Social Media Marketing
As you scroll through your social media accounts, multiple times you will see advertisements, promotions and offers. Even you also follow a lot of businesses of your own choices. Like you there are hundred thousand of people following business pages and getting updated.
These all are related to social media marketing. It is the most popular form of marketing nowadays. Let’s dive into some basic ideas of the social media marketing that you need to know.
What is Social Media Marketing (SMM)?
It is as simple as it sounds. Social media marketing refers, using Social media platforms, websites or networks for the marketing of a company’s products or services.
It allows the company to reach new customers and engage with them. Through this platform, a business owner can promote their mission, vision and details about who are they. Many also call it digital marketing or e-marketing.
1.Facebook
Daily active users: 1.45 billion
Monthly active users: 2.20 billion
Best use: Engaging audience, Collecting reviews, Customer service, Advertising
When discussing about social media, the first thing that comes to your mind is Facebook and for good reason. It’s one of the most highly-used platforms in the world. And it was one of the first advertising options for businesses.
If you are the owner of a company or brand, you just need to have a Facebook business page. And you should update your content on a regular basis. Today’s consumers expect all businesses to have a presence on Facebook. Besides many of them also expect that those businesses will respond to their queries.
So, if you want to choose only one platform for your business purpose, then choose Facebook.
2.Twitter
Monthly active users: 320 million
Best use: Building industry authority, Real-Life updates
Twitter is a fast-paced platform, and many users search for news and information on it. Because of this, it can be useful especially for the companies who will publish their updated content on a regular basis.
Sharing links of new pages and blog posts is easy. Doing it on a regular basis can send readers easily to your new content. You can build your reputation as an authority in your industry by sharing helpful and informative content from other sources.
3.LinkedIn
Registered users: 562 million
Best use: Reaching B2B prospects and potential employees
LinkedIn is a social network for professionals. That means it can be helpful for reaching B2B prospects. However, it is also useful for B2C companies.
It can help interested applicants to learn about your job openings. Such as, if your company is hiring they will know from your active LinkedIn account. Again if you share updates about your company and employees in LinkedIn, you can show what it’s like to work at your business.
Registered users: Over 1 billion
Best use: Highlighting company culture, Tutorials, Demonstrations
Although it is not the usual social media, YouTube is one of the biggest sources of user-produced content online. And if your company wants to make its own content, it can be a good pathway to connect with those users.
The way you get the view directly on the platform, you can also host videos to embed on your site by YouTube. And by it you can engage visitors with visual content. This reason can be enough to produce an account on YouTube.
Monthly users: Over 175 million
Best use: Sharing products
You should be on Pinterest if you have an eCommerce business —you can say it easily like this. Because 87% of pinners have bought their product because of Pinterest. You can upload individual photos (like product photos) with short descriptions (like product information) and a link (like to a product page) in this platform. For businesses to promote their products on the network, it has a build-in shopping feature. This feature helps to make it easier than ever.
You can also use rich pins to supply more details to a product, recipe, article, and app pins. And Then use their advertising options to come in contact with more users. It’s an easy way to move traffic easily to your product pages and link up with interested customers.
Monthly active users: Over 400 million
Best use: Building your brand
Instagram is built to share photos and is good for any visual content. It isn’t actually a text-based platform and also doesn’t give permission to share links within posts.
But this platform is useful to build your brand’s identity. If your company is a B2C company, you can use this platform to share photos of your products. So that you can inspire your supporters to do the same. For user-generated content, you can then re-post as part of your feed. If your company is a B2B company, you can easily use it to share behind-the-scenes images of your company and office.
The use of hashtags on Instagram is a way to get connected with a whole lot of people. And take benefit from the famous Instagram stories. Besides Instagram Live video options is a great way to increase your social appearance.
The platform also supports advertising options for businesses, which can be reachable through Facebook. If you know about Facebook’s ad management method, it could be an easy way to start running sponsored posts.
