Social Media Marketing Strategies

What is Social Media Marketing?

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is the series of activities on different social media platforms to create engaging content about your business, subject for your target audience and increasing your website (or other platform) traffic. Social media marketing is also the best option to build communities to create, support & retain your customers for your products and/or services. Visitors come on Social media platforms to search, know, understand, solutions & shop as well as ask for support for any product, service or subject matter