What is Social Media Marketing? Social media marketing (SMM for short) takes social networking sites and turns them into a source of warm leads and sales. This is done by learning how to optimize your marketing efforts towards the different social networks available to you.
Social media platforms are a great way to market your business and each of them has its own benefits. It can be a challenge to effectively manage multiple social networks so choosing the right ones will ensure you have time for marketing and your business gets the maximum benefits.
As the largest social media platform in the world, it’s safe to say that Facebook is a reliable choice when deciding where to advertise. Facebook is popular among a wide variety of demographics, including gender and age (shown in a report below by Hootsuite), which means there’s a good chance your target audience is engaging with the platform, too.
Aside from allowing Facebook users to connect with one another and share content online, the platform also offers merchants the opportunity to advertise their products and services online. Among a laundry list of benefits, these are a few ways that Facebook ads can help you meet campaign goals:
- Build brand awareness: Increase your reach and get your products in front of potential customers.
- Consideration: Direct traffic to your website, harness lead generation through opt-in emails, blog posts and content and reach out to potential customers through Messenger.
- Conversion: Set up a Facebook Shop to give customers a more seamless shopping experience, drive traffic to both your online and brick-and-mortar stores and increase conversion rates.
Plus, Facebook advertising allows merchants to target customers by location (within a 5-mile radius), occupation, interests, past activity, and several other valuable data points.
Pricing for Facebook ads varies depending on several factors, including the audience you’re trying to target and the budget you set for your ads. However, as a rule of thumb, the more ad spend, the more efficient Facebook’s algorithm becomes at spending your money and increasing your ad performance over time.
Known for its glossy photos and videos, Instagram is an ideal platform for brands with products that are visually appealing and easily incorporated into visual media.
Plus, with an engagement rate 58% higher than Facebook’s and 2,000% higher than Twitter’s in 2016, Instagram holds a massive user base, although one that’s largely younger than other advertising platforms.
So, if your business and target audience fits both of those characteristics, Instagram advertising might be the best option for you.
Although organic posts and stories can be great ways to boost traffic to your website, Instagram ads can be directly linked to your product page or another landing page, allowing for quick and easy engagement with your products.
As the go-to platform for discovering breaking news and engaging with small- and big-name influencers, Twitter has been one of the most popular social media channels since its launch in 2006.
Twitter advertising offers two options for brands to create ads:
- Quick Promote: Twitter automatically promotes Tweets to your target audience. All you have to do is choose a promotable Tweet from your timeline and specify your target audience, and Twitter will do the rest of the work for you.
- Twitter Ads: These ads are objective-based, meaning you first have to choose your preferred business objective, and Twitter will only bill you for actions that align with your goal.
Tiktok
Although a relatively newer player in the social advertising game, TikTok holds huge potential for reaching potential customers, especially younger audiences.
According to eMarketer, many of TikTok’s social commerce capabilities have primarily focused on product ads that appear as native videos on users’ “For You” feeds. The ads are full-screen and appear for nine seconds, just like an organic TikTok post. Under each advertisement, users can tap the “Shop Now” button, which brings them directly to the merchant’s eCommerce site to complete their checkout.
Besides in-feed ads, other ad options on TikTok include Brand Takeovers, which means that your ad will be displayed as soon as a user opens the app, or a Branded Hashtag Challenge, which encourages user-generated content through trending hashtags and fun video challenges, like a popular dance or creative filter.
Like Instagram, Pinterest is a highly visual platform, decorated with whimsical wedding photos, cooking videos, and fashion reels. But with that being said, Pinterest is largely geared toward women with a 71% female user base.
Considering Pinterest users intentionally use the platform to find and purchase products, Pinterest is one of the most ideal platforms for social media advertising. Promoted pins easily blend into the Pinterest boards without distracting users as some other platforms do. In fact, 85% of weekly Pinners have made a purchase based on Pins they see from brands.
Especially beneficial for eCommerce retailers, Pinterest has a highly targeted search engine that allows brands to advertise their products by promoting their highest-performing pins.
Linkedin.
As the world’s largest professional network, LinkedIn holds a large professional user base and is able to target customers based on job qualifications. Thus, LinkedIn advertising is largely geared toward a corporate audience.
