Social media marketing is simply using all the available tools of social network to connect with your audience, drive traffic to your website or blog, increase sales of your digital or physical product or services. It involves doing some or all of the following:
· Publishing engaging and great contents on your social media pages
· Listening and engaging with your audience/followers
· Analyzing data
· Running advertisement on the social media
Social media platforms to carry out the above processes involve Facebook, twitter, linkedln, pinterest, Youtube and snapchat, tik tok, tumblr,
Overview of social media marketing
Social media marketing started out as just posting about businesses or blogs or products. But with the huge leap the social media companies has made, a lot is going on other than posting contents. Businesses has also grown in intelligence to the level where transactions, public relations, advertisement and more can all be done on the social network. Depending on what a company is majorly interested in achieving on the social media network, in the core, all the social media platforms don’t harbor the same type of audience.
When one starts off as a social media marketer, the real challenge is not going to be the tools but the plan or strategy to be adopted in the actual marketing.
There are ranges of tools to be used for analytics, advertising, monitoring and tracking.
The 5 Core Pillars of Social Media Marketing
- Strategy
I mentioned earlier that when starting out as a social media marketer, the greatest challenge one will encounter is not the tools to be used but the strategy to employ and I will also add : not getting lost in the strategy. Starting out as a business on social media, you need to understand the goals and objective of your business, and put it in writing to avoid getting it all mixed up in the journey of social media marketing. To help you, you will need to do justice to this question and answer them as honestly as you can:
· What are your goals
· What social media platform do you want to focus on?
· What type of content will you promote?
With the above questions answered, you will have drawn a map for your actions and tools you will need on the social platforms.
Goals can be as simple as getting your brand online incase anybody searches for it, it can also be as complex as building followers, reaching new audience, driving traffic to your website or blog, or being online to render customer services to your followers.
On the right platform to use, there are a huge number of social media platforms to join. While answering the questions, you will know the type of business you offer, the type of audience that is more likely to patronize your business and the physical location you are based for local customers to find you online. That a platform has a greater number of users may not directly result in more followers or sales. Go with relevance first when choosing platforms.
Content can be as simple as a tweet, image or homemade video with your mobile phones. Whatever you are to share in your content should be relevant and in line with your overall business goal. There are content creators that can help you create contents for your posts too. You can use the social media tools like canva to curate contents.
Planning and Publishing
Publishing content is as simple as wishing a friend a happy birthday on your post and stuff like that. Most of us has done it already. But while we have done it in the past sparingly, in social media marketing, you will need consistency to thrive. Posting spontaneously once in a while when its convenient for you can be easy but when you are to make new post as often as once daily, it can be tedious and impossible to bring up great contents on the spot. So social media managing tools can come to your help when it gets to the stage. Because small businesses need to be seen online often, it’s better to plan contents ahead and use scheduling tools to post them at later times. In one of my articles, I wrote extensively on the top performing social media management platforms available.
Listening & Engagement
Since Social media is not a one-way communication system, you have to engage and respond to people’s post, comments, questions and inquiries about your posts or things that will affect your business. You will also need to listen to what people are saying about your product or business on the social media place. In as much as one can see the basic information about who mentioned your name or business on the notification tab of your social media platform, you will only get to see people who tag you directly. But with the help of listening tools you will get to see mentions of people that are not even directly your friends. This way, you will get to know what people think of your product, how they see it and what negative or positive comments they are making about your brand. Direct messages along with the mentions are aggregated together in one place with listening tools. These and many more are the benefits of the tools.
Analytics
At one point, though it out to be often, one will need to know how he or she has fared in all the efforts he has put out us in his social media page or account. Information gotten from these analytics will be crucial in understanding what is working and what is not working. Almost every social platform has a functionality for users to get insight about their post’s performance albeit, the insights are mostly basic and shallow, though still useful for very small businesses who does not have much thing to do online. With the help of Social Media Analytical Tools, you can see comprehensive and in-depth knowledge, performance and engagement of your page with just a click. There are a number of dedicated analytical tools to do that.
Advertising
Social media has come a long way in reaching new audience through advertising. Advertising, being as old as newspaper has also find its way into social media in a very advanced way. With the help of targeting, Social media is able to show your advert to a particular set of people who are of particular age bracket, living within a particular geographical area and interested in some particular topics or movies. That is how powerful social
