What is Social Media Marketing?

This is a powerful way to improve brand awareness, build a loyal follower base, attract new customers, and increase sales through social media.

Social media promotion works equally well for small companies and startups and mature and large businesses, both in the field of B2C and B2B companies.

Your customers are their spending a lot of time and interacting with different brands through social media. And if you still do not communicate with your audience through Vkontakte, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, or YouTube, sooner or later, you may lose the loyalty of your audience, and at the same time, lose to competitors.

Quality social media marketing will take your business to the next level. Thanks to useful SMM tools, your brand will gain admirers, and your company will gain new customers and sales growth.

Over the years, with the increase in the number of users of various social networks, social media marketing has become a handy tool. But at the same time, competition for the attention of each user has grown. However, this does not mean that social media marketing is no longer useful.

What Is Social Media Marketing? (SMM Marketing)

Social media marketing, aka SMM marketing or simply SMM (SMM), is a form of online marketing that involves creating and distributing content on social media to achieve your business marketing and branding goals.

In addition to free publishing of posts (texts, videos, images, and other types of content) that stimulate audience engagement, SMM also includes promotion through paid advertising on social networks.

You can choose the social media platform that suits your business and start developing your own social media marketing plan today.

Why Your Business Needs Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing helps you achieve many goals:

• driving traffic to your website;
• Increase in the number of sales;
• increasing brand awareness;
• creating a brand image;
• improving the quality of communication and interaction with target audiences.

The larger your social media audience, the easier it will be for you to fill your sales funnel with inbound traffic and increase sales.

Of course, You can do without this digital marketing channel, and you don't need to be present on all platforms. But if this tool can help you achieve your goals more effectively, then there is no point in ignoring it.

Social media marketing: Begin with a plan.

Before you begin establishing social media marketing campaigns, decide on your business goals. After all, starting a social media marketing campaign without a strategy is like wandering through the woods without a map - yes, it will be fun, but you will most likely, get lost.

Top Social Media Marketing Tips

Ready to start your exciting SMM journey? Here are tips to assist you to do effective online social media marketing.

1. Do your research

Study your target audience and create a client profile. The first step to creating a social media marketing strategy is identifying your ideal customer and the target audience is. Determine for whom you want to create content and what is unique about these people. This will help you target specifically their interests and needs when creating and publishing posts.

2. Study your competitors

Subscribe to your significant competitors and study their behavior and strategies for promoting content on social networks. How often do they post content? What time? What platforms or online communities do they use for this? What influencers do they involve in their social media promotion?

If your competitors are using a channel or marketing tool on their social media to give visible positive results, analyze it. Study them under a microscope and take successful tactics into service.

3. Make a content plan for social media

As said before, creating an SMM plan is of great importance. Do not start randomly posting random content on your pages, trying to promote your products or services. Make a well-thought-out plan for 1-2 weeks in advance, which will serve as a timetable and give a clear understanding of what, when, and where to publish.

Create engaging and unique social media content. As with other areas of online marketing, content is the backbone of social media marketing. You should regularly publish precious information that will be interesting and useful to your customers. The content you share on social media may include:

• Images;
• Video;
• Infographics;
• Practical guides;
• Links;
• Text posts;
• Audio files;
• Other.

4. Maintain your brand image consistently

Using social media in marketing allows your business to project your brand image onto various social platforms.

Each platform has its unique medium, format, and tone of voice. However, remember that your brand (whether it is friendly, fun, or strict and reliable) should remain consistent across all social networks where your brand is present.

5. Use social media to promote your content

SMM is the perfect channel for promoting the best content from your website or blog. Once you build a loyal audience on social media, you can be sure readers will find your freshly published content right away.

Plus, engaging blog content will help you gain a lot more followers. Content marketing and SMM complement each other wonderfully in terms of efficiency. Also, content marketing uses content reorientation. This approach allows you to increase your target audience's reach and get the most out of one piece of content.

6. Share links to other people's content

Even though SMM involves the use and promotion of its unique content, links to third-party resources (articles) can be handy. If you are sure that a third-party source offers useful and valuable information for your readers that they will definitely like, link to it without a twinge of conscience.

Links to external sources increase the level of trust and reliability. Plus - you can also get links to your profile or website.

7. Always measure the efficiency

For example, using Google Analytics. You cannot measure the success of your SMM strategies without tracking data.