Considering 69% of LinkedIn US users earn $50,000 or more per year, this platform tends to hold the highest average disposable income and high-quality leads in certain industries.
However, unlike most other platforms, which focus on B2C advertising, the nature of LinkedIn makes it better suited to B2B advertising campaigns. So, service businesses and B2B product businesses tend to get better results on LinkedIn than other platforms.
There are four types of LinkedIn ads:
- Sponsored content: These ads — often through photos, videos or carousels — are displayed in LinkedIn’s newsfeed in order to reach a larger audience.
- Sponsored Messaging: This is LinkedIn’s version of email marketing, but rather than sending a message to the user’s inbox, it goes to their LinkedIn inbox, where the user can then interact either with a chatbot or a human customer representative.
- Text and Dynamic ads: Only visible to desktop users, text ads are small advertisements displayed at the top of the screen above the user’s newsfeed.
- Lead Gen forms: Using pre-filled forms in your LinkedIn ads, you can collect quality leads at scale.
Brand24
It is another brand reputation management tool that is specifically designed to work with social networks. Brand24 tracks your brand mention on social networking websites notify you immediately and lets you analyze how satisfied your customers are.
Key Features
- It is a powerful tool suitable for teams.
- It monitors sentiment analysis.
- You can measure customer satisfaction with Brand24 too.
Sendible
It is a multi-purpose social media management tool that does a lot of things. Sendible lets you manage multiple social media accounts, collaborate with your social media marketing team, and monitor brand mentions.
Key Features
- An all-in-one social media marketing platform.
- You can create a social media marketing strategy with Sendible easily.
- Powerful reporting simplifies tracking and analysis.
NapoleonCat
Founded in 2013, NapoleonCat is trusted by the likes of Allianz, OLX, and the WWF and boasts glowing reviews on review sites like GetApp and Capterra. After you’ve viewed its interface, you’ll understand why. It just looks better than you’ve probably grown used to. Though it’s not all about looks and when it comes to user experience, it also delivers. Getting started is straightforward and its Social Inbox will blow you away. Here, you’ll find everything you’ll need to streamline customer engagement and care.
Key Features
- Its pricing is flexible and allows you to select the number of accounts and users.
- You can use it to handle generic comments automatically.
- Its performance analytics lets you measure and analyze your progress on the major platforms.
- It has an Instagram Scheduler for scheduling and publishing content automatically.
Visme
If you want to create infographics, presentations, GIFs, charts, or any other type of social media graphics, Visme is the best social media marketing platform tool for it. Visme comes with a simple dashboard, templates, and a huge library of graphics and photos to make your life easier. The best thing about Visme is that it lets you create infographics even if you aren’t a designer.
Key Features
- It has a huge collection of assets for its users.
- You can create several types of visual content.
- It lets you collect and store leads.
Onlypult
Not only can you use OnlyPult to post on social media platforms, but you can also use it to post to your blog as well. It includes an extensive collection of well-integrated features, and we can only touch the surface in this post. Plans start at $10.50/mo., but they offer a free no credit card 7-day trial. OnlyPult is a quick and easy-to-use tool with more features than your average social media marketing software
Key Features
- You can post in multiple ways across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google My Business, YouTube, TikTok, Tumblr, WordPress, Telegram, Vkontakte, Odnoklassniki, Pinterest, and Medium. It includes auto scheduling and multi-posting.
- It includes Builder, a link-in-bio tool that lets you create micro landing pages that link to other assets.
- It includes a social media listening/monitoring tool for crisis management and improving your customer satisfaction.
Why is Social Media Important For Your Business?
1. Builds Brand Awareness and Recognition:
Gaining brand awareness and brand recognition is one of any business’s most important marketing goals. That’s because consumers want to buy brands they recognize. Many shoppers even have certain degrees of brand loyalty, which leads to long-term business benefits. Thankfully, social media allows for easy and effective brand building. Social media has a benefit over traditional media because it can get your brand in front of people much more quickly and easily. Furthermore, it gets your audience looking at your brand even when they aren’t thinking about your brand or product. Tip: Pay attention to your profile and cover photos. A great way to create brand recognition is to place your logo often, yet strategically. You want to make sure that it’s not overwhelming or distracting. Make sure the visual elements of your brand are well represented.
