What is social media marketing?
Social media marketing is the use of social media websites and platforms to promote or market a company’s product and service.
Why social media marketing?
With the increased use of social media platforms all over the world, now social media marketing is one of the most discussing marketing techniques in the whole world. Here we are going discuss all about social media marketing.
Nearly 3.96 billion users are actively using social media today. There occurred an annual growth of 10.5% in social media from the previous year and it is expected to grow more on the upcoming years. In these 3.96 billion users, 3.91 users are choosing mobile devices to use their social media networks. That is nearly 99%.
NOW THINK ABOUT THE POWER OF SOCIAL MEDIA TODAY!
Companies and Individuals using social media for building their brand, increasing their sales and much more. Through social media a Company can;
- Increase their brand awareness
- They can engage with existing customers
- Reach new customers
- Make better traffic
- Promote their products and services
- Catch better sales
- They can retarget customers
It’s only some benefits of social media marketing. There are many more.
In this New Digital Economy, Social media became an indispensable character of peoples.
SO THAT’S WHY IT IS MORE IMPORTANT- TO EXPLORE SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING.
We can categorize the whole social media into five categories.
- Social networking sites
Eg: Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter
- Image sharing sites
Eg: Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, Imgur
- Video sharing sites
Eg: YouTube, Vimeo, TikTok, Periscope
- Social blogging sites
Eg: WordPress, Tumblr, medium
- Social Community and Discussion forum
Eg: Quora, Reddit, Yahoo Answers, Digg
THINGS TO REMEMBER
- Each one has its own uses and its own business opportunities in digital marketing industry. Every type of business can use social media platforms according to their will.
- By setting specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time bound (SMART) goals, a business firm can start their social media marketing campaign. Setting SMART GOALS will help us to target our specific audience.
- Selection of right social media to target our right audience is an important step in social media marketing. Don’t waste our time and effort on social networks where our target audience is really not. It is a very important point to remember when planning our social media strategy.
- We want a clear and precise plan about the content and posts we are planning to share in each different social networks. Content and design of each post may vary for each social media sites.
- We want to set up our social media websites fully functional with accurate information before we update a content or post.
- Scheduling the best time to publish a post in social media will increase our organic visibility. Each social network has different time where there will be optimum number of users. Time means not only about the 24 hours in a day, it also about different days in a week.
- Engage with audience by replying to comments in social feeds. Not for everyone, but surely for qualified ones. We can pin quality comments in top of our feed in social medias like Instagram. Pinning good and also bad reviews will create discussions on our field, which is a helpful tip for creating better traffic.
- We can also create paid promotion and advertisements in social media networks to increase our reach and better customer response. Running paid ads will generate more engagement to the post. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, Twitter, Snapchat, LinkedIn and some other platforms providing us the opportunity to advertise.
- Proper analysis of performance of our posts and paid advertisements will give us a clear image about where we want to improve. Take the time available and improve better for sustainment in the online platform.
DIFFERENT SOCIAL MEDIA ADVERTISING
Facebook Advertising
Facebook is the world largest social media network with the total users of 2449 million all around the world. Facebook is an gives a better opportunity to business to advertise which will reach more peoples in the world.
With the advanced targeting tools in the Ads manager, we can target our audience more precisely. By setting up a Facebook Ads Manager account, we can start our advertising process. With relatively lower cost per click rate and wider reach Facebook is leading in the social media advertising platform.
Instagram Advertising
Facebook acquired Instagram in August 2012 for 1 billion US Dollars. Instagram has 800 million active users and it have a better engagement rate than Facebook. By using better visual designs and attractive short videos we can create more traffic to our post in Instagram.
Hashtags have a serious role in Instagram advertising. Use of proper hashtags for relevant content will create more reach to the post. We can create Instagram ads directly from Instagram for business or from Facebook Ads Manager. Story ad is a better option in IG.
Twitter Advertising
We can see various type of advertisements in Twitter like promoted tweets, promoted accounts, and promoted trends. Through user’s activity Twitter personalise their advertisements to better results. Keyword targeting is an interesting feature of Twitter ads. Marketer only want to pay only if the goal is achieved on Twitter. Cost per click is cheap for Twitter when comparing to other networks.
Pinterest Advertising
Pinterest Ads is a promotional platform by pinterest.com. We can reach up to 300 million peoples in Pinterest for discover and buy our products.
LinkedIn Advertising
LinkedIn is a professional social media platform which is best for B2B marketing and building personal brand. We can target over 690 million active users in LinkedIn to advertise our job requirement. Sponsored content, sponsored in mail, and text ads are the three major categories in LinkedIn advertising. LinkedIn ads are really effective in producing better B2B leads.
Snapchat Advertising
Snapchat is a camera and messaging app founded in 2011 by Evan Spiegel, Reggie Brown, and Bobby Murphy, all students at Stanford University. With story Ad feature in Snapchat, we can create ads with size of 1080 px wide x 1920 px high. Sponsored geo filters and Sponsored lenses are other different ad option in Snapchat.
Learning social media marketing will boost your career. Nexxa Digital Academy offers you the awesome practical learning experience through both online and offline medium.