Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms and websites to promote a product/service. Although the terms e-Marketing and digital marketing are still the dominant terms in academia.
What is Social media marketing's importance?
- Most social media platforms have their own built-in data analytic tools, which enable companies to track the progress, success, and engagement of ad campaigns.
- Companies address a range of stakeholders through social media marketing including current and potential customers, current and potential employees, journalists, bloggers, and the general public.
- On a strategic level it includes the management of the implementation of a marketing campaign, governance, setting the scope and the establishment of a firm's desired social media culture and tone.
- To use social media effectively, firms should learn to allow customers and Internet users to post user-generated content (online comments, product reviews) rather than use marketer-prepared advertising copy.
1. Learn how social media works
There are a lot of social media marketing tips available online, from free or paid courses you can complete at your convenience. It’s important that you take the time to learn how social media marketing works for your specific business. While the fundamentals are similar across the board, different businesses will have to alter their strategies slightly in order to capture the attention of their target audience. From there, you can then focus on your specific goals and objectives.
2. Use all social networks
You may have a social network that you prefer over others, but it doesn’t mean that all of your followers feel that way. You have to think like your target customer, and determine what networks they are more than likely to be active on. If you want to be successful with social media, then you need to post across all networks. This means having and maintaining an account with all of the big social media sites, including Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.
3. Recognize the Target Market
Not knowing precisely who your target market is will lead to an fail. Facebook has the most targeting options, allowing you to laser-focus your efforts. Placing your offer in front of 1,000 highly targeted prospects is going to perform much better than showing it to 500,000 un-targeted prospects, that the smaller targeted audience will not only convert higher, but the overall ad spend will be lower since you are targeting a much smaller pool.
4. Listen to your customers
The only way you are going to know what your customers want is by listening to what they have to say. It’s important that you use your social media platforms as an extension of your customer service. More customers are going to voice their opinion on social media than via email or over the phone, When you listen to your audience, you open the door to other opportunities as well.
5. Format content to optimize for each platform
Maintaining accounts across all of the major social media platforms doesn’t mean posting the same thing on four different sites every day. All of your posts should be different, even if they are delivering the same message. You need photos for Instagram, long posts for LinkedIn, videos and memes for Facebook and short and snappy announcements for Twitter.
6. Engage with and delight your audience
It’s one thing to fill up your social media feed with posts, but it’s another thing to actively engage with your audience and turn them into satisfied customers. Engaging your followers allows you to uncover problems or issues other customers might be experiencing as well. Then, you can be proactive and address those issues quickly before they turn into fires that are difficult to put out.
7. Make sure that your content aligns with your message
When it comes to building a strong social media presence, getting likes and follows is great. However, it's about more than just the number of responses each of your posts get. You may be tempted to deliver a post that simply gets a lot of attention, but that will do nothing for your brand if you don’t make sure that the content aligns with your message. Everything needs to fit within your brand identity and promote what it is that you're trying to say to the world.
8. Be consistent
When it comes to your posts, your message and how frequently you use social media, keep consistency in mind. It is truly the key to success with any social media campaign. Make a plan for what you're going to post and how often you're going to post, and stick with it. This should ideally be a few times a day or a week, depending on your goals and your following.
9. Find balance between popularity and business
If you want to be popular on social media. However, you need to find that balance between popularity and business. You need to have a little bit of both and mix the more fun side that wants popularity with the serious and informative side that boosts the reputation of your business.
10 .Track and measure everything
You will never run a successful social media marketing campaign if you don’t measure your results. It’s important that you lay out clear goals with benchmarks that allow you to determine whether or not your social effort is paying off. The data you collect and analyze can then be used to make changes to your social media campaign to amplify all of your business and marketing efforts.
