Social Media Marketing has stood as the trend-setter in the entire industry. It has created more buzz than the invention of the internet itself. By making it easy to access even for a common man, Facebook has now grown up to a user base of 2.80 billion and around 1.84 billion people use it every day. It’s growing each day and has become the easiest platform to connect with people across the world. Similarly, platforms like Instagram, Youtube, Whatsapp, LinkedIn have also been in the race and people are using them every single day of their lives.
Reports show that user engagement keeps rising over the years and the way apps have evolved with the latest features. The increasing presence of people on these platforms has presented a wide opportunity to industries and brands making it easy to effectively communicate with their target market. This was rather a difficult task to do when the internet wasn’t at its disposal. Companies had to use traditional marketing methods which posed expensively and did not always guarantee results. But now, digital marketing experts are helping brands to build awareness using social media marketing strategies. Each platform can help you to connect with different types of audiences, so keep reading this blog to understand what best suits your brand.
What is Social Media Marketing?
Keeping the book definition away, social media marketing simply refers to creating unique and engaging content tailored for each platform and its users to reach a wider audience. If you want to drive traffic to your business, create content that fits perfectly into each platform.
There are a lot of social mediums that allow you to convey your message, share interesting stories about your brand, promote your products, interact with your customers and keep the conversation going. To begin with your social media journey, it is advisable to start with the most successful and popular ones like Facebook and Twitter.
Some platforms are a blog or text-dominated, while some are picture-driven and some have just videos all over. So, how to design a strategy that works just right? You want to create an impact that makes customers feel it’s worth sharing. The solution is to understand what your customers like more, what they respond to, and what doesn’t interest them. Creating content that they relate and respond to makes it go viral. That’s your goal right there!
How to determine Content and its suitability?
Content is the words, pictures, or videos that you post on these platforms. Social media is filled with loads of content that can be challenging for you. You have to be really smart to stand out with content that just clicks with the audience.
Let’s talk about Twitter, a simple sentence like a pun with good hashtags go viral, fun videos on Youtube gain popularity, and interactive campaigns are loved on Facebook. So, place yourself into your audience’s shoes and think about what you love to see on a particular platform, what drives your attention, and what makes you share it with your friends.
When you use trending hashtags, it will help people discover your content easily and you’ll gain more viewers. For most of these social media platforms, a tool to measure your success is the number of shares your post received. You might find that your audience has responded to your posts in ways like commenting their views on it, liking it, or posting a reaction. But shares are the denomination on social media to know how many people liked your content enough to pass it to others.
Social Media Trends: What’s to know?
It was really easy to post something and gain attention in the initial years when the user base was not this large. But now, spotting attention and attracting an audience has become a tough deal. These platforms have made it difficult for individuals and brands to build networks through organic reach. To beat this, businesses have started to spend on paid ads making the whole reason successful. Social media platforms have started to endorse brands that pay and businesses are willing to be a part of it.
So, to make sure your money is well-spent, have your expert’s design campaigns that fetch results. Make your ads worth the amount you spend. Because, if you choose the platform correctly; you will connect with a wide audience that will actually be interested in your products.
Another trend that you might have come across is the integration of different platforms that aims to target customers directly. At some point, we all browse our shopping apps and leave the site second-guessing the purchase decision. So, you’ll be sent a reminder through an app notification or an email at most telling you to buy the piece you added to the cart.
But, now that is not it. Now different platforms have come together to connect businesses directly to their customers. You might see the same products you looked for in the app, on your Facebook. Your Instagram might show you similar products and you may be addressed through messenger also. From being a fun platform, these are becoming a part of your identity and we have really started to use them to login into other apps or sites. This has helped create a user database with segmented details and demographics.
As a business, you must know that the social media channels are growing their features and changing their way of serving businesses. Using them for your growth and profits is a ball in your court.
How to use SMM for your business?
Social Media Marketing can help you promote your products or services on social media sites. You can create personalized content depending on the context and reach the right target audience. With engaging content, you can keep your audience connected to you and update them on your offers. By building an engagement, your business gains loyalty and has a higher chance of generating leads. A well-designed social media marketing strategy can build your brand awareness and grow more traffic. This might as well be considered as one of your strongest pillars, making you stay ahead of the competition.
To begin with, here’s a list of things to be considered to get the result right.
- Set goals: Before starting to post any content on your social media, decide what you want to achieve. Whether you want to drive traffic, increase sales or build awareness of your brand, setting measurable goals can help you track your progress.
- Target market: Identify your target audience and study their demographics. Their tastes, likes, and lifestyle choices will help you align your messages and convey them easily.
- Social media plan: Plan your content along with the date, time, and platform to be used. Accordingly, choose the occasion and the form of content you want to post. You can also use alternate campaigns to see which one reaches better and gains more responses.
- Monitor the performance: Get a tool to analyze what is working, which age groups are responding, and what needs improvement. Engage with your audience to understand what they connect with.
- Measure results: Compare the campaign analytics with your goals to see if it was a successful social media strategy or not. If you want to push sales, use the data and drive the traffic through emails and follow-ups.
Final Thoughts
Social Media is a very empowering platform that enables businesses to build communities and relationships in the world. It also serves brands on platforms that maximize reach a very less price. By building social media presence, brands can provide valuable insights on their products and services, and find potential leads. Understanding your customers’ habits and lifestyles will present you with wide opportunities to connect in ways they respond. The increasing number of users on social media sites and their habit of spending more time browsing these sites makes it one of the best ways to promote your business and grow your market size.
It allows expanding your network through sharing, retweeting, and reposting your content with your friends. This will increase their connection and loyalty with your brand and stand as a major USP for your business.
There are also popular communication hotspots like Quora and Reddit for people, places where there are a hundred topics being discussed each day. They serve as a platform for opinions, questions, answers, experiences, and sharing perspectives. These networking places have turned very effective in influencing each other with stories of products or services and how righteous a brand is. People have now started to collect information from other users before starting to invest in a product. Influencer marketing is a growing trend in today’s day and age. Finding the right person who can willingly guide and motivate others to try your brand is an effective strategy. With a little incentive, these influencers can create your network on social media and get your popularity rising up.
So spend some quality time with a social media expert to figure out what platform and channel will you need to spread the news faster, reach across the masses and build a connection that results in the achievement of your social media goals.
