What Is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms to market and sell a business’s product(s) or service(s). This entails formulating a strategy, creating social media accounts for your business on strategically selected platforms, posting valuable content, growing and engaging with your audience, and analyzing the results.
Formulating A Strategy
Before jumping straight into posting content, it is important that you have a social media marketing strategy.
What are your goals? What is the desired result and how do you plan to leverage social media to achieve these goals? Social media can help your business to generate brand awareness, sales, leads, website traffic, etc.
What will be your initial social media platforms? Some of the biggest social media platforms that your business should take into consideration when strategically selecting platforms to allocate resources to are Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, and Snapchat. More on this in the next section.
What types of content will you focus on? When deciding on what content you should create, start by reverse-engineering your goals. Ask yourself when creating each individual piece of content, “will this bring value to my audience, and does it align with my business’s goals?” if the answer is yes to both of these questions then you are more than likely on the right track.
Platform Selection
Some of the biggest social media platforms as mentioned in the above section are Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, and Snapchat.
We suggest doing your research into each individual social platform for both current and potential opportunity to grow and nurture an audience that will have a genuine interest in what you bring to the marketplace. You should be asking yourself not only where is your target market spending their time, but how they are spending their time on each platform as well. For instance, the same individual may take on a very different level of consumer behavior when active on LinkedIn vs. when they are on TikTok.
When selecting the platforms to start on keep in mind that once you have entered the implementation stage you will have access to data in which you will be able to perform analysis and pivot/optimize your strategy accordingly. So don’t overthink this initial selection stage too heavily.
Posting Valuable Content
Simply posting content at scale for your business isn’t enough. The content that you post needs to deliver value to your audience. Value can be delivered through your content in a variety of different ways, which should be decided upon strategically in direct correlation with your goals.
You should aim to create content that educates, informs, or entertains your audience. We find that incorporating different pieces of content that focus on each is where we experience long-term success with our social media management clients.
Growing & Engaging With Your Audience
As your business and social media presence grows, so will the number of engagements/conversations. People will leave comments on your content, share your content, and send you direct messages.
Throughout this process It is important to invest the time to monitor your social media communication channels. By taking the time to maintain efficient communication with your audience you will be laying a suitable foundation for building long-term relationships with the members of your audience.
Data Collection & Analysis
Last, but certainly not least you should be consistently collecting and analyzing your social media data. The mass majority of social media platforms provide users with access to analytics. One suggestion that we have is to aggregate key data points from each platform into a single spreadsheet and/or report on a regular basis, to ensure a more streamlined process of analysis and decision making.
Once you have collected sufficient data, you will now be enabled to perform analysis of the data you have collected in an effort to drive future decisions and optimize your social media marketing strategy for results.
Taking The Next Step
Looking to learn more about how you can best implement social media marketing to drive results for your business? Get in touch with us today.
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