Social Media Marketing Explained for Beginners
Social media marketing is an essential part of the e-marketing plan these days and an effective and reliable way for large and small companies and startups to reach the target customers of their business.
Customers interact more with brands through social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and many other popular social networking sites.
Facebook exceeded 2 billion monthly active users as of the second quarter of 2017. In 2020, the number of users exceeded 2,603 million active users, becoming the largest social networking site.
If you are not using this type of marketing to communicate directly with your audience and get new customers, you are missing out! Marketing on social media can achieve great success for your business and significantly increase profits.
What is social media marketing?
Social media marketing, or social media marketing, is a form of online marketing that involves creating and sharing content on social media networks in order to achieve your brand’s marketing goals.
Social media marketing includes activities such as posting text, images, videos, and other content that attracts audience attention along with paid social media advertising.
I wrote this article about marketing via social media and giving you the best advice on marketing via social media and training to improve your company’s social presence on social media platforms.
How can social media marketing help you achieve your goals?
- Increase visitor traffic to your website.
- Build customers and make more sales.
- Brand support.
- Increase brand recognition.
- Improve communication and interaction with target audiences.
- The larger your target audience and the more engaged you are with social media, the easier it will be to achieve every other marketing goal in your plan!
Steps of marketing via social media
If you are ready to start marketing on social media, follow these steps:
1. Good planning
The first step is to think about your social media strategy. In order to start marketing through social media networks, you must develop your plan first!
With these tips, you can start developing your social media marketing plan. Before you start creating marketing campaigns across popular social media platforms, consider these questions:
- What are your business goals?
- How can social media help you achieve your business goals?
- What is the age range of your audience?
- What is the target gender? male or female? Or both?
- What are your audience’s interests? How do you reach the largest possible target audience? Think about how your audience thinks! Think well!
Some businesses use social media to increase awareness of their brand, while others use it with the goal of increasing website followers and sales. Social media can also help you create engagement around your brand, create an engaged community, and serve as a customer support channel.
From my point of view, starting a social media marketing process without a strategy is like navigating a ship at sea without a compass – you may be enjoying the clear sky and the color blue, thinking that you will arrive in the end, but you will be lost!
Maybe it is compatible with marketing via Twitter while you are marketing via Facebook! You will fail greatly.
Here are some questions you should ask yourself before developing your social media marketing plan:
- What do you want to achieve through social media marketing?
- Where will your target audience go?
- What message do you want to send to your customers through social media marketing?
- What is your type of business and what is the most appropriate communication network to reach your target customers?
For example, e-commerce sites or tourism businesses can get a lot of engagement on photo networking sites like Instagram or Pinterest.
A business or marketing company may find more power and engagement on social networks like Twitter or Linkedin.
2. Content Planning (Publishing)
Posting on social media is as simple as sharing a photo or video, just like sharing content on your Facebook profile.
But you’ll need to plan your content in advance rather than automatically creating and posting content. Also, to make sure you’re maximizing your reach on social media, you need to post great content that your audience will love, at the right time, moment and occasion.
There are a variety of social media publishing scheduling tools, such as Buffer Publish, that can help you automatically publish your content at your preferred time.
This saves you time and allows you to reach your audience when they can interact with your content.
Make sure you publish regularly and provide valuable information to customers so that they find a useful and interesting experience. The content you share can include images or videos, infographics, how-to guides, and much more. You may need an integrated team to publish regularly.
3. Unique content
When using social media for marketing, the content you provide must be unique and original (do not copy the content) to gain more followers, fans, and potential customers.
It is also an opportunity to link to articles on your site. If you provide links from other sources but they are of good value, do not be ashamed to publish them.
Coordinating and linking with external sources improves trust and reliability on social networks and between you, your customers and followers, you may get some links in return.
4. Listen and share
As your business grows on social media, conversations about your brand will increase. People will comment on your social media posts, tag you in their posts, or send you direct messages.
People may even be talking about your brand on social media without your knowledge, so you’ll need to monitor social media posts about your brand.
If it is a positive comment, you will get a chance to surprise and delight them. Otherwise, you can offer support and correct the situation before it gets worse.
You can manually check all your notifications across all social media platforms, but this is not efficient and you will not see posts that have not flagged you.
Alternatively, you can use the social media listening and engagement tool which collects all of your business’ social media mentions and messages, including posts that haven’t tagged you.
5. Analysis
All the time, whether you’re publishing content or sharing on social media, you’ll need to know how you’re performing.
- Are you reaching more people on social media than last month?
- How many positive mentions do you get per month?
- How many people have used your brand’s hashtag in their social media posts?
- The social media platforms themselves provide this information.
To get more in-depth analytics information or for easy comparison, you can use an analytics tool like Buffer Analyze.
6. Advertisement
When you have money to grow your social media marketing, one thing you can consider is social media advertising. Social media advertising allows you to reach a wider audience than those who follow you, giving you the opportunity to reach potential customers.
Advertising on social media platforms is less expensive than advertising through search engines.
Advertising on social media platforms is so powerful nowadays that you can determine exactly who you are showing your ads to, in addition to playing on word of mouth for the purpose of marketing and publishing through the use of copywriting templates. You can create target audiences based on demographics, interests, and other behaviors.
When you’re running multiple social media advertising campaigns at once, you may consider using a social media advertising tool to make bulk changes, automate processes, and optimize your ads.
7. Monitor competitors
It is very important to monitor your competitors in your field. Competitors can provide valuable information such as new keywords or other important information that will benefit you in one way or another.
If your competitors use a specific social network or advertise using a link, text, image or video.
It seems that this is achieving good results and sales for them. You should consider doing the same thing, but doing it better!