Daily active users: 187 million
Best use: Real-Time updates, Promoting events
In Snapchat, the posted photos or videos remain published for 24 hours before disappearing. This is perfect for businesses looking to develop a timely event, such as a product launch or conference.
Snapchat also gives the opportunity to the marketers to able to create custom. And branded geotags to promote certain events in certain locations during a certain time period.
The Snapchat audience does skew younger, making it good if your targeted user is a college student.
Registered users: 412.8 million
Best use: Reaching a young audience
Tumblr is mainly a microblogging platform, not a social media platform. But it’s a useful platform for reaching users between the ages of 16 to 34. Tumblr has the youngest demographic of any social site, and its followers are very active.
It is said that marketing on Tumblr cannot be easy if you’re not used to with the platform. It has an independent “community” with lots of running jokes and memes. So you should invest more and more time getting used to it before using it as a marketing platform.
Monthly user: 300 million
Best Use: Exceptional reach, High-quality traffic, Insights into the audience.
It is basically an information-focused site. People ask questions and give answers. Right now there are about 400,000 topics on Quora and you surely going to find some worthy of talking about.
This platform helps you to reach your audience by answering their questions and describing how your product can solve the problem.
In addition, it also provides a road map into what they’re looking for from your business. You can follow different topics here and get to know what is your competitors are doing. And get ahead of them. Quora acts as a great marketing tool where you can find your customers and make them follow you. This is kind of out of the box marketing strategy.
Monthly user: 542 million
Best use: Driving up Traffic.
Reddit is mainly a community-focused aggregator of content. In this social platform users post article and viewers upvote and downvote them. Posts which get more upvotes become popular and rank higher.
This platform gives an opportunity to talk with target an audience directly. One can post videos, images, contents, GIF here. And be a part of the community which matters for the business. It is a great platform to build a real relationship with potential customer communities. A post directly reaches to the interested customers at once. If you can create proper and authentic appearance here, it can be a great marketing platform for your business.
Registered users: 25 million
Best use: Increasing site traffic
When social platforms focus on user interaction with one another, StumbleUpon helps the users to find interesting pages and sites based on the user’s interests. This means that it won’t help you to communicate with your followers but it can be a good source of traffic for some specific pages.
If you produce original infographics, videos, or research pieces, you can upload the content in StumbleUpon. And it can draw the attention of the audience. If you want to attract more people on your website, then Paid Discovery tool is a smart option.
If you want to be a social media manager or social media marketing expert follow this article:
Why Social Media Marketing is important for businesses?
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Increased Brand Awareness
Social media is one of the (almost) cost-free digital marketing platform that is used to share content and increase your business visibility. Your brand name will spread and a large group of consumers will be engaged by you through social media.
At first, built social media profiles for your business and begin communicating with others. To Increase “like” and “share” for your page, you can use your employees, business partners and sponsors. If people interact with your content, it will increase brand awareness and will start to increase their reputation as a business. The post that is shared by you will be introduced to a new network of individuals, which can lead them to become active customers.
The more people will know about your business, the better. Over 91% of marketers confessed that their social marketing efforts greatly increased their exposure by using only a few hours a week. Only having a social media page, your brand will get benefitted and with regular use, it can produce wide customers for your business, no doubt about that.
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More Inbound Traffic
Your inbound traffic is limited to your general customers if you are not using social media for your business marketing. The people who are familiar with your brand will usually search for the same keywords you already ranked for.
Without using social media as part of your marketing strength, it will be difficult for you to reach anyone outside of your loyal customer circle. The social media profile you add for your marketing is the entrance to your website and every piece of content you post is another way to acquire a new customer.
Social media works as a melting pot of different types of people with different backgrounds and behaviours. Different people come with different needs and different ways of thinking. Sharing your content on as many platforms as possible allows these individuals to reach your business.
For instance, someone in an older demographic of consumers will search for your website using a specific keyword on Facebook, but a millennial could start their search by using a different social media platform entirely because they search for products totally differently.