Take a look at Adidas’ Twitter page. Adidas keeps its Twitter profile neat and clean. They place their recognizable logo on both their profile image and cover photo without being overbearing. This cover photo is especially effective because it showcases Adidas products while enforcing their brand name.
2. Generates Conversation Around Your Brand:
A strong social media marketing strategy will generate conversation about your brand, products, and partners. Take this example from Xbox Game Pass on Twitter. They simply tweeted to announce the availability of one of their games on EA Play. By doing this, they received a great amount of feedback about their product. They also got people talking. Fans were having genuine conversations, all facilitated by social media.
Tip: Engage with your audience when they comment on your social media messages. Make sure they feel that there is a person behind the brand. Ensuring they feel like they’re not talking to a robot will give them a better perception of your company and make them feel more like a valued customer. Focus on sharing content that naturally creates conversation. Some of those ways are to:
- Give shout-outs to other companies you network and work with.
- Solicit feedback about your products.
- Ask open ended questions, then let the audience reply to get them actively involved.
3. Helps Understand Your Target Customers’ Interests:
You need to know what your target customers are interested in if you’re going to try to reach them effectively. You can do this by monitoring their social conversations around certain topics. This is called social listening, and can help you understand what’s important to your audience while identifying trends they’re following. You may also learn about what they’re struggling with, which can help you create content addressing those pain points.
Take a look at Belk on Twitter. Their target audience’s interests align strongly with the women’s empowerment message portrayed in this tweet. By aligning themselves with the same value, they create a stronger bond with their target audience. If you’re unsure how to match your target customers’ interests, social listening can help. Tip: Make it part of your daily routine to do some social listening and see what your target customers are talking about in your industry.
4. Provides Platforms to Tell Your Brand’s Story:
Using social media is a great way to share your brand’s mission and share stories. Effective storytelling can have a great impact on your brand’s image. These stories can be simple or extensive depending on what you think will be most effective.
Take this Starbucks post for example. They chose to share a video that tells the story of a customer who had a heartwarming experience at a Starbucks drive-through. Not only did they show how they impacted one of their customers, but they also spread the message that their product (or service) is effective enough for someone to give them positive feedback. Tip: Not all stories have to be long and complicated. You can tell impactful and clear stories by using a simple image. As long as it tells a good story, it can effectively help your business’s public image.
5. Helps You Gather Data About Your Audience:
Audience research is similar to social listening. It searches the keywords your audience will be using, but it’s more focused on your specific product. You can use social media to gather this information. Tip: Many social media platforms allow you to view the reach and insights of all your posts. To view the insights on your Facebook page:
- Go to the page that you are the admin of
- Scroll down the “Manage Page” section on the left side of the screen
- Click on “Insights”
- Scroll down and click on “People” to see specific audience analytics
To view the insights on your Twitter page:
- Go to the tweet you want to see the analytics for
- Underneath the tweet, click on the “analytics” icon on the far right, or…
- On your Twitter page, click on the “More” tab on the left side of your screen
- Click on “Analytics” to see broad metrics that aren’t specific to any post
To view the insights on your Instagram page on the mobile app:
- Go to your profile
- Click on the “Insights” button
- Scroll down to “Your Audience” and click on “See All”
6. Helps Provide Responsive Customer Service:
Customers now expect companies to handle their requests through social media. A strong investment in customer service can build meaningful relationships between your company and your customers. With social media, the challenge of customer service remains as demanding as it had before. Social media allows for immediate interaction and customer feedback. Businesses can also respond to their customers right away. 71% of consumers who have had a positive experience with a brand on a social media platform said they were more likely to recommend that brand to the people they know, so having a social media customer service strategy is extremely important.
Take this example from Spotify’s support Twitter account. A customer decided to ask a question via Twitter, and Spotify was able to answer it and help resolve the issue within a couple of hours. Tip: Assuming that you have separate teams for social media and customer service, it’s important to maintain a strong line of communication between the two. That way, your teams don’t get tangled up when providing customer service through social media.
Conclusion
Social media marketing platforms focus on the internet’s most popular social media sites, including Facebook. Marketing your business on social media channels is one of the best ways to increase your visibility and generate new customers.