Raise your hand if you’ve struggled with trying to explain your role as a Social Media Manager or Professional!
In hindsight, handling digital platforms may look simple, but managing a brand’s social media goes beyond posting a pretty picture on Instagram and calling it a day.
Common misconceptions about Social Media Marketing may mislead many brands and businesses into thinking that having an online presence on social platforms is not necessary or doesn’t require a specialized professional.
Here’s a quick breakdown of what it actually means to work in social media marketing!
What is Social Media Marketing?
Social Media Marketing refers to the use of social media platforms to achieve business goals – increase website traffic, brand awareness, and more – and maintain a connection with your audience.
Similar to traditional marketing, Social Media Marketing is an effective modern marketing tool that enables brands to get a consumer’s attention and interact with the target audience in a more authentic and innovative way.
Five Fundamentals of Social Media Marketing
Strategy
Before a general goes into the battlefield with his soldiers, they must first create a strategy on how to target their opponents. The same analogy applies to a social media strategy!
Social media strategy is a summary of actions that your brand plans to do on social media, which consists of your purpose and goals, knowing which social media platforms your business needs, and what type of content is relevant to your customers.
This helps to set your strategic vision as well as guide your actions to let you know if your brand is in the right direction. The more specific and insightful your plan is, the more effective it will be.
Planning & Publishing
Once you are clear on your strategy, it’s time to start planning and publishing content! Knowing when and what to publish on social media is essential to building an online presence.
One of the best practices when it comes to posting on social media is finding the best times on each platform. It is also important to consider that each social media platform has its own unique features and demographics. What may work for one channel may not work for the other.
Building a Social Media Content Calendar can help you see the bigger picture to plan your posts on each platform as well as enable you to organize them in a way that is consistent with your strategy.
Listening & Engagement
As your business and online presence grow, comments, tags, shares, and direct messages will grow too – which is why listening and engaging with current and potential customers is a must in social media marketing.
Social listening enables you to tap into the conversations of your audience and their sentiments when engaging with your content in real-time.
For instance, if certain posts are receiving a lot of negative engagement, listening helps you find out why your audience is reacting the way they do. Engagement comes into play when you start interacting with the audience by addressing concerns and managing the crisis.
By listening and engaging with your community online, you foster existing relationships with your brand’s followers as well as build new ones.
Analytics
Social media analytics provide important information to monitor your social media marketing performance. This involves tracking metrics, gathering data, and analyzing information from social media platforms to suggest business solutions and optimize results based on the business goals.
Metrics can include follower engagement (likes, comments, shares etc.), the number of followers, reach, impressions, and more.
A number of analytics tools are commonly used to extract data from each platform and analyze the performance efficiently; some popular tools are Hootsuite, Social Bakers, and Sprinkler to name a few.
Advertising
When you gain funds to invest in social media marketing, social media ads are a great way to reach more of your target audience.
As much as we want our social media content to perform organically, the modern algorithm and highly saturated competition between well-established brands that have long existed on social media can slow down the process of reaching a wider audience and reach other business goals in the long run.
The beauty of advertising through social media is that you can create content to be advertised to a specific audience based on their location, demographics, interests, and more.
If executed properly with the right target in mind, social advertising can be one of the greatest ways to provide huge increases in conversions cost-efficiently and effectively.
Types of Social Media Marketing
Now that we’ve explored the fundamentals of Social Media Marketing, below are some of the many platforms or networks that you can explore for your brand:
- Social Networks
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn - Media-sharing networks
Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok - Discussion networks
Reddit, Quora - Review Networks
Yelp, Glassdoor, Trip Advisor - Social blogging networks
The Verge, Mashable, Medium
Social Media platforms have long existed before high-speed WiFi became a thing and are constantly evolving (remember those MySpace days?). Even back then, consumers were already pushing for brands to be more present on social media.
Fast forward to modern-day society, Social Media Marketing has become more essential and relevant than ever before; the possibilities for brands to utilize the tools online are endless!
From creating a killer strategy to publishing great content to engaging your followers, Social Media Marketers are always trying to stay up-to-date with the latest ways to help your brand succeed on social media!