What is Social Media Marketing?

Social Media Marketing or SMM as the name itself states marketing through social media.

Marketing could be anything; it could be your brand or product of your business or personal branding.  So, social media marketing is a form of internet marketing which involves creating and sharing content on social media networks for achieving your branding goals.

The marketing strategy has now moved from traditional marketing to social media marketing. Most of the people believe that there are two types of Marketing.

1. Old traditional way of marketing approach – This could be Radio, TV, Newspaper and Magazines and
2. A new way of Digital Marketing which is through Social Mediaplatforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, Reddit and so on.

Now, let us understand how social media platforms play a vital role in marketing.

Social media has been growing exponentially every year. Statistics shows that there are almost 3 billion active users of social media in the world. That is 40% of the entire world.

As consumers have started to use digital devices like Smartphones, Tablets, Laptops etc, businesses are forced to adapt social media marketingfor improvising their brand identity.

However, the question is, is it worth to promote your business through social media? The answer is yes because 90% of the active social media users access social networks through mobile and no matter whatever your business is, there is a definite chance that your audience, prospects and customers are active on social media which cannot be ignored.

Social media platforms play a key role in connecting the audience with your brand; promote business, increase sales, increase brand loyalty, increase brand awareness, higher brand authority, building relationships, gain valuable consumer insights, maintaining your personal brand identity, customer experiences, drivemore traffic to your website, higher conversions  and many more.

This involves lot of engagement posts on your social media profiles, engaging your followers, analysing your results and running social media ads. When executed correctly, social media platforms are very powerful measurable solution.

Social media marketing is an amazing way to build your business online. It requires lot of dedication, passion, creativity, consistency to proceed in the right path. If you have not entered into social media till now, take a moment to look at these below 5 major social media marketing tips that are really helpful to improve your business’s social presence.

1. Strategy:This social media marketing strategy is a powerful weapon to start your business and plays a major part in the growth of your company. It lets you analyse, set relevant goals and helps in planning the business.
2. Planning: Before posting anything on social media, we need to have a proper plan. Research about latest market trends, identify the target audience and identify the proper social platform to use for your business.

• Engagement: When your business starts growing, the reach also eventually increases. You will be having lot of things to take care. Starting with maintaining a good social profile to interacting with your customers on different social medial platforms, you will be on the edge of the marketing campaign. So, having a good engagement ratio will help you with that.  The best part is we can track our engagement ratio by using the engagement tools like Buffer etc.
• Analytics: In social media, we can promote any product. Analysing your leads from social media, tracking them and converting them is very important. We can use different analytics tools like Google Analytics etc which help to analyse your websites performance.

• Advertising: Have you ever seen any ads which pop up while watching a video? These are the advertisements for promotions. Social media is so powerful that you can manage the status of who can view your advertisement (target audience). You can always use Google ads, LinkedIn ads, Instagram sponsored ads etc.

How to choose the right social media platform?

Well, there are many platforms as mentioned before, opting for the correct platform yields good results in the long run. The chances are what’s right for me may be not be right for you.

LinkedIn – If you are in B2B, the chances are LinkedInis going to be the best social network for you. This is one of the professional social media marketing sites.

Twitter– This is also a good social media marketing tool for B2B, but LinkedIn is typically better.

Facebook-If you are in B2C, Facebook does really well. Some of the leading industries on FB include Financial services, Telecom, Technology, Gaming, Retail and many more.

Instagram-If you are in B2C, Instagram also does really well. Stories go really well in Instagram.

Youtube-It works both for B2B and B2C. It is the number one place for creating and sharing video content and it is a powerful social media marketing tool.

Now, here is the thing, you also have to look at what type of content you like to create. If you are really good with Videos, you probably should start with Youtube or LinkedIn.

Facebook is much more competitive and people don’t search videos over here. In regard to Youtube, you can get the longevity even though you don’t have subscribers, you can still get more traffic over time.

If you are going for older demographic, Facebook is amazing.

If you are going for younger demographic, Instagram and Snapchat are amazing.

Now that you got an idea of which platforms to use, jump into the social media platforms and explore.

Conclusion

Your competitors are already active on social media which means there is a probability of diversion of social media traffic of your business to their business and thus their chances of growing in their business increases. So, think if this is the case, the best move is to have at least a presence on each of the major platforms. The faster you start, the faster you gain the benefits.If you are looking to outsource your social media to an agency or hire someone to work for you, you can use the above tips.

The statistics that have been taken are done by researching on Google.