What is social media marketing?

Table of Contents

Introduction

Many people are aware of the word social media marketing, and many of the people may be aware of how many strategies are there about social media marketing. This article is based on the major topic what is social media marketing. The current article is focused on the definition of social media and some useful tips for beginners and professionals. The article also defines the major pillars of social media marketing.

Social Media Marketing best tips for beginners

How can you take advantage of social media? How can beginners craft an excellent social media presence fast?

Decide which social media platform which to use.

As a learner of social media marketing, you must know to choose one or two best social media platforms for you and concentrate on those rather than trying to work on all platforms simultaneously.

An excellent way to find out which platform is best suitable for your favorite niche is to understand the influencers and analyze where and why they have succeeded.

Taking an example, find out the best icon leaders of your niche and check out their number of Facebook fans, Twitter fans and followers, Pinterest followers, and Instagram followers.

Better to Optimize your social media profiles and account

Once you decide whichsocial media toolswill be best for you as a beginner, the very next step is to optimize your profiles on those social media.

By optimizing your profiles, you increase your chances of getting more followers, and it is also an excellent way to boost your SEO efforts.

Connect your website link or blog link with your social media pages

After you are ready with your social media profiles, the next step is to connect your website with your social media pages.

There is a specific and crucial procedure to follow for each platform, and you must perform it correctly.

A correct binding between the two means that search engines and social media websites and other tools know which website corresponds to which social media page. Add something like,

For Facebook, you can easily follow the above-mentioned instructions
For Pinterest media, you can verify your website using this procedure
For Twitter, you can follow this

Represent all the social media buttons or icons on your front page of the site

Besides connecting your website links with the respective business pages on social media, you also have to add social media buttons or icons on your front or landing page of the website so that readers can easily share and find your creative writing.

As per the general rule of thumb, keep the buttons above the fold to increase the effective exposure, and keep in mind that larger buttons should get more clicks than smaller buttons.

Find and follow the influencers of your own niche.

So far in the earlier steps, we have successfully selected the most appropriate and best social media tools for our favorite niche, also optimized the social media links and profiles, attached the website with the social media pages, and also added the buttons and icons on our pages for more interaction.

The next obvious step is finding people to follow but, most notably, gradually building our tribe of followers.

I would say that there are five basic steps to follow to get faster followers, and these are described in listed bullets 6-10 below.

Before getting into that, you should definitely first find and follow the influencers in your niche.

It is almost obvious that they will not follow you back because you have created a new account with zero followers but doing so is essential for three reasons:

Social media platforms will use this information to suggest who to follow, so following famous people in your niche of the subject is like telling them you are also in that niche.
When you follow famous people who are iconic and likely to get followed by other fans as well. A trick major people use is to follow the followers of a famous icon because they know that some people might follow them back as well.
They will most probably share vital and valuable information about the niche or subject, so you have a better chance to learn something new every day and re-share that with your followers.

Keep a balance between following and followers.

Once you start following people, you should never forget that it’s better to balance the number of people you follow every day and the number of people they follow you back on regular basis.

This is specifically important, especially on Twitter and Pinterest, and the reasons are a lot:

Software applications use this ratio (followers/following) as always to suggest who to follow, so if you have a higher ratio, you should minimize your chances of getting new quality and quantity followers.
It is a primary matter of trust – Who do you think has a trusted profile: someone with 1000 followers but following 3500 or someone with 550 followers that follows 810?
A balanced profile is best for SEO – the SEO’s have been talking the last couple of months about the major importance of social media for SEO and how things are changing.
A strong and impactful profile, in here case, is an individual that has more followers than following numbers and someone that is followed by people who are considered influencers in the niche.

Share always interesting and unique content may be text, images, or videos

This is the foundation for having a major successful social media marketing campaign. When we think about publishing content, we always say that ‘content is king,’ which is true in social media.

If you share interesting and valuable content, you can get more re-shares, more visitors to your pages of the website, and under some conditions, more customers as well.

What is engaging content?

It is a combination of listed things below-

Articles, some Stories, various Pages related to your niche but not only from your website.
Interesting statistics about your favorite niche
Motivational Quotes related to your niche
Research on various studies
Images and Videos should be added If you’re making videos for YouTube or Instagram reels.
Funny and creative stuff- whatever your favorite niche, you can share once in a while a joke, some funny image, or video to make your followers laugh and smile.
Never forget to addhashtags– hashtags (#) are the major ingredient that can make your content or article more searchable and topmost, so don’t forget to use hashtags in the networks that support it (Twitter, Pinterest)

Social media platforms have played a major shift in digital and social media marketing. These have altered the way information is transmitted from one end of the world to another. With the commercial aspect in mind, social media has helped promote business activities like never before.

Initially, taken as a source of entertainment and individual connectivity, social media platforms have come a long way. With business owners taking social media more seriously and using it to their advantage, it has become a single source of authentic and effective digital marketing tools.

Currently, you will find every single major brand having a footing and presence on social media, with a focus on long-term interaction and relationship building with their customers.

In this course series, we have come up with all that our readers need to know about social media marketing. These comprehensive articles will enable you in getting the most out of your digital marketing campaigns after getting the needed the know-how of social media marketing.

Why is it necessary to get to know all about social media marketing first?

Well, if you are an entrepreneur, just look around and you will find several failed startups. One of the reasons for their failure is diving headfirst into the sea of digital marketing campaigns without getting the homework done.