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Improved Search Engine Rankings
Posting on social media can give your business some site traffic but you have to put more effort to see success. To attain a higher page ranking and increase traffic to your business website the importance of SEO is undeniable.
When social media doesn’t directly upgrade search engine rankings, Social Media Examiner explains that more than 58% of marketers who have been using social media for one year or longer still see improved search engine rankings. Being able to rank in the top positions for your keywords will increase your traffic and continue to generate positive results for your business.
Let’s face it, everyone uses Google to find out useful information, and they generally won’t go to page 2 because their answer is usually on the first page of results. You have to adjust your search engine optimization strategy if your business website isn’t in the top of search engine results. For the better ranking in social media, create high-quality content that will make your business’s social media profile intriguing and credible.
You will need content such as blogs, infographics, case studies, business information & employee photos etc. You’ll start to build a social media community where followers will “like” and “share” your content if you begin posting quality content. The most important point is, it gives you more chance to get in front of industry influencers who will write about your business and provide links back – which will assist directly to increase search engine rankings.
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Higher Conversion Rates
Your business gains more opportunities for conversion if the visibility increases. Viewers of your company’s website and increase traffic will increase by posting a quality blog post, image, video or comment. Social media marketing gives your business a positive impression through a humanization factor. By sharing content, commenting, and posting statuses on social media will identify a brand.
People like to do business with other people, rather than companies. Over 51% of marketers explained that taking the time to build a relationship with consumers gave positive results in sales. The better impression you make on a visitor, the more chances of them to think of your business when they need for your product or services. Studies have also given us the view that social media has a 100% high lead-to-close rate than outbound marketing.
Consumers who follow your brand’s accounts often begin to more completely trust the credibility of your business when the brand is interactive online. By using social media platforms, people used to stay connected to their friends, family, and communities. Why not throw your brand into the mix when people are already talking? People will mention your brand to a friend when your products or services are needed. And also will provide your business with social proof of its quality.
Social Media Examiner reported that by using social media platforms about 66% of marketers saw lead generations benefits. Putting your brand in a position where people are sharing, liking, and talking, can only improve the conversion rates on your existing traffic.
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Higher Customer Satisfaction
Social media can be said as the networking and communication platform. For humanizing your company, it is important to create a voice for your company by these platforms. If customers receive a personalized response rather than an automated message for their query on your page, they will appreciate it and will give a positive response.
If you can answer each of the queries your customer has in your page then they will appreciate your page and will think that your company want to provide the best experience for the customer.
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customer on social media
To publicly demonstrate your compassion for your customers, every customer’s interaction on your business’s social media accounts is important. If an individual has a question or a complaint, social media gives you a chance to address the matter using interpersonal conversation.
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Cost-Effective
Social media marketing maybe is the most cheaper part of an advertising strategy. In almost all social networking platforms, signing up and creating a profile is free. And any paid promotions you decide to invest in are a relatively cost-effective compared to another market strategy.
You can see a greater return on investment and retain a bigger budget for other marketing and business expenses. Always start small to see what you should expect.
Then decide whether you want to use paid advertising on social media. Fine-tune your strategy and try to increase your budget when you become more comfortable. By spending very few amounts of time and money, you can persistently increase your conversion rates. And get a return on investment on the money you initially invested as soon as possible.
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Gain Marketplace Insights
One of the most important advantages of social media is marketplace insight. What is the best way to know the thoughts and needs of your consumers by directly talking to them? If your business didn’t have a social media presence you couldn’t able to see customer interest and opinions by monitoring the activity on your profile.
Using social media as a research tool can help you to gain information. And this information will aid you in understanding public interest.
Social media marketing is a buzzword in today’s world. Most of us are familiar with it. Hope this content helped you to know this more precisely. If you are a business owner its high time to start your marketing on the digital platform. Make the best use of social media and built a larger community of potential customers.
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