Social Media is about the people! Not about your business. Provide for the people and the people will provide for you
Matt Goulart, Founder, Ignite Digital
Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms to connect with your audience. The objective is to promote your brand, improve sales, and drive website traffic. This is done in several ways including:
- creating compelling content for your social media profiles
- listening to and connecting with your followers
- analysing your outcomes, and
- running social media campaigns.
Why Social Media Marketing?
With the growing smartphone and internet penetration globally, social media as a platform for marketing is evolving continuously. A report by Smart Insights suggests about 58.4% of the global population uses smartphones. This gives brands an immense opportunity to engage with their audiences.
The 5 Pillars of Social Media Marketing
- Strategy: Before publishing content on social media, it’s important to work on the strategy. Every brand at different points of time has different goals, based on which a strategy is to be formulated. Examples of goals can be to create brand awareness, drive traffic to websites, make sales or create a community. Creating a strategy will include
- deciding on the target audience
- choosing an appropriate platform based on that
- type of content relevant to each platform and
- audience present
Here’s an example of how different brands find different platforms appropriate for their goals.
- Facebook is suitable for generating brand awareness and advertising for D2C brands. Facebook Ads Manager comes with extensive features for precision targeting and analysing campaigns.
- Instagram is an excellent platform for user-generated content and advertising. D2C brands with Gen Z’s as primary audiences should choose Instagram as a platform to be present on.
- Twitter is best for customer service and community building.
- B2B and B2C brands focus on LinkedIn for business development.
- Planning and Publishing: Various aspects should be taken into consideration in this stage. These include:
- The type of posts your audience is likely to engage with the most – images, videos, carousels, etc.
- Create a social media content calendar and schedule: This should be done by analysing when your audience is most active on various social media platforms.
- Listening and Engagement: The underlying goal of social media marketing is to engage with audiences. To do this right, brands should monitor how their audiences are reacting to their content directly or indirectly. Various tools for listening and engagement are available. These tools help brands analyse audience sentiments even when they are directly not engaging on brand’s profiles but talking about them elsewhere.
- Analytics and Reporting: Analysing the brand’s social media performance and taking actions based on that is very important for it to grow. Social media platforms allow various analytics and insights features that help brands to get geographical, demographic as well psychographic insights on their audiences. They can monitor the growth in their number of followers, what time they engage mostly and accordingly strategize the next course of action.
- Advertising: Social media advertising gives brands a wider audience to reach. Various features allow them to target the audience specifically based on interests, demographics.
Key Trends in Social Media Marketing
- The increasingly better performance of Facebook advertising.
- The rise of social commerce platforms is a big trend of 2022. Social media platforms are working towards providing the customers with a holistic and complete buying journey by integrating payments in their apps.
- Brands will focus on augmented reality to provide their users with a real-time experience of their products on social media platforms.
- Research by HubSpot suggests that the top goal of social media marketing will be to reach new audiences.
Influencer marketing has been growing immensely since the pandemic as customers trust influencers more than brands. This trend is going to be present, with the significant growth of micro-influencers.
What are the benefits of social media marketing? Read here.
If you are interested in other digital marketing topics, please refer to our Blog.