Google Analytics is a great social media marketing tool to help you identify and measure your most successful marketing techniques and identify losing strategies. Include tags and UTM tags in the links you share on social media to track the effectiveness of your SMM campaigns.

This way, you can monitor regularly and quickly understand what works and what doesn't, identify trends, trends, and growth opportunities.

And be sure to monitor the performance of each social platform separately. Don't mix all your social media traffic and sales into a single whole.

Separate sources. This data will help you determine which content and on which platform is best received by your audience.

Here are the nine most important metrics for tracking your social media marketing performance:

• Involvement. It includes clicks, comments, likes, reposts, and replies to your social media posts. There are also platform-specific engagement metrics such as "Saved" posts on Instagram and "Pinned" posts on Pinterest.
• Coverage. The number of people who have seen contents associated with your page or profile is your reach.
• Subscribers. This is the number of people on your profile who have clicked the Subscribe button and regularly see your content in their news feeds.
• Impressions. This is the number of times your post has been viewed. This indicator does not depend on whether your audience is responding to the post or not. The number of impressions is formed even when users view the news feed and do not click anything.
• Number of video views. This metric is relevant to YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, or any other social channel that allows video viewing. You get statistics on the views of your videos.
• The number of profile visits. The number of people who opened your page on social networks is equal to the number of visits to your profile. This can be seen on LinkedIn.
• Mentions. This is the number of times your profile has been mentioned by your followers in their posts.
• Tags. This is when your followers add your company profile name or your hashtags to a post.
• Reposts. When someone from your audience posts some of your content to their profile.
• Select the most critical performance indicators that match your goals and objectives and monitor them regularly to analyze the correctness of your strategy.

Experiment and test

Not everything always goes smoothly with brands on social media. Therefore, do not be upset if, for some reason, your strategy did not work as you planned. Learn from mistakes.

Analyze your performance. Identify the reasons for the failure. Find out what worked and what didn't. Then do more of what brings results and stop wasting time on what turned out to be a failure.

If your strategy is to drive traffic from social media to your site, then consider optimizing your site first before changing anything on social media.

Overall, look more expansive at the big picture and experiment with new approaches.

How To Choose The Right Media Platform For SMM

Here is a quick rundown of how to use social media in marketing, taking into account the unique characteristics of each platform.

• Facebook

Facebook's laid-back, friendly environment requires an active social media strategy.

Facebook is where people come to relax and chat with friends. Therefore, the tone of your messages should be calm and friendly.

Remember, organic reach on Facebook is extremely limited. Consider paid ad placement, which can provide very granular targeting.

Pros:

• There is almost everything on Facebook.
• Detailed targeting with paid ads.

Cons:

• Big competition.
• Low organic reach.
• Advertising prices are continually increasing.
• Instagram

This social network is having its best times, as its growth rate breaks all records. For businesses, this, in turn, is both an opportunity and a threat. On the one hand, more users mean more reach. On the other hand, this means a lot of content and a lot of competition.

Instagram is unlikely to be suitable for B2B companies, but it is great for online retail. What Instagram does is to work effectively with influencers (accounts with a large follower base). You can achieve much more efficiency by partnering with an influencer who will promote your product, rather than spending the same money driving cold traffic to your site through paid advertising.

Pros:

• High level of involvement.
• Lots of influencers to collaborate with.

Cons:

• Organic reach is declining due to high competition.
• Not suitable for B2B companies.
• Youtube

YouTube is the most popular and best video marketing platform (publishing and promoting video content) and an incredibly powerful social media marketing tool. Many companies try to create "viral" video content; however, in this case, the chances of success are negligible.

Much more effective is to focus on creating helpful, enlightening how-to videos that have a strong chance of becoming evergreen content and generating traffic for years to come through SEO optimization.

In addition to their actual value to the audience, these videos have the added benefit of ranking in Google search results. Therefore, if you have the opportunity to include video in your content strategy, then you should pay special attention to this format.

Pros:

• The video format is gaining popularity.
• YouTube rewards good content with a significant amount of organic reach.
• A great place to try viral marketing strategies.

  Cons:

  • Creating high-quality video content requires specialized skills and a lot of resources.
  • The popularity of the platform also creates high competition for the user's attention.
  • Telegram

  As you know, Telegram is primarily a messenger. But with the addition of new functionality and the emergence of chats and channels, Telegram acquired elements of a classic social network.

  The most effective tool is the Telegram channel. You can create a channel and regularly publish short informational posts that will grab the attention of your target audience. As practice shows, both B2C and B2B companies succeed in lead generation via Telegram.

