Social media marketing
Social media marketing is a form of digital marketing that leverages the power of digital marketing that leverages the power of a social media network to achieve your marketing and brand goals .
This marketing requires an evolving strategy with measurable goals included .
- Maintaining and optimising your profiles.
- Uploaded pictures, videos ,stories and live video that represent your brand and attract an audience .
- Responding to comments, shares, likes and monitoring your reputation .
- Following and engaging with followers ,customers and influencers to build a community around your brand .
Social media is also includes paid social media advertising ,where you can pay to have your business appear in front of a large volume of highly targeted users.
The five pillars of SMM
strategy
Planning and publishing
Listening and Engagement
Analytics and Reporting
Advertising
Strategy
The first step is to think about your social media strategy .
What are your goals ? How can social media help you achieve your business goals ? Some businesses use social media for increasing their brand awareness ,others use it for driving website traffic and sales .Social media can also help to engage your brand ,create a community and serve as a customer support channel for your customers .
Which social media platform do you want to focus on? the major social media platforms are facebook ,instagram, twitter ,linkedin, pinterest youtube, snapchat .When you start out it’s better to pick a few platforms that you think your target audience is on than to be on all platforms .
What type of content do you want to share ?
What type of content will attract your target audience best ?Is it an image, video,or links ?Is it educational or entertaining content ?
To help you create a great social media strategy ,here is our long- form ,step-by-step guide on creating a social media strategy and social media marketing plan .
2. Planning and publishing
Social media marketing for small businesses usually starts with having a consistent presence on social media .Approximately three billion people use social media.
Publishing to social media is as simple as sharing a blog post ,an image ,or video on a social media platform . it’s just like how you would share on your personal facebook profile .
but you will want to plan your content and publishing content on timing you maximise reach on social media .
There are now a variety of social media scheduling tools ,such as a buffer publish that can help you publish your content automatically at your preferred timing .This saves your time and allows you to reach your audience when they are most likely to engage with your content.
3. Listening and engagement
As your business and social media following grow ,conversations about your brand and comment on your post ,tag you in there on your social media posts or message directly .
People might even talk about your brand on social media without letting you know .
so you want to social media conversation about your brand .
you can manually check your all your notification across all the social media platforms but this isn’t efficient and you won’t see posts that didn’t tag your business’s social media profile .you can instead you can use a social media listening and engagement tool that aggregates all your social media mentions and messages,including posts that didn’t tag your businesses social media profile .
4. Analytics and reporting
Along the way, complete your last three steps and you will know how your social media marketing is performing .
Are you reaching more people on social media according to last month? so how many people used your brand’s hashtag on their social media posts ?
To get more in-depth analytics information about your account and compare other accounts ,so you can use the wide range of social media analytics tools available ,such as buffer analysis.
5. Advertising
When you want more funds on social media marketing ,you can consider social media advertising .
so social media ads help to improve your audience
Social media advertising platforms are so powerful nowadays that you can specify exactly who to display your ads to. You can target audiences