Social Media Marketing (SMM) is important for small businesses to reach prospects and customers. SMM helps to interact with the wider world through social media platforms to build brand awareness, drive website traffic and increase sales. The process involves creating tailor-made context for every possible client on a social media platform and running social media advertisements to drive user engagement in the business.
What is Social Media Marketing?
SMM is a form of internet marketing that channels potential traffic to relevant websites through wide-ranging social media platforms. Further, it requires creating and sharing content, image, and video that drives audience engagement on social media networks to achieve the branding and marketing goals of the business.
What are the top social media advertising platforms?
Major social media platforms are Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Pinterest, Tumblr and LinkedIn. Each social media platform has a unique user base and environment. So, every platform needs a distinct strategy to follow.
- Facebook Marketing:
Facebook has more than 2 billion monthly users approximately. Most of the eCommerce business use Facebook to market their products online. Facebook Marketing is the best method to get more advanced targeting features than any other social media platform. Business owners can target audiences based on their location, job description, past activity and interests.
- Instagram Marketing:
Although Facebook has a greater number of users, Instagram has the highest audience engagement in social media, which is 58% higher than Facebook and 2000% higher than Twitter. Instagram ads are mostly image and video formats which perform best on social media channels. These ads can create direct engagement of the customers and can drive direct traffic/sales for the business.
- LinkedIn Marketing:
LinkedIn is one of the more qualified social media marketing sites. This marketing method is suitable for the B2B market and has an estimation of about 227 million monthly active users. Unlike other social media platforms, LinkedIn is the best place to find high-quality leads and to run social media marketing campaigns. In LinkedIn, ads are in the form of sponsored content, In Mail and Text ads.
- Twitter Marketing:
Unlike Facebook and Instagram, Twitter is a network of organic engagement. The main advantage of Twitter is that there is no need to pay to reach followers. Based on research, people who use Twitter shop 6.9 times a month. It is a boon for small businesses and Twitter ads can promote specific products for direct conversations. You can follow any one of the following methods like website cards, promoted trends, tweets, and accounts to set up a Twitter Advertising Campaign.
- Pinterest Marketing:
Pinterest targets women since it has 175 million active monthly users, with 81% female user base. The process is mainly accomplished by selecting a high performing pin and placing it in the highly visible place for the users who are searching for the keywords associated with the pin.
- Reddit Marketing:
Reddit is the front page of the internet and primarily focus on social news aggregation. The Reddit platform has more than 330 million active monthly users. Reddit allows users to upvote and downvotes the content. The threat with a greater number of upvotes will move to the top of the result. A business owner can utilize this feature to market its product in Reddit.
The key elements of Social Media Marketing:
Social Media Marketing (SMM) can assist the organization to generate engagement around the brand, create new business, and impact revenue. The essential features of SMM are:
- Strategy:
The initial step of social media strategy is to identify clear business goals and marketing objectives. Then to achieve business goals we must engage the target audience. For that, the business should consider keyword and competitive research to get content ideas. Concerning the product or the service of the organization, the content can be in the form of videos, photos or links. Regarding marketing objectives, the business startup can choose one or two social media platforms to support customer channels.
- Publishing:
Publishing is the process of sharing content in social media in ways that allow people to respond. Initially, create a style guide to provide content consistency through which an organization can manage to convey important information about their products to the audience. Further, it is important to share content that is relevant to the industry. Research must make to find out when to publish the content to get the best response from the consumers. Finally, update the content regularly for your audience to know that the information is up-to-date which helps to achieve audience engagement.
- Engagement:
Engagement is more than just marketing. This helps the conversation about the brand to keep going and advertise the product. Once the small business starts to expand, people begin to comment, follow and tag in their social media posts. Engagement is important to track all those activities about your product. If the activity is going positive, the business can make moves with lead generation.
- Analytics:
Social Media Analytics is the process of analyzing follower’s data from social media sites. This analyzed data was used to measure the growth and effectiveness of the social channels to improve profits, brand awareness and return on investment. Social Media Analytics also helps to analyze the marketing ideas that work for the competitors and their audiences.
Final Thoughts:
The social media platforms, strategy plans, and trend identification have an inevitable impact on lead generation. To get potential clients, it is important to post meaningful, attractive, and insightful content on Social Media. On the whole, Social Media Marketing is important for small businesses since it builds a community around their business that can drive traffic to the website, boost brand engagement, generate new leads, increase brand awareness and revenue.