How Does Social Media Marketing Work?

Social media marketing is quickly becoming a powerful way for your business to reach prospects and customers. Your customers are already interacting with brands through social media, and if you’re not already communicating with your customers through social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest, you’re missing out! Effective social media marketing can bring remarkable success to your business and has proven to create loyal brand advocates and drive sales and leads.

What Is Social Media?

So first things first. We need to get an understanding of what social media sites are. Social media is an all-inclusive term for sites that provide profoundly different social actions. For example, Twitter is a site that allows users to share short thoughts or messages with others. In contrast to this, Facebook is a full-blown social networking platform that allows its users to share updates, pictures, event invitations and a variety of other activities.

What is Social Media Marketing?

Now let’s move into the nitty-gritty. What is social media marketing (SMM)? Well SMM is a form of online marketing that involves the creation and of content on social media platforms to achieve your branding and marketing goals. Social media marketing includes activities like posting image and text updates, videos and other forms of content that boost audience engagement, as well as paid social media advertising. Below we’ve listed a few aspects of social media marketing that may help you improve your business’s social presence.

These tips will assist you in the development of your own social media marketing plan.

Start with a Plan

Before you begin your campaign, take a moment to consider your business goals. Doing so will help you devise a plan that is assisting in achieving long-term outcomes. If you begin your campaign without a social media strategy in mind is like wandering around a foreign city without a map – you may enjoy it, but you’ll probably get lost.  

Here are a few questions to ask yourself when defining your social media marketing goals:

•    What are you hoping to achieve by using social media marketing?
•    Who is your target audience?
•    What platforms do your target audience use?
•    What message do you want to send your audience?

Your business type should inform and drive your marketing strategy on social media.

For example, an E-commerce business is considered to be highly visual and can gain a strong online presence using sites such as Instagram. However, a marketing company may find a site such as Twitter more effective.

How Social Media Can Help You Reach Business Goals

Using social media to assist in marketing can help you achieve many business goals such as:

•    Increase in website traffic
•    Building conversations with customers
•    Raising brand awareness
•    Creating and expanding on brand identity and positive brand association
•    Improve communication with your key audience

Remember, the bigger and more engaged your online audience is, the easier it will be for you to achieve every other marketing goal on your list.

Best Social Media Marketing Tips

If you think it’s time that your business started marketing on social media, we’ve listed a few tips to help you kick your marketing goals.

• Content Planning – As mentioned before, building a social media marketing plan is vital. Consider researching keywords and competitive research to help you brainstorm content ideas that will appeal to your target audience. What are others in the same field doing to drive social media engagement?

• Good Quality Social Content – Along with other areas of online marketing, content remains supreme in social media marketing. By making sure you are posting regularly and are offering your audience genuinely valuable advice and information.  The content you share can include videos, images, how-to-guides and infographics.

• A Consistent Brand Image — Social media enables your business to project your brand’s image across a variety of different online platforms. While each platform comes with its unique environment and voice, your business’s identity should remain consistent.

• Social Media for Content Promotion — This is a perfect way to share your blog posts with readers, and once you build a loyal following you’ll find that your new content gets views straight away.

• Sharing Links — This is a great way to link to outside articles, which in turn can result in outside links coming back to your website. It also improves your site's trust and reliability.
• Track Your Competitors – Ever heard the saying keep your friends close and your enemies closer? The same applies to your competitors. They can provide you with data surrounding data and keyword research and other online insights.

• Measuring Your Success With Analytics

You can’t determine the success of your social media marketing strategies without being able to track the data. By tracking your campaigns with tracking tags allows you to properly monitor them.

If you’re after some expertise on how to maximise your social media platforms for business marketing don’t hesitate to give SEO Marketer a call today! We can help point you in the right direction in order for you to make the most out of your brands online presence.