Also, you have got to show patience in running a startup and carefully analyzing various aspects of digital marketing campaigns first.

In this article, we will focus on getting to know the basics of social media marketing and different aspects of its successful execution. We hope it to be true of benefit to your campaign.

Let’s get on with it.

Social media marketing – The definition:

As per Investopedia:

“Social media marketing (SMM) is the use of social media websites and social networks to market a company’s products and services. Social media marketing provides companies with a way to reach new customers, engage with existing customers, and promote their desired culture, mission, or tone”.

People have been spending increased time on social media platforms, not only for entertainment but also as a means of getting to know different buying options. Because of this reason, smart business owners are taking this opportunity of social media for spreading awareness of their brands.

Different sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest have become a hub for not only the general public but also huge conglomerates.

At its most basic level, you can say that social media marketing entails the advertisement of products or services on social media platforms. It’s beneficial for all in the form that customers have access to a wide range of market competitors.

The end goal is the usage of social media platforms for the benefits of both parties i.e. manufacturers and consumers.

Social media marketing is truly a cost-saving and effective tactic where two-way communication is possible like never before. A direct and timely message is conveyed from either side or opinions and queries shared at the spot without any delay.

Also, social media platforms are simple to use for every age group and a super cost-effective way of advertisement.

This video belong to Neil Patel

Pillars of social media marketing

Strategy:

The first thing to do is to sit back and look for a deep view of what you want to achieve before diving right in. You need to devise a strategy according to the desired goals. Developing a business strategy will constitute the following:

Goals

You need to have clear targets and goals for your business activity. This is very important as it will set the direction for your digital and online marketing campaign activity accordingly. You need to ask yourself what you want to achieve. Is it brand awareness or generation of more website traffic and leads?

In either case, your strategy will reflect the set goals that you formulate at this early stage. Therefore, clarity of goals and targets is of utmost importance at this stage.

Once a direction is set, your social media campaign will help you in executing the tasks and getting your goals conquered.

Platforms:

As we have seen above, there are plenty of social media platforms available to be hit by your digital marketing campaign. These include major platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, and Snapchat, and a few slightly smaller platforms such as Tumbler, Messenger, and WeChat.

You need to carefully determine your target audience and choose your social media platform keeping in view what your target audience uses the most.

Content:

The next question that may arise is what type of content should be used for attracting a wider range of audiences. Should it be a formal, educational and informational content or a light version of entertainment?

You can have either of these and assess carefully the response of the respective audience. Once you analyze the response, you can shift to a more preferable content category if the current one doesn’t work as expected.

Planning and publishing:

What’s the key requirement of a successful social media marketing campaign? We’ll elaborate this in detail in upcoming chapters but for now, let’s just summarize it in a simple rule.

And the rule is a continuous social media presence. Successful campaign managers have learned this rule that the more they are showing an active presence on social media, the more likely their content will be seen by the audience.

Consider this, there are more than 3 billion users of social media and most of them are posting stuff on these platforms. For your content to stay alive, you need to be consistent in publishing the content. Otherwise, it will be buried under tons of other published content.

For consistent posting of content, you need to create and plan your content ahead of time and at every time; there must be an inventory of content ready to be published.

No back lag is acceptable.

Engagement:

Another important pillar of social media marketing is the level of engagement that the customers and the business owners can have. The more growth and brand awareness achieved, the more responsibility should also be taken up by the business owner.

At that stage, people will take up their opinions regarding your brand on social media. This could be direct or indirect engagements with the brand. This leads to the point that you must carefully see what the engagement is about.

In the case of positive feedback, comments, tags, or social media posts, you can engage in a friendlier manner and surprise them with your counter-responses. In other cases, a corrective engagement should be offered from your side to tackle any negative energy.

That’s why a review of your social media notifications must be carefully done. Doing it manually can be an inefficient way. Therefore, you may check for any social media listening and engagement tools to execute the tasks efficiently.

Advertising & Analytics

Managing a series of simultaneous social media campaigns can be a gruesome task. For successfully running multiple advertising campaigns, you can choose to get the help of different automotive social media advertising tools. These can manage several campaigns running simultaneously with automating processes and optimization of personalized ads.

Also, advertising on different websites may require a certain amount of funds. You have to select and personalize these ads with the target audience in mind, based on their demographics, interests, hobbies, and lifestyles.

Why periodic analysis?

Analysis of your content periodically is a must thing to do. Based on the performance and impact on the audience, timely changes are necessary.

Besides, social media analytics tools can be engaged in measuring the performance of your content. These will measure how much positive feedback you have received from the audience and whether they like it or not.

Timely decisions will help in achieving the objectives. Also, you need good decisions to make your business and online work long-term. The analysis is the key to decision making and decision making is key to success. There is no other way to achieve that.

Final thoughts

To sum up, the efficient use of social media platforms for business activities is the need of the hour. With millions of users worldwide, one cannot deny the power that social media has become in the modern era. People spend hours on these platforms just for getting to know what’s happening in the world.

In the meantime, the smart thing to do is using these worldwide platforms to your advantage. This will generate more sales and leads as millions of successful businesses have done.

We have jotted down some key considerations to make our readers aware of what to expect from social media marketing. In the coming chapters, we will explore this topic in detail.

If you need to hire the expertise of market professionals, you can visit Fiver.

Stay tuned for more exciting chapters ahead.