years

Industries (Mostly B2C): Art, DIY, craft, beauty, fashion, e-commerce, architecture, food, photography

Pinterest is a great visual platform for individuals and brands to seek inspiration for artistic endeavors and to promote DIY activities. You will find a plethora of ideas in the form of pins (images) and boards (a collection of images) about a topic. Although Pinterest was heavily popular among women in its early years, a shift has been observed in its usage in 2016 where women users have dropped from 83% 60%.

• Snapchat

MAU: 287 million (as of January 2019)

Age Group: 18-35 years

Industries (Mostly B2C): Health, fashion, food and beverages, live events/concerts, retail

Snapchat is another mobile-exclusive visual platform that became famous for its short content visibility. The images and videos posted on Snapchat disappear after 24 hours. Snapchat is the most popular social platform among millennials and gen Z users. The platform is also known for its face lenses (filters). Since the content is short-lived, Snapchat is suitable to create content that is raw and genuine.

Besides building a brand organically, organizations can run ads to reach out to a wider audience.

• TikTok

MAU: 1 billion (as of June 2019)

Age Group: 10-29 years

Industries (Mostly B2C): Entertainment, Fashion, Drama, almost any industry that can create interesting video content

A lot like Snapchat and Instagram, TikTok is mobile-exclusive. This app, however, is primarily video oriented and caters to a much younger audience so marketers can choose it to specifically target Gen Z users. Influencer marketing and paid promotions are just beginning to emerge. It, therefore, holds tremendous potential to drive low-cost viral campaigns.

Important Benefits of Social Media Marketing

1. Growing your brand awareness: Social media marketing will make it easy to spread the word about your products and mission.

2. Increasing your traffic: Using social media and linking it to your website will increase your traffic tremendously.

3. Promoting your products and services: This is ultimately why you invest in marketing, right?

• How To Grow Your Brand Awareness using Social Media?

Create Brand Recognition

Gaining brand recognition is one of any business’ most important marketing goals. That’s because consumers want to buy brands they recognize. Thankfully, social media allows for easy and effective brand building.

Social media has a benefit over traditional media because it can get your brand in front of people much more quickly and easily. Furthermore, it gets your audience looking at your brand even when they aren’t thinking about your brand or product.

Generate A Conversation Around Your Brand

A strong social media marketing strategy will generate conversation about your brand, products, and partners.

Engage with your audience when they comment on your social media messages. Make sure they feel that there is a person behind the brand. Ensuring that they don’t feel like they’re talking to a robot will give them a better perception of your company and make them feel more like a valued customer.

Learn How To Connect With Your Audience Through Social Listening

Social listening is the act of monitoring social conversations around certain topics. It helps you understand what’s important to your audience and identify trends your target audience is following.

You’ll learn about what they’re struggling with, which can help you create content addressing those pain points. You can also identify the tone and language that your target audience uses.

Make it a part of your daily routine to do some social listening and see what people are saying in your industry. If you want to take your social listening to the next level, check out Mention.

Tell Your Brand’s Story

Using social media is a great way to share your brand’s mission and share stories. Effective stories can have a great impact on your brand’s image. They can be simple or extensive depending on what you think will be most effective.

Share stories of people who use your product or service. If they give you great feedback, share it! It’ll spread the message that your product is effective enough for someone to give you positive feedback.

Gather Data From Audience Research To Improve

Audience research is similar to social listening. It searches the keywords your audience will be using, but it’s more focused on your specific product. You can use social media to gather this information.

To view the insights on your Facebook page, simply go to the page that you are the admin of and they will be next to your cover photo. Twitter will have an option to view the insights of every tweet you post at the bottom of each tweet. Both Facebook and Twitter allow you to view the reach and the insights of all your posts.

Provide Exceptional Customer Service That Keeps Your Followers Happy

Customers now expect companies to handle their requests through social media.

A strong investment in customer service can build meaningful relationships between your company and your customers. And with social media, the challenge of customer service remains as demanding as it had before.

Social media allows for immediate interaction and customer feedback. Businesses can also respond to their customers right away. With nearly half of U.S. customers using social media to ask questions about products or services, having a social media customer service strategy is extremely important.

Build Customer Loyalty

What could possibly be better than building brand loyalty for free?

Customers follow and interact with the brands they enjoy. But what’s interesting is that 53% of customers who follow your business are likely to be loyal to your business specifically.

It’s an obvious direct correlation: If customers follow you, they are more likely to choose you versus your competition. Furthermore, if they’re loyal customers, they’ll increase your traffic.

Be sure to keep your loyal audience engaged and happy.

• How to Increase Your Traffic using Social Media?

Direct Referral Traffic To Your Site Or Blog

Social media marketing can assist in sending customers directly to your site.

It’s unlikely that all of your traffic will come through search engines. Social media channels allow for more diverse inbound traffic streams.

Though social networks are great for getting traffic to your site, you need to consider not only what to post but how often to post. You don’t want to become that overbearing marketer, or you’ll turn off your customers.

It’s good to follow a set schedule for posting your content (link to one of our blog posts). This will help you ensure that your content is not only posted at a time that is most effective, it will also give you time to edit your content to help you with your SEO.

Social Media Can Assist With Link Building

Social media can have an indirect impact on SEO. For example, let’s say that you get 1,000 shares on a blog post because it contains strong content. Some of your followers who see your post may write similar content and link back to your original post as a source. Search engines will then pick up on the fact that your content has linked back to a good amount and (hopefully) rank your post higher than your competition.

