Participation in social networks is possible through Social Media Marketing platforms. They allow businesses to connect and engage with their customers. Share your posts to improve visibility for your company. Entertainment, education, news updates, and marketing are all being carried out through social networking sites. Craft social media strategies and best practices for engagement with users. Use Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to create brand awareness, generate sales, and build online communities. Multiply your reach with Facebook and YouTube Advertising. To connect with business professionals use the social network Linkedin. Social media is about visual storytelling and compelling images. Social Media users who attain a level of credibility in a specific niche and have a large following are called Influencers. Use analytics to show how social media can create value for your business.
What Is Social Media Marketing?
Social Media Marketing is a process to gain attention or traffic via social media websites.
Social Networking Definition
Interaction with other users and people with like-minded interest through the use of dedicated websites and applications.
Social Media Marketing Definition
It is a form of internet marketing that uses social networking websites as its marketing tool involving:
- customer feedback for the campaigns run by way of contests and surveys.
- creating advertisements and shareable content
- establishing social media platforms on most beneficial platforms
- spreading brand awareness and product promotion
Social Media Optimization (SMO) utilizes communities and a number of outlets to promote publicity and increase awareness of a brand, product, or event. RSS feeds, social news, and bookmarking sites, in addition to social networking sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, Blogging & Video sharing websites are the different types of Social Media.
The Different Types Of Social Media Platforms
- Social networking (Facebook, Linked In).
- Microblogging (Twitter, Tumblr).
- Blogging (WordPress, Blogger)
- Photo sharing (Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest).
- Video sharing (YouTube, Facebook Live, Periscope, Vimeo).
- Crowdsourcing (Inc, Ushahidi, Amazon Mechanical Turk)
- Bookmarking (StumbleUpon, Digg, Tumblr, scoop.it)
- Forums (Reddit, Q&A-Quora)
- Reviews (Yelp, Trip Advisor, Zomato)
Evolution of Social Media
Today, Social Media is an integrated part of our lives and popular platforms such as Facebook | Twitter has spread even to the remote corners of the world having internet access. Social Media, in fact, has the ability to connect and share with other users instantaneously.
‘Six Degrees’ was launched in 1997 allowing its users to create a profile and become friends with other users. From here, the internet emerged into an era of instant blogging and messaging.
Towards the end of the millennium, about 100 million people had access to the internet. However, social media was looked at as a hobby and people used chat rooms to make and date new friends and discuss topics with other similar groups of people. The boom of social media was on its anvil.
LinkedIn website in 2002 was the very first social media website. Others drew inspiration from LinkedIn which targeted professionals who wanted to network with one another. Even today it functions in a very similar manner.
How to do Social Media Marketing?
Set Goals
Define your goals, so you are clear about what is to be achieved and what action needs to be performed. Common examples of setting goals are related to brand awareness, sales, ROI, lead generation, drive traffic to your website, find supporters & fans, etc.
Audience
The group of potential customers you want to reach is the targeted audience. To learn more about the target audience use social media insights and URL shortening services for tracking. Your audience needs to be compared and sales analyzed
Social Media Channels
Fill out your company profile & find the right tone and voice for your brand on social media.
Optimize your profiles and pages on social media for SEO, add a CTA, customize URL’s and incorporate company information.
Some best social networks for e-commerce Advertising are:
- Facebook Advertising
- Twitter Advertising
- LinkedIn Advertising
- Pinterest Advertising
- Instagram Advertising
- Snapchat Advertising
Content Strategy
Create your own network of influencer marketing that can put your business before the target audience.
Work on a draft strategic plan with defined goals and resources to accomplish them.
Based on feedback and data you have from social media create content that engages your target audience. If you are a blogger, include your social media profiles as blogging is much more than just Content Marketing and SEO.
Post content about what your users want to see that promote brand awareness, growth, and audience development. Use the power of Influencer Marketing to promote your content.
Track & Measure
Social media tracking allows you to measure the performance of individual social media marketing so that you can identify the most effective strategies.
