Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing

Did you know 3.5 billion people use social media - that’s about 45% of the entire global population? (Emarsys, 2019)

It’s quite remarkable when you think about how social media has changed the way we communicate and connect in our everyday lives.

In the early days, social media was about communication and social interaction. But as it has evolved, many people now use social media as their main platform for news, events and staying connected with friends and family.

The rise of social media has also revolutionised business.

It has opened up a vast new world of opportunities to reach consumers and promote your products and services. 

What is social media marketing?

The definition of social media marketing is when you use social media platforms to promote your business. 

Social media marketing enables you to reach and connect with your target audience, build brand recognition, drive website traffic and increase your sales.

There are two types of social media marketing:

1. Organic social media: Using organic (free) strategies such as sharing posts and links, status updates and posting images with captions to build your community steadily and connect with your audience.
2. Paid social media: Using sponsored (paid) advertising campaigns such as carousel ads and sponsored newsfeed ads to target users who are likely to show an interest in your brand.

Why is social media important for businesses?

When you take a step back, social media marketing is so much more than promoting your products and services.

It literally provides you with a platform to bring your brand to life - to give it a social personality that can interact with existing and prospective customers on a mass scale.

Engagement is the crux of social media marketing. 

Image source: Sprout Social 

What are the benefits of social media marketing?

With social media, you have the opportunity to utilise responsive communication and build relationships with your customers that surpass regular transactions. 

This enables you to foster trust and promote brand loyalty in a way that other digital marketing strategies can’t.

Other benefits of social media marketing include:

• Create higher brand authority
• Cost-effective
• Increase brand awareness
• Generate leads
• Increase conversions
• Increase inbound traffic
• Build lasting relationships with your customers
• Monitor your competitors

How does social media differ from other communication platforms?

The key difference is that social media is an interactive communication channel.

Unlike radio, TV, print, paid digital ads and even blogs and articles where the viewers passively absorb content, social media encourages viewers to respond and engage instantaneously.

Social media has become an essential marketing and advertising avenue that small businesses can’t afford to ignore.

How does social media work?

It may seem straightforward, but there’s much more than what meets the eye when it comes to effective social media marketing.

There are five key pillars of social media marketing:

1. Strategy: Establishing your overarching goals and objectives is absolutely essential. Step back and decide what it is you want to achieve (e.g. brand awareness or driving sales) and which platforms best align with your goals.
2. Planning and publishing: The content you share is the bread and butter of social media marketing. Planning ahead and creating a consistent content schedule that factors in timing and frequency is how you will maximise audience reach.
3. Social listening and engagement: Once the first half of your strategy is ready and rolling, you need to be monitoring the mentions and conversations people start to have about your brand. It could be direct mentions, comments or sending you direct messages. It’s key to deal with both positive and negative comments in a way that paints a positive brand reputation.
4. Analytics and reporting: You can track how well your published content is performing using either the inbuilt analytics on a platform or other social media management tools. How many people are you reaching? How many people are engaging with your posts? Analytics are a great driving force to improve and better your future strategies.
5. Advertising: Organic social media marketing is important, but if you want better results and a higher ROI you should consider paid social media advertising. Paid social allows you to target your content to specific user demographics including interests, behaviour, location and age.

What are the different types of social media?

There are seven types of social media:

1. Social media networking sites - e.g. Facebook, Instagram
2. Image sharing sites - e.g Pinterest, Google Photos, Dropbox
3. Social review sites - e.g Tripadvisor, Amazon
4. Blogging networks - e.g WordPress, blog.com
5. Discussion forums - e.g Reddit, Quora
6. Video hosting sites - e.g YouTube, Vimeo
7. Sharing economy networks - e.g Airbnb, Uber 

What social media platforms do small businesses use?

Choosing the right social media platforms and networks is important. You need to meet your audience where they are spending time.

Every platform has its own user demographics and you need to be aware of this to decide where to focus your efforts.

For example, the age demographic for Snapchat and TikTok is considerably younger than other platforms such as Facebook.

There are 5 key social media platforms small businesses should focus on:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• YouTube

Other platforms may align with your industry and target audience, such as:

• Snapchat
• Pinterest
• Google+
• Tumblr
• Flickr
• Reddit

How do I create a good social media strategy?

From choosing the right platforms to figuring out what kind of content will engage your audience, social media can make many small business owners feel like a rabbit in the headlights.

Creating a comprehensive social media strategy from scratch will give you a sense of direction and purpose - it’s really the only way to be successful with social media.

Follow these steps to create a social media strategy:

1. Define your goals
2. Research your target audience personas
3. Analyse your competitors
4. Choose your platforms
5. Create authentic and engaging content
6. Create a content schedule
7. Analyse and optimise your results

As well as consistent content in your daily social content schedule, you can also create social media campaigns.

What is a social media campaign? 

A social campaign differs from standard social content as it focuses on a specific goal or objective, is more targeted and has increased measurability.

Social campaigns are usually paid social advertisements.

Some common goals for social media campaigns include:

• Driving brand engagement
• Generate audience feedback
• Drive sales

What are the different types of social media campaigns?

There are different types of social media campaigns to fulfil different goals. Here are some examples:

• Influencer outreach: Utilising influencers with a high audience reach to endorse and promote your brand and to build credibility.
• Partnerships: Co-branding with another business to boost the profile of your campaign or reaching out to companies to donate a prize for a content or giveaway.
• Polls: Running polls to tap into your followers opinions, feedback, general thoughts about a topic is a great way to inform your social content strategy.
• Giveaways and contests: Running prize and giveaway contests to grow your followers, supercharge engagement and brand awareness or expand your email list.

What is a successful vs unsuccessful social media marketing?

Social media is great (when it’s done well). But it can also go wrong, terribly wrong.

Big brands have made some serious social media blips such as using memes inappropriately for sensitive political topics.

Here are some things to consider to avoid bad social media campaigns:

• Be sensitive to political issues and be wary of local issues and conflicts
• Be wary of your business’s current reputation
• Not using original visuals
• Not understanding how algorithms work
• Not engaging with your followers regularly
• Having an incomplete profile

Image source: Sprout Social 

How can I monitor, measure and track performance of social media?

If you use social media for your business, you should be keeping tabs on performance to learn what is and isn’t working so you can improve.

You can measure your social media in two ways:

1. Ongoing analytics - track your activities over time
2. Campaign-focused analytics - track the metrics of a specific campaign from beginning to end 

What are social media metrics?

With ongoing and campaign-focused analytics, you will need to decide on the right metrics to measure.

Here are some of the most important social media metrics:

• Engagement: This is essentially how much your followers interact with your brand on social. It’s measured by likes, shares, clicks, mentions and comments.
• Volume: The number of messages and mentions of your brand from people online.
• Impressions: The number of times a social post showed up on social accounts.
• Reach: The number of times a social post could have potentially been seen by people outside of your following, e.g. followers who have shared a post 
• Share of voice: How much space your brand is taking up in a particular online market compared to your competitors.
• Return on investment (ROI): When someone purchases something or lands on your website via your social channels.

Social media is one of most effective digital marketing channels for small business, and it’s 100% possible to do on your own. 

However, small business owners outsource to social media agencies who are experts in making your social presence as authentic and effective as possible to drive engagement and conversion.

Learn more about how social media marketing agencies can help you.