It’s FREE

That’s right, (mostly) free.

It’s free to create social media profiles and post organic content. For some, that may be enough, and the quality of the content may promote the content on its own. However, if you’d like to go the extra mile and promote it further, paying for promotion will help increase exposure.

You can promote your business on Facebook for any budget. Facebook also automatically directs your ad toward users that are interested in what you’re advertising. Twitter works the same way.

You have to set up a campaign, and they’ll work with your budget. That means you’ll have a huge ROI and you’ll use your marketing budget in an effective way.

Establish Your Brand As A Topical Authority

Topical authority means your business is a trusted source of information on a given topic.

So where does social media come in? Establishing topical authority is a subset of content marketing. The more you use social media to post relevant content, the more search engines will pick up on your authority on that subject.

This can make you become the “go-to” authority for a specific topic. The more authoritative your page, is the more traffic will increase. Page authority is a ranking based on how well a specific page will rank on a search engine. Domain authority is a ranking based on how well a specific website will rank on a search engine.

Retarget Your Audience Using Social Media

Retargeting is a wonderful tool for social media marketing. Generally only 2% of customers will actually purchase something during their first visit to your site. Advertising can help reach that other 98%. One way to do that is to run retargeting ads.

Retargeting works by keeping a list of people who visit your site and placing anonymous “cookies” within their browser. When they visit a social media site, a retargeting service then displays the ads. This allows for your business to be in the eyes of the customer beyond just when they’re on your site.

Help Your Cause To Go Viral

We’re all familiar with viral ads; just take a walk down memory lane and take a look at some of these great viral campaigns. Social media can have a huge impact on making ads viral. In fact, that’s where most of those ads are shared. The beauty of a viral ad is that you can get a lot of attention for relatively little effort, getting a huge ROI. But you want to keep in mind that your focus shouldn’t be on forcing an ad to go viral.

Driving Conversions

Traffic is just traffic, right? Not quite. What you really care about is how much your traffic drives conversions.

Here are four great ways to drive conversions with social media:

Add calls to action: A call to action is helpful because it motivates your customer to do something. They feel empowered to purchase your product. You can also design your social media messages to appeal the to the customer so they’ll want to take a specific action, such as purchasing your product.

Contests: Contests, giveaways, free stuff. They’re all things that no business really wants to do, but they’re extremely helpful. Anyone would be more compelled to purchase a product from a company from which they’ve already received some free stuff.

Ads: Let’s face it, no one is on social media to buy things. They’re on there to talk to friends or follow their interests, and organic content that leads to ads are distasteful.

So the challenge is to grab people’s attention and make them want to purchase your product or service without leaving a bad impression on them.

The beauty of social media is that it lets you directly place ads, so the audience doesn’t feel tricked. Facebook and Twitter allow your business to post ads directly on your target market’s timeline. Those ads will lead them directly to your page and drive those conversions right up!

• How to Promote Your Product using Social Media?

Promote Your Content

This seems pretty general, right? Promote the content, and you’ll promote the product. But, what are the best ways to do that? Let’s look into the things that make a difference such as headlines, having an image, and the time of the post. Each of these things are important and must be taken into consideration when writing a social media message.

The most important thing to keep in mind in writing your messages is to be creative. You want to make sure that you’re posting original content. Being creative and telling stories is an effective way to promote content without having to seem like an ad. Telling a story through the headline or the promotional image will allow the audience to build their own perception of the product.

Communicate With Customers About Niche Topics You Both Love

Facebook alone has over 620 million groups. Chances are that your target market is in a few of those. Finding those groups and getting involved can help you help your audience.

You can also follow people who are posting about subjects in your industry. If they like what they see in your company, they’ll follow you back. That’s important because 72% of customers are more likely to purchase a product from your business after they follow you.

Consider building your own Facebook or LinkedIn group about the industry you’re in. You can see conversations about the industry as a whole that can help you with your marketing and product development.

Use Social Proof To Connect With Potential Customers Like Your Existing Audience

Let’s compare your website to a restaurant.

You’re walking down the street looking for a place to eat and you see one restaurant that’s empty and one that’s packed. You’d most likely choose the packed restaurant, right? That’s the place with all the great food that people are going for.

The same goes for your website.

No one wants to get the content that no one else cares about. They want the one that is doing well and being shared often.

Obviously, the content of it must be worth getting a lot of shares or it must be authoritative. The content that is shared the most must have some authority or must be creative and original.

Easy A/B Testing To Get The Biggest Results

A/B testing is when you present a different version of the same website to different people.

But how can you use this concept on social media?

Instead of trying different websites, try similar posts, and track the reach and conversion results of each post. Twitter recently started making it much easier to track the results of a tweet. This will help you narrow down your most effective social media posts.

Use #Hashtags To Increase Your Reach

A hashtag is a powerful tool that can connect a group of like-minded individuals through social media. It’s a simple way to greatly increase your reach.

Using a hashtag is free, so why wouldn’t you want to use it?

It’s important to keep in mind more hashtags don’t translate into more engagement. Too many hashtags will devalue the strength of your message and it’ll get lost quickly. Use hashtags sparingly. Ensure that you’re putting them on the words that will be most effective.

Keep Your Customers Up-To-Date

Social media is one of the best and easiest ways of keeping your customers updated with your new products or upcoming events. If your business makes a huge announcement about a new product or an exciting event, it’ll catch on and get people excited.

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