Metrics for social media are data that give insights that have a bearing on marketing performance and company revenues. eg:
Interact | Research & Analysis
Twitter Analytics, gives you a number of tweets, tweet impressions, profile visits, mentions, and followers. Tools like Hootsuite and TweetDeck allows a simple way to monitor twitter without having to go through hundreds of tweets.
Page Insights is an analytics tool on Facebook which can be used once you get at least 30 likes. It lets you know about your audience and how they engage with your posts. It gives you page post metrics of the number of users the post have reached their clicks and interaction. Booshaka is a service that tracks every time a user engages with one of your Facebook Ad campaigns.
LinkedIn gives you analytical data about company pages. An example is measuring your posts’ engagement and information about user demographics.
Google Alerts sends you an email when someone mentions your business on social media, blog, or websites thereby giving you a chance to respond to your customer.
Social mentions are like a search engine specializing in social media for tracking whenever your keywords appear on many social media sites. Promote and expand your ‘Reach’ using hashtag marketing.
Quintly is a centralized Analytic Tool where tracking effort is available on a single dashboard giving a review of Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and other social media accounts.
Google Analytics measures the traffic to your website. It tells you Where your traffic is coming from? Which links give the clicks? Which URLs are shared & How conversions are taking place? What users are doing on your website? How much time did they spend on your website? etc. Visitors not around your website indicates that you need to produce interesting content to attract them back to your site.
Automation of Social Media
Automation builds brand awareness by always having trending content for customers to engage. It finds new content that can be shared on social media pages and posts to ensure platforms remain active even when the admin is offline.
Automation leads to increased sales by increasing Reach & Conversions, getting more customer word of mouth referrals, establish brand awareness, scale up its presence and become more efficient
Automation methods include scheduling, monitoring, curation, and networking.
Social Media Marketing becomes easier when you can find some great tool from the many that are available to assist you. Some Apps that are available for Marketers to automate Social Media are:
Social Drift: Instagram bot called as ‘securebot’ helps to increase good quality followers
Buffer is a social media scheduling tool. It allows publishing more and better content to your social profiles.
BuzzSumo provides you with insights on what content is working
Unsplash provides high quality and high-resolution images to any users
Canva contains plenty of design tools and resources to allow marketers to create stunning content to generate followers.
Zapier allows you to select a trigger and then action based on the trigger. Automated workflows are created by connecting many different apps.
Social Media Strategy
To view, the pdf file click on social_media_strategy.pdf
Research-Finding-Analysis > Social Media Channels – Facebook | Twitter | Linkedin | Pinterest | Instagram > Target Audience > Message > Company | Strength | Weakness
Competitive Analysis > Competition | Strength | Weakness
Objectives > What & How
Measurable Goals > Define Goals
Execute-Implement-Launch > Message Clarity & Uniformity > Conversation Monitoring > Daily Posting > Reporting Plan – Engagement | Influence | Numbers
Track-Measure-Metrics [Weekly Status Updates] > Engagement Status > Influence Status >Numbers-Network Growth >What Is Working? What Is Not Working? Evaluation & Revisions
Goal Assessment > Revised Goals > New Goals
Benefits of social media
Social media accomplishes the task of building an online community around your brand, who remain loyal, engage and create a valuable environment. You will be able to broadcast your message to promote your product and foster relationships within followers in this community most suited for modern businesses.
Online communities help you learn about your target audience. Feedback and interaction with potential customers can explore their motives and needs that induce them to buy as well as what choices they may have to make a buy decision.
The feedback you gather from the community can be integrated into your business by way of improvements to existing products or packages or customer care or maybe launch new products. Getting familiar with global trends and staying competitive is possible only if you are aware of current conditions which need to be met and adapt to the demanding market.
The goal to maximize “click-through rate” [CTR] ensures visitors actually visit your online store which increases the possibilities of converting them to customers. Local businesses can increase visibility on social networks by making users share product images or promotional schemes and check location thereby improving sales.
Businesses can benefit a lot from using social networks, which is why the implementation of these networks has now become a part of the business. Internet users are active on social networks every day spending a considerable amount of time in these networks. Users trust, interact, communicate, and have been accessing social networks on their mobile devices. Social networks are a new dimension of reality and many businesses claim to have found new customers through the social network.