These days, effective social media marketing is a term found on everyone’s tongue. And the term is associated with the day-to-day life errands of all the people that use the Internet. Social media has been defined by the digital networking trend to collaborate or network with people to share your personal or professional content. The content can range from pictures, blog posts, status updates, videos, status stories, and more.
What is Social Media?
As we have previously seen, social media is the platform for people to network digitally with their friends, family members, and people from all around the world. If you are a professional looking to connect with customers from different domains and parts of the world, then you should use Social media to promote your brand using Social Media Marketing services.
Understanding social media marketing:
Social media marketing is the planning of the content that is targeted towards the endorsement of the business and products on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. The curated content should be specific to your company’s brand and once shared, it can help you increase conversions and promote the awareness behind the brand.
Let us see an example of social media marketing. This would help us understand the term using all the perspectives of the example given here.
I am a particular fan of the Instagram handle of Fossil India, I always find their posts interesting, engaging, and well-organized. They also use relevant hashtags that you can also use when you buy their product. When you use that hashtag, they know that you have tagged them and they sometimes mention your post in their Instagram story.
This makes the interaction between the brand and the customer easy, friendly, and effortless. Fossil India’s Instagram account is the right example to understand the term Social media marketing. Social media marketing is a marketing strategy where the brand uses social media platforms to promote their brand and their products. They target a larger audience using social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. With this strategy, they try to increase more followers for their brands that increase their reach and enlarge the brand’s digital footprint.
Importance of Social Media Marketing:
Every business owner should understand the importance of creating accounts on Social Media. You should be able to figure out the social media marketing strategy that lets you attract and reach more followers for the domains of your business.
Social media marketing is all about reaching a point where you meet your target audience on their level and allowing the interaction between your brand and them. Social media marketing can prove to be extremely beneficial for your brand. But this can depend highly on what platform your target audience spends most of their time. Before delving into social media marketing, let us see how you can strategize the strategy for various platforms:
Facebook has around 1.73 billion daily active users from all around the world. The audience of Facebook consists mainly of Generation X and the millennial audience. And Facebook greatly affects the B2C industry and is best known for creating awareness around the brands. Also, you can target Facebook mainly because it is known as one of the best platforms for the advertisement of your brand and your company.
Twitter takes pride in around 126 million active users worldwide and its audience consists primarily of the millennial audience. It impacts largely the B2B and B2C domains and the platform is best known for creating and maintaining public relations and customer service.
Instagram has so far roped in around 1 billion active users worldwide and has mainly a millennial audience as its primary users. It impacts B2C industries and you can use Instagram to include natural-appearing media, behind-the-scenes content, and user-generated content. You can also include advertising to promote your brand using Instagram.
LinkedIn boasts of around 675 million active users around the world. The audience of this platform largely consists of baby boomers, generation X, and the millennial. You can target the B2C industry using this platform. Moreover, LinkedIn is popular mainly for B2B relationships, development of business, and employment marketing.
Youtube has over 2 million logged-in monthly lists of users which consist of the millennial audience and Generation X. It impacts the B2C industry while you can create awareness around your brand story, entertainment, and how-to videos.
Merits of Social Media Marketing:
There are a million reasons why you should invest your time, money, and resources to target social media marketing. But, we have come up with four basic reasons as to why social media marketing is the right thing to promote your brand.
Let us explore them:
Building awareness around the brand: In the year 2018, the count of people using social media reached over 3.2 billion from all over the world. Due to these many users of social media, you should be able to see how sharing the details of your products and the company details can help you achieve a larger section of the audience. This can help increase brand awareness. It is proven that social media helps a lot in targeting brand awareness by increasing engagement with your target audience. Social engagement is done by targeting the number of likes, comments, reposting, and sharing your content. This indirectly increases the awareness of the brand amongst its target audience and indirectly brings your website a lot of relevant traffic. This can be accomplished by including the links to your website in your user profile, bio, and posts.
- Lead Generation and Increased Conversion:
Social media is the right place where you can introduce, promote and share the information related to your products. This increases the chances of lead generation and conversions. After this step is achieved, it is easy to increase sales since you are targeting the audience that agrees to engage with your brand. And they are the people who follow your social media account to keep themselves updated about the brand and its products.
The following examples can help you understand how to channelize the power of social media marketing to generate more leads:
– To increase user engagement and interaction with your profile, you can arrange contests at regular time intervals on your social media profile.
– You can choose to include links to the website of your company and provide various discount offers in the bio section of your social media profile.
– To announce the products and their launch, you can conduct a live video session on your social media profile where you can interact with your followers and target audience. You can also provide them with product updates, or some news to announce.
– You should start the implementation of the social media marketing campaign on your social media platform(s) at regular intervals.
– Selling your product through your social media profiles becomes easy with Instagram’s shopping characteristic or Facebook’s shop portal. These facilities let the users click on the product to see the price. Based on this, they can choose to buy the product. This allows your customer to buy the product directly from you without interacting with a middle man. He can securely check out from the social media platform after the purchase is made successfully.
2. Enhances your interaction with your customers:
Social media platforms enable you to have direct interaction with your customers and followers. This strengthens the relationship between your customers and your brand and also lasts for a long time. For this, you have to respond to their comments and queries that the customers have posted beneath your post. You can provide a lot of assistance to your customers through the social media platform.
On the other hand, you can inquire from your customers about your products and their pain points. You can also arrange a giveaway for your customers to let them know how much you value their support and inputs.
3. Lessons to learn from your competitors:
Through social media, you can keep an eye on your competitors without them knowing about your prying eyes. You can monitor their social media marketing strategies, their marketing campaigns, the products that they promote, and more. Moreover, you can also see their interaction and the depth of the interaction with their customers.
Social media lets you see what works and what doesn’t work for your brand, which in turn lets you decide on what you should or should not change. This should be specific to your brand and your brand story.
Social Media Metrics:
Social media metrics are the parameters on the basis of which, you define the success of the post under consideration. It defines how the post has impacted your target audience on various social media platforms. There are ten basic parameters or metrics that you should monitor:
- Engagement: This defines the number of clicks, likes, comments, and reposting of your post on social media. A specific type of user engagement is saving the posts on Instagram or pinning a post on Pinterest.
- Reach: The number of people who have viewed the content related to your page or profile is your reach.
- Followers: It is the number of people who clicked the “follow” button on your profile and regularly engage and interact with your posts in their news feed.
- Impression: It is the number of times your post is seen but the user may or may not have clicked the post. This happens when generally the user is scrolling through their regular news feed but don’t click anything.
- Video views: The number of views a video gets after it is posted on Facebook, Snapchat, or Instagram.
- Profile visits: It is defined by the number of people who have opened your social media profile on the respective social media platform.
- Mentions: It is the number of times your customers or target audience mentions you or “tags” you in their posts.
- Tags: Tags define the number of times a user has used the company’s name or your hashtag in one of their posts.
- Reposts: This is the number of times when a user or number of users share your content on their profile on the social media platform.
- Shares: These are the number of times when a user takes a post from your profile and chooses to share it with his network of friends and other people.
Conclusion:
We saw various social media platforms in this article yet what we saw is just the tip of an iceberg. To know more, go to our second chapter to understand every platform with minute details.
