What is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing (SMM) refers to the act of marketing a company's products and services through social networks, websites and social media platforms. All forms of advertising done on the internet using social techniques and applications to attract clients is SMM. Social media marketing is also called digital marketing or e-marketing. It entails the use of social networks to increase the exposure of a brand and attract new customers. Nowadays, companies leverage social media marketing to drive business growth and profit. They promote their business, engage existing customers and widen their customer reach using social networks and applications.

How can we Use Social Media in Marketing? 

Being active on social media allows us to engage with people. Through this engagement we can achieve the following: 

• Make others aware of our product or company
• Direct Sales Platform
• Create an image or build a brand around our company
• Build relationship (create customer loyalty)
• Deliver Customer Service
• Track Customer Interactions
• Delivery of paid advertisements

What are some Platforms for Social Media Marketing?

Social media platforms are media systems on or through which individuals interact social. Some of the most common forms of marketing platform are listed below.

• Facebook/Instagram
  • Business Account/Page
  • Likes and Subscriptions
  • Not searchable
  • Instagram
• LinkedIn
  • Personal & Business Page
    • Good source for business member bios
    • Other professionals will follow you
  • Professional Groups
    • Ready Audience
    • Conversational
• Twitter:
  • Twitter handle
  • Mass publication of data: Business News Real
  • Hash tags (ex. #startup)
  • Conversational: Tweeting at People.
  • Vime
• TikTok
  • Short Video Clips
• Pinterest
  • Interesting Pictures
• YouTube/Vimeo
  • Videos
• Digg
  • Internet Stories
• Reddit
  • Submit link or post and registered users vote it up or down.
• Tumblr
  • Short-form blog on a group social networking site.

What are Website URLs and Social Media Handles?

Website URLs and your Social Media Handles (Account names or identifiers) can be extremely important for marketing purposes. 

Your objective is to make your business or brand memorable. A well-crafted social media handle or website URL can serve this purpose. 

Unfortunately, many easy-to-remember URLs and media handles are already taken. As such, you will have to work diligently to identify available URLs and handles that have the following qualities:

• Easy to remember or recall
• Memorable in nature
• Representative or your Business or Brand
• Available (Not already taken)

What Types of Marketing Content Can we Put on Social Media? 

We can use social media to provide various types of content to potential customers. Most people think about the ability to place advertisements. While this is possible, social media can be used to deliver other types of valuable marketing content, such as:

• News Releases - We can let people know about new products or interesting things happening at or with the company. 
• Entertainment - One of the best ways to capture the attention of a prospective customer is to provide them a form of entertainment. 
• Image/Lifestyle - Even business social media platforms provide picture, videos, and stories from the lives of individuals associated with the company. 
• Educational/Informative - We can help people understand our product or the problem that our product addresses. Sometimes, we will simply provide useful information to build our brand in a particular fashion. 
• Sales/Discounts - Social media is an excellent platform for distributing access to or information about sales or product discounts. 

Why is Social Media Marketing Important?

Through social media marketing, marketers are able to use diverse technological tools, social applications and networks to drive sustainable growth in a business. Social media websites avail marketers techniques and tactics that can be used in reaching more customers and retain the existing ones. Having an online presence is crucial to every business in the 21st century, this is why many marketing campaigns and advertorials are sent to people via social networks and platforms. SMM is not restricted by geographical location, you can reach people regardless of where they are using social techniques and platforms. Internet audience are huge companies that leverage the numerical strength of this audience trend to thrive well. Targeting audience through social media marketing is important, the types of adverts, messages and campaigns churned out to individuals must also resonate with their needs and desires.

Social Media Marketing Strategy

Developing transferable messages is a major strategy used in social media marketing, this means a receiver can share content of the message with loved ones. This strategy is crucial and it expands the number of people reached. Sending a solicited message is another strategy. This requires sending messages to customers who have showed interest in receiving adverts, campaigns or messages from a source. Unsolicited messages turn receivers off and most of these messages and campaigns end up in the spam. Creating an attractive and appealing content is another strategy used in SMM. Boring messages and uncreative content is a turn off, the SMM team of a firm should ensure they inject creativity and innovative thinking into the campaigns created. This is because readers can distinguish a great content from a bad one at first glance.

How to Measure the Impact of Social Media? 

One method of tracking the impact of social media is by monitoring platform metrics. So, facebook, instagram, any platform that you're going to use, has some built-in metrics to help you understand how many people you're reaching, how many people are following you, etc.  

You may also use third-party resources that measure social media performance. There are a plethora of these services (and more spring up every day). These service provide all sorts of metrics concerning how the information you put onto social media is doing. Another benefit is that these services allow us to combine so many metrics into one location. We can see, for example, what is happening across different platforms 

Another way of measuring the impact of social media is looking at sales versus our activity on social media.

Lastly, one thing we can do to measure impact on social media is social listening. This is just a way of paying attention to what's being said on social media about us or about competition. 

How to Maximize the Impact of Social Media?

An important thing to do is to use social media as a way to direct people to our website. So we want to link our website to our social media. 

We also want to generate and provide content that's shareable. We want to use links and other things to allow people to pass it along. Whatever the case, we want to make content more shareable.

If we are active on multiple social media platforms, we want to make sure we cross-link our platform posts, so that people from one platform can find us on another and be encouraged to find us on multiple platforms. 

Lastly, we need to engage. In other words, we need to make content that encourages action or involvement from the audience. We also need to be ready and willing to respond. This can be difficult, as it requires additional resources.