Social media marketing simply is the utilization of social media platforms to help your business connect with your audience and build your brand, increase traffic website, and make more sales.

This involves different strategies like content publishing, getting your audiences’ preference, engaging with your followers, analyzing data, and coming up with different advertising campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, and more.

According to GlobalWebIndex, 54% of individuals use social media platforms to research products they need and want — making it one of the most powerful ways for businesses to reach their target audience and customers.

Social Media Marketing 101

Social media marketing, also known as SMM is a form of digital marketing which involves creating and sharing your brand’s content on different social media platforms to achieve your marketing goals. For those who are quite new to this topic, here’s an overview of its importance to your business. In addition, we’ll also discuss the five core pillars of social media marketing.

Now, if you are concerned about what people are saying about your business, you would need to monitor their social media conversations and their responses to relevant posts and mentions related to your brand — this is called social media listening and engagement.

On the other hand, if you wish to understand how your business is performing on different social media platforms, you would need to analyze your engagement, reach, and sales with an analytics tool. If you want to reach your targeted audience, then you would need to run highly-targeted social media ads.

Let’s discuss the five core pillars of social media marketing

1. Strategy

Taking a step back to get a good look at a bigger picture is a great thing to do before diving into publishing information on social media. The first essential step is to think about your social media marketing strategy.

Here are the questions you need to ask yourself to come up with an excellent strategy:

• What are your goals?
• Which social media platforms you would like to focus on?
• What are the types of content does your audience need?

2. Planning and Publishing

For small businesses, social media marketing usually starts in coming up with a consistent presence in different social media platforms. By doing this, you’ll give your brand an increased opportunity to be found and discovered by your customers.

In terms of publishing content, it is as simple as sharing an image, a video, or a blog post. It’s somehow similar to sharing your personal posts on Facebook or Instagram. However, you should plan your content ahead instead of coming up with a spontaneous post. This is to ensure that you are maximizing your reach on social media and keep in mind to make it relevant and useful to your audience.

3. Listening and Engagement

As your number of social media followers grow — conversations about your brand increase too. You’ll find people commenting on your social media posts, sharing your content, tagging you on their posts, and even sending you a direct message to learn more about what your business has to offer.

It is wise to monitor what people are saying about your brand because if it’s a positive comment, then you would know that you’re treading the right path, otherwise, you can improve on what you lack or make changes on your social media strategies before it gets worse.

4. Social Media Analytics

It is essential to determine how your social media marketing is doing because this would give you a good idea if you’re reaching more people compared to the previous months. It would also let you determine how much positive mentions you have and how many users have used your brand’s hashtag on their social media posts. Different social media platforms provide you with analytics information you need so it’ll be easy for you be posted.

5. Advertising

Once you have more than enough funds and you can allocate some to grow your social media marketing efforts, you can consider advertising as it allows you to reach a wider audience than what you currently have now.

You can target your advertisements based on your audiences’ demographics, behaviors, interests, and so much more. These social media advertisements can also be optimized to suit your brand’s needs.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, you need to understand that you’re dealing with people and your social media interactions should be personal to get better results and increase your social media presence.

If you’re struggling on coming up with your social media marketing strategy, you can download our Web Development ebook.

Are you looking for help in planning your social media marketing strategy? Talk to one of our social media marketing specialists now!