  For example, you can often find channels of travel agencies that publish hot offers for tourists and also channels of marketing or web studios that share cases and expertise to find new clients.

  Pros:

  • Due to the nature of the messenger, the content that is published on the channel receives significant coverage thanks to alerts disguised as private messages.
  • Convenient content format for users.
  • Possibility of fast channel growth due to simple promotion through other channels.

  Cons:

  • Due to the growing popularity of Telegram channels, competition is also growing, which makes the struggle for user attention even more challenging.
  • Pinterest

  Pinterest is one of the fastest-growing SMM trends. This platform is explicitly focused on visual content, namely images—ideal for eCommerce businesses and brands promoting their products.

  Pinterest allows companies to showcase their product offerings and develop brand identity through beautiful, unique pinboards. As you strategize for this platform, keep in mind that women are its primary audience. If they represent your target audience, you should be on Pinterest.

  Pros:

  • People who spend time on this platform are most often looking for purchase ideas. This, in turn, ensures high traffic conversion from this platform.
  • Large organic reach.

  Cons:

  • The nature of this platform assumes a vast number of publications. You need to post a lot and often to get noticed.
  • Twitter

  Twitter is an SMM tool that allows you to broadcast your updates on the Internet in a short form.

  If you're looking to grow your Twitter account, be sure to dilute your tweets for specials, discounts, and news with hilarious tweets that convey the tone of your brand.

  Don't forget to retweet messages in which people mention you, and if possible, answer subscribers' questions.

  Twitter is an SMM tool, the essence of which is dialogue and communication. So make sure you actively engage with your followers and build communication.

  Pros:

  • Simple and convenient format.

  Cons:

  • A very noisy platform. It isn't effortless to get noticed. Therefore, you will have to publish often, a lot, and with high quality.
  • LinkedIn

  LinkedIn is a social network for professionals where people exchange contacts and communicates about business and career opportunities. It's an excellent platform for engaging in a professional dialogue with people from similar industries and sharing content with like-minded people.

  Also great for a job posting and employee internal communication.

  This platform will help you establish yourself as a leader and build trust in your industry.

  Pros:

  • High concentration of people from the business community
  • Great platform for B2B companies, as most people are open to new opportunities for their business.

  Cons:

  • Like Twitter, LinkedIn is a very noisy platform.
  • Almost no one scrolls through the news feed like on Facebook or Instagram. Therefore, it won't be easy to get organic reach.
  • Reddit

  Reddit and similar social platforms (Stumble Upon or Digg) are ideal for sharing interesting content.

  With over 2 billion page viewers per month, Reddit has incredible potential for social media marketing. However, marketers should be aware that the platform only welcomes genuinely unique, engaging content.

  Posting to Reddit is always a game with fire. If your post is perceived as spam or is caught doing something to sell, the community will not have mercy on you. You will most likely be banned a few minutes after posting.

  But if you have content that is useful to the demanding Reddit community (and these are cocky, free-thinking, and obsessed young people), you will receive tremendous benefits and, of course, earn such valuable traffic.

  Pros:

  • Great coverage and fast feedback.
  • Perfect if you need to validate an idea or collect feedback on your service or products.

  Cons:

  • The audience on Reddit abhors trying to sell or promote their business. Therefore, everything should be done as naturally as possible.
  • Quora

  It is the most extensive Q&A (questions and answers) platform. For a long time, marketers have underestimated this place, but as practice shows, more and more companies are betting on Quora.

  High-quality content in text format makes it possible to get colossal reach and drive targeted traffic to your website. All that’s needed is to provide exciting and valuable answers to the questions asked by platform users.

  Apart from that, Quora is also a source of content for large publications. Excellent answers are republished on Forbes, Time, Business Insider, Inc, and other sites.

  Pros:

  • High organic reach.
  • The ability to get additional coverage and backlinks to the site if your content is paid attention to by large publications.

  Cons:

  • Most of the popular questions have already been answered, and it will be difficult to interrupt them in terms of quality and originality.

  However, you shouldn't overload yourself and try to embrace the immensity. We don't necessarily need to be on all of these social networks. It is enough to choose the tools that best suit you and your business. And it is better to concentrate on one, reach a certain level of success there, and only then switch to the next.

  Find out where your primary audience lives and be active on this platform.

  Armed with the knowledge of what each social network is and what requirements it has for you, you can create good content for each of them.