Social media marketing is the method of using social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Youtube, etc to connect with your audience to build your brand, increase sales and drive website traffic. This involves publishing valuable content on social media profiles, engaging your followers, analyzing results, and running social media advertisements.
How does social media marketing work?
Social media marketing first started with publishing. Businesses were sharing their content on social media to generate traffic to their websites and, hopefully, sales. But social media has grown far beyond being just a post to broadcast content.
Nowadays, businesses use social media in different ways. For example, a business that is concerned about what people are saying about its brand would monitor social media conversations and respond to relevant mentions (social media listening and engagement). A business that wants to understand how it’s performing on social media would analyze its reach, engagement, and sales on social media with an analytics tool (social media analytics). A business that wants to reach a specific set of audiences at scale would run highly-targeted social media ads (social media advertising).
As a whole, these are often also known as social media management.
Steps involved in social media marketing
There are five golden steps in social media marketing that helps advertisers to achieve their goal.
- Strategy
- Planning and publishing
- Listening and engagement
- Analytics and reporting
- advertising
Strategy
Before you publish your ad you have to make a strategy. What are your goals? Some businesses are using social media for brand awareness, some for website traffic or sales. Social media can also help you generate engagement around your brand, create a community, and serve as a customer support channel for your customers. Apart from that, you have to decide on which platform you want to publish your content. You will also have to decide what type of content you want to share on social media. Is it images, videos, or links? Is it educational or entertaining content? You should have a clear plan about what you are going to do.
Planning and Publishing
There are a million people using social media nowadays. So we have to plan and publish our posts accordingly. There should be proper content which attracts them and we should also think about our future customers. Publishing on social media is as simple as sharing an image, video, or blog on social media. But you have to keep in mind the content and at the right time.
Listening and Engagement
If you are getting noticed, it is your duty to respond to them keep engaged. Their engagements can be like, share, comment, etc. so it is your duty to listen to them and reply to them in a positive manner. In that way, you can increase your business. You can either check manually or use a social media listening and engagement tool to respond to their engagements.
Analytics and Reporting
You will want to know how your ads are performing you got how many engagements. Did the number of visits increase? all these things you want to know. There are tools available for analyzing and reporting such things.
Advertising
When you have more funds to invest, you can consider social media platforms for advertising. In this way, you can reach a wider audience and can decide exactly to who you want to display your ad. You can create target audiences based on their demographics, interests, behaviors, and more.
