Believe it or not, social media is one of the fastest growing trends in recent years, and if you check on Wikipedia, it lists over 200 social media platforms that are doing remarkably well. Social media has just not helped people connect with each other, but it has also helped many businesses as one of the most effective digital marketing tools. This marketing technique using social media is most commonly referred to as social media marketing.
Social media marketing describes the marketing strategies the marketers use to boost their business, over distinct social media platforms. It is simply building audience-oriented content and sharing it with them, on various social media platforms, to obtain leads to help in the growth of the business.
But it isn’t as simple as it seems to be. Since most of the businesses are already active on social media and promoting their business over it (and with a business I mean almost every type of business), it has become essential for every marketer to follow a proper strategy to get the most of the results from social media marketing.
The Importance of Social Media for Business: One of the first and the most successful social media platforms, i.e. Facebook, was created just to help people connect with each other, despite the difference in the locations, language and culture between them. And yes, it did the job perfectly. In the beginning, it was considered a distraction for kids. But soon, many businesses understood the importance of it and started promoting their business over Facebook, as it was a single medium that could help them to cross the borders, seek more audience and make them aware about their business, services as well as products.
In the past ten years, not only Facebook has evolved as a business marketing platform, but there are so many other platforms that are serving the purpose exceptionally well.
The only answer to the question of why social media marketing is important for any business is ‘user engagement’. Including Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp, people are more active on those social media platforms than any other medium of marketing. Reportedly, people are using these platforms every single day, and not once but more than once. The common people have become habitual of exploring the various social media platforms as these not only help them connect with people but also serve as the medium of entertainment, that eventually, is benefitting various businesses with their marketing strategies. The traditional advertising medias had never gained much of user engagement like the various social media platforms derive every day.
Benefits of Social Media Marketing: Social media has helped many individual content creators from almost every field to build their own identity, and many businesses are also yielding great results from it as a marketing tool. Following are the major benefits of using social media as a marketing tool:
• Branding of Your Business: As I mentioned before, people are constantly shuffling between various apps over their phones, it is easy to reach more people, which is definitely good for the branding of your business.
• Drive Traffic & Generate New Leads: Out of over 7.5 billion population of the world, 3.77 billion people are internet users, and 2.8 billion people are active on social media. Where else can you get such a huge audience? Though you cannot target every single person from this huge number of people, you can target to more people on social media than over any other source of advertising. Therefore, social media platforms are more effective when you want to get more traffic to your business website or generate more leads.
• Establishing Yourself as an Authority: Building your own brand by putting relevant content on your social media handles, taking part in discussions, answering the business-related queries of the users, over those social media platforms, helps you in establishing your business as an authority.
• Improving Your Customer Service: When you interact directly with your customer and reply to their queries, you serve them better and build trust for your brand among them.
Social Media Marketing Strategy for Your Business: At the beginning of social media, it was easy to get a few likes and share on the posts, and it did not even matter that much as those posts used to be personal and were not used for the marketing purposes. But today, as competition has increased and most of the businesses are actively using the different social media platforms to advertise and promote their services, it has become difficult for them to drive the effective results without an effective strategy.
So before stepping into social media marketing, you must build an effective plan and strategise everything in a way that you can retrieve most effective results through it.
Strategising social media marketing involves the following important steps:
1) Set Social Media Marketing Goals: Setting goals is the foremost thing to do while making a strategy to accomplish any task. Similarly, to build an effective strategy for the social media marketing of your business, you need to set the objectives that you want to achieve through it. The objectives must be relevant, measurable and attainable. Also, you must set a time limit for every goal you want to achieve through social media marketing.
2) Research: Social media is a platform, where you can directly target your audience, so before moving ahead, you need to research and know about your audience. Knowing your audience means to know their needs and their expectations. The better you know your audience, or the customers, the better you can serve them and create good content for them.
3) Picking the Right Social Media Platforms: Admit that even though there are over 200 social media platforms, you cannot use all of them for marketing. You need to pick a few, and also, the ones that are relevant to your business as well as your target audience.
4) Differentiate Between the Content: Though social media is a single entity, the social media platforms are all different from each other. So while putting up your content on any of those, you must be able to differentiate between the various social media platforms. For example, on Facebook, you can post a longer text, image, or even a longer video, but there is a limit on Instagram for the length of a video and even for words for the caption. Also, Twitter lets its users upload only 280 characters. So for every other platform, the criteria for the content will be different, and you must be aware of that.
5) Paid vs. Organic Social Media: In the early days of the emergence of social media, you could easily get likes and shares as well as leads through it. But today, business is also investing in overpaid promotions. Though with good efforts, you can also get good organic traffic, paying for marketing of your business also is not a bad idea. The choice is all yours. Also, you can opt for both which is even better.
6) Track Meaningful Metrics: Most of the social media platforms let you track the likes, comments, share and other elements. It is very important for your business to track all these metrics such that you can measure the progress and get to know what are the things that are getting most of the user engagement. You can also use Google Analytics, or any other third party social media monitoring and reporting tools to get the track of various factors that contribute to your marketing goals.
The Major Social Media Platforms:
Facebook: Facebook is one of the oldest but effective social media platform, which has over 2 billion monthly active users. Posting one or two posts every day on your Facebook page can be really helpful for your business. You can also create a group or join other groups for the advertisement of your services. The platform also offers paid promotions.
Twitter: Twitter is the source of most genuine traffic, and even posting fifteen tweets a day is not enough for this platform.
Instagram: Many of the businesses, from small to bigger scale, are using this platform to promote their services. Instagram is not only good for sharing content and get more traffic but there are many people who are directly selling their products on this very platform.
YouTube: This free platform is one of the most used ones among the people. The average daily watch time for YouTube is about one billion hours, and that is definitely huge. So making good videos and posting once a week on YouTube is also another method to spread awareness about your business. Also, you can produce ads for your business to run with the other creator’s videos.
LinkedIn: A fifteen years old platform with 467 million members, is solely a business-oriented platform. Here you can help people expand their network by putting up a professional post every day. Here too, you can join various groups and even create your own and share relevant information with other people. LinkedIn also lets you run B2B advertisements for your business.
Pinterest: Since Pinterest has been around for over a decade, it has been opened for all since only a few years. Pinterest is like a scrapbook and one of the most popular social media platforms. Here there is no boundation on the niche and you can advertise your business by putting up one or two posts on the platform every day. Also, you can take the help of other Pinterest influencers to market your product or services.
Along with those social media platforms, there are Quora, Tumblr, Reddit, Snapchat, Tumblr, Medium, Periscope and many other platforms that can be more relevant to your business as well as the target audience.
Social media has become ever evolving and following the right strategy for your business promotion you can get along with this most effective trend. If you are not using any of the social media platforms to promote your business, you must get started asap, otherwise, you will be lacking the most important business marketing strategy.