Social Media Marketing (SMM) is a marketing of products or services through social networking channels such as Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc to drive traffic to your website.
The objective of SMM is to deliver content that users will share with their social networks to enable an organization to expand brand exposure and widen customer reach.
One of the important parts of SMM is Social Media Optimization (SMO). Like Search engine optimization (SEO), SMO is also a technique for bringing new and unique visitors to a website.
SMO can be done in two different ways: including social media links in the content, for example, RSS feeds and sharing buttons – or promoting the activities by updating status or tweets, or blog posts.
What are the uses of Social Media Marketing (SMM)?
The primary objective of SMM is to improve communication with users, increase brand visibility and customer reach.
Social Media Marketing is done by creating quality and engaging content so that the user share the content with their family and friends through social media.
The purpose of SMM is to get immediate feedback from customers with the goal that the organization gets a personal stamp at the same time, appearing more human-like.
By the methods of interactive options on social platforms, the users find the opportunity to be heard, either by posing questions or by submitting complaints.
This sort of Social Media Marketing (SMM) is known as Social Customer Relation Management (Social CRM), which can additionally prompt enhancing credibility and return on investment (ROI) if the customers are happy with the content, relationship with the organization and the service provided.
What are the Different Types of Social Media Marketing (SMM) Channel?
1. Instagram
An image is worth 1,000 words on this platform and this universally popular photograph sharing platform does the trick for you. Clients, customers, agents, and participants routinely love to post photos of their experience on Instagram.
The hashtag alternative is especially helpful, and users can be incentivized with raffles, giveaways, prizes, and other limited-time offers.
2. Pinterest
Organizations that have top-notch (HD) pictures will see Pinterest as one of the most valuable expert advertising channels for social media sharing. Owing to the unbelievable viral capacities that are very natural on Pinterest, your marketing message reaches millions of users in no time.
Adding URLs to your pictures can serve as the perfect redirect to your website to help in boosting sales, ROI, CTR, and engagement.
3. Twitter
Much has been made of the melting away fame of Twitter, yet nothing could be further from reality. The 140-character microblogging stage is massively popular. Tweets that are appealing and exciting will circulate the internet in a split second.
Hashtags must be utilized to improve the quality of Twitter posts and retweets terrifically bring the message home. The objective is always to increase the number of followers, and upgrade the level of engagement on your social networks.
4. LinkedIn
LinkedIn is incredible for business to business marketing. It is a great social media network that enables you to post professional content about your organization’s accomplishments, objectives, and destinations.
Since you will be competing with a skilled professional, everything starts here by building connections—not attempts to sell something. LinkedIn Groups is an incredible place to start.
5.Facebook
Last, but not least Facebook is the world’s biggest social media platform. Facebook has some exceptional marketing features available to customers, such as Facebook feed, where updates can be posted.
Dynamic video retargeting campaign is exceptionally effective on Facebook, and paid advertising is routinely used by a large number of organizations around the globe. With billions of users, Facebook is the best Social Media Marketing channel of all, and it is growing quickly.
Keep in mind, it’s one thing using a social media channel like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or LinkedIn, it’s another understanding of the best social media tools that you are using.
This incorporates analytics-based tools, monitoring and engagement alternatives, for example, Hootsuite and other well-known social media tools. This can be used along with your favorite social media channels to hit home with the correct message without fail!
Five Important Components of Social Media Marketing (SMM)
1. Strategy
Before you dive in and post something via social media, how about we make a stride back and take a bigger picture. The first step is creating a social media marketing strategy.
What are your objectives? In what manner can social media help you in accomplishing your business objectives? Few organizations use social media to increase their brand awareness, others use it for driving website traffic and increasing sales.
Social media can also help you in generating engagement, creating a community, and serve as a customer support channel for your users.
Which social media platform would you like to concentrate on? The most used social media platform are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.
There are much smaller and upcoming social media platforms, for example, Tumblr and Tik Tok and social messaging platforms such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and WeChat.
At the initial stages, it’s better to pick a couple of platforms that you think your target audience would be present on rather than be on all.
What content would you like to share? What type of content will pull in your target audience best? Is it images, videos, or links? Is it entertaining or educational content? A decent place to begin is to make a marketing persona, which will answer all these questions.
What’s more, this doesn’t need to be fixed forever; you can always change your strategy as per the performance of the social media post.
2. Planning and Posting
Social media marketing for small business begins with having a consistent presence on social networks. Nearly 3 billion individuals in the world use social media.
By being available on social media platforms, you offer your brand a chance to be discovered by your future customers.
Publishing to social media channels is as simple as sharing a blog post, an image, or a video on a social media platform. It’s much the same as how you would share on your own Facebook profile.
But you will need to plan your content ahead of time instead of creating and posting content at any time.
Additionally, to guarantee that you are maximizing your reach through social media, you have to post great content that your audience likes, at the correct time and frequency.
There are a variety of social media tools available for scheduling and publishing your posts, for example, Buffer, that can help you to post your content at your time.
This saves you time and enables you to reach your preferred audience when they are most likely to engage with your content.
3. Listening and Engagement
As your business and social media following grows, people will start conversations with your brand. People will start commenting on your posts, tag you in their posts, or message you straightforwardly.
Individuals may even discuss your business on social media without letting you know anything. So, you will need to monitor your social media conversations about your business.
If it’s a positive comment you get an opportunity to surprise and delight them. Else, you can offer help and correct a situation before it gets worse.
You can physically check all your notifications across all social media platforms however this isn’t efficient and you won’t be able to see posts that didn’t tag your social media business page.
You can rather use a social media listening and engagement tool, for example, Buffer, that totals all your social media mentions and messages, including posts that didn’t tag your social media business profile.
4. Analytics
Regardless of whether you are Publishing content or engaging on the social media platform, you will want to know how your social media marketing campaign is performing.
It is safe to say that you are reaching more people via social media than last month? What number of positive mentions do you get a month? What number of people used your brand hashtag on their social media posts?
The social media platforms themselves give such basic information. To get more detailed analytics information or to effectively compare across social media platforms, you can use the social media tools that are available in the market such as Buffer.
5. Paid Ads
When you have extra funds to grow your social media marketing, a zone that you can consider is advertising through social media. Social media ads allow you to reach more numbers of people than those who are following you.
Social media platforms are very powerful nowadays, you can decide whom you want your ad to be shown rather than everyone. You can create your target audiences based on their interest, age, behaviors and many more.
When you are running many social media marketing campaigns at the same time, you can consider using a social media marketing tool to make bulk changes, automated process, and you can also optimize your ads.