Social media marketing is the way to choose social media platforms to interact with your audience for brand building, boosting sales, and driving traffic to your website.
It covers the areas to publish your content on your social media accounts, reply and engage your customers, evaluate your outputs, run social media ads, etc.
The main social media platforms include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, Snapchat, etc. However, you can also find many social media management tools to support your business and get the best results from these platforms.
Consider this from an example of Buffer that is a social media management tool. It will support you to get high results with your social media marketing. Let’s consider the main pillars of social media marketing;
The Five Pillars of Social Media Marketing
The first stage of social media marketing is publishing. Organizations share their content on social media to attract people to their website and increase sales. But social media has become more mature than just a stage to publish content.
Today, it is widely used by businesses in different ways. For instance, a business that wants to know people’s thoughts about its products can check the audience’s comments and reply to relevant ones.
And if the business wants to judge its performance on social media can monitor its access, engagement, and purchases there. This all can also be easily done using an analytic tool named social media analytics.
If a business’s target is to reach particular audience groups, it can run a targeted social media advertising campaign. Collectively, these are often referred to as social media management.
Here are five basic stages of social media marketing;
1- Strategy
The foremost step before publishing something on social media is to plan your social media strategy. First of all, you should ensure your goals and how social media platforms can help you attain these goals.
Some businesses want to set brand awareness using social media platforms. However, some prefer to boost website traffic and their sales. You can also use social media to build engagement around your brand, build a community, and act as a customer support channel for your customs.
Besides major social platforms, you can also use Tumblr, Tik Tok, and Anchor, and social messaging platforms, such as Messenger, WhatsApp, and WeChat, according to your campaign requirements. You should use a platform where your target audience exists.
Once after selected your platforms, now it’s time to analyze the type of content that you want to share. Check it, or it is best to attract your target audience. You should start it by building a marketing personality that will help you to confirm your targeted content.
2- Planning and Publishing
Generally, social media marketing for small businesses begins with a permanent presence on social media. Nearly three billion people use social media. If you are also there, your brand will have the chance to be found by your future customs.
Publishing on social media is not challenging. It is as simple as you are sharing something on your Facebook profile. But you must plan your time for content. In addition, ensure that you are publishing exact content according to the audience requirements, desired time, etc.
You can use different social media scheduling tools like Buffer Publish. It will help you publish your content automatically according to your selected time. It will also save your time and access your audience at their preferred time.
3- Listening and Engagement
With the growth of your social media and business, your brand conversation will also increase. The audience will comment on your posts, tag you in their posts, directly access you through messenger, etc.
It may also happen that people discuss your brand on social media platforms without your knowledge. Hence, you will need to monitor all conversations about your business. If people leave positive feedback, you have the opportunity to wonder and pleasure them. In the opposite situation, you can convince them and control the situation before it gets worse.
The social media listening and engagement tool will help you reach your product-related messages, tags, notifications, and all those you don’t know. You can also monitor those posts and comments where you are not tagged, but it is about your brand.
4- Analytics
Whatever your target is on social media, you would like to know how your marketing campaign works. Of course, social media gives you all analytics, including your performance comparison of last month and current month, monthly positive feedback, or total people using your brand’s hashtags on their post, etc. However, social media analytics tools will also help you amazingly in this regard.
5- Advertising
Social media advertising is the best way to invest more funds to develop your marketing plan. Social media ads will help you to access your target audience quickly and in a wider range. In addition, you can specify to whom you want to show your advertisement. Social media platforms will help you set your target audience according to their demographics, benefits, preferences, and many more.
When running multiple social media advertising campaigns simultaneously, you can use social media advertising tools to make big changes. They will also help you to automate the process, and improve your advertising.
Tip to Choose the Best Social Media Platforms for Marketing
Look at the easy tips to choose the best social media platform for marketing based on their uniqueness and performance. All they work according to the different website’s approaches.
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Facebook
Nowadays, Facebook is the most widely used marketing platform. Besides this, it has an easy-to-use interface. For your marketing plan, you can start by creating a business fan page. You should pay special focus on its design, as it is the essential one that can appeal to your audience or dissatisfy them.
Facebook is a platform where people are relaxed to chat with their friends. That’s why you should also be friendly but professional. As Facebook has limited organic reach to a page, so you have to work on a cost-effective Facebook advertising plan that will have a great influence on your organic Facebook presence.
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Google+
Google+ comes as a Facebook competitor. However, now it is performing for a more specific audience. It is not for everyone but particular communities. This platform will help you to upload and share images, videos, links, and many more.
The Google+ circles will support the user to divide their followers into smaller groups. In this way, you can specify a group to share certain information.
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Pinterest
This is the fast-growing social media marketing platform. It is best to use for the retailing purpose. However, it is also great to run sales-driving advertisements. You will enjoy its uses to display your product offering and boost brand persona with attractive and best pinboards. However, while creating your Pinterest plan, keep in mind that its main audience is females. So, advertise accordingly.
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Twitter
Twitter will support you in publishing your updates on the web. You can combine official tweets about offers, discounts, and brand-building tweets. You should retweet when a consumer mentions a positive comment about you. Try to answer all people’s questions.
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LinkedIn
This is from professional social media marketing platforms. For example, LinkedIn is the best place to engage in specialized dialogue with people in comparable businesses. It also offers space to share content with compatible people. You can also post jobs and hire people.
It will support you to encourage clients to suggest your business on their LinkedIn profiles. This will help you to make your business more credible and reliable. In addition, while answering the questions in the LinkedIn FAQ section will support you to earn the trust of your clients.
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YouTube
YouTube is the top platform to create and share video content. Unfortunately, businesses create video content while aiming to viral them; that is not a fair plan. Instead, they should create useful, informative, and how-to video content. How-to videos can also rank in the video search results of Google.
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Location-Based Social Media Tools
Yelp, FourSquare, and different other location-based social media tools are ideal for brick-and-mortar businesses that want to execute marketing on social media. Sign in to these sites to claim your place and understand additional perks like registration rewards or other discounts. In addition, visitors will write and publish their reviews. Lots of positive reviews can potentially help visitors build your business.
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Reddit
Reddit, or other similar social media platforms like StumbleUpon or Digg, are best to share great content. It has full social media marketing potential, but it just welcomes unique and captivating content. Unfortunately, posting on Reddit is not much easier. If you submit spammy or openly sales-focused content, then your business could be harmed by this highly tech-savvy community.
If you have content about which you are confident the Reddit community would enjoy, you can reap tremendous benefits and gain valuable traffic.
Conclusion
The use of social media in marketing does much more than improve site traffic. It supports businesses to get more clients. Moreover, it gives a valuable place for better recognition and pick-up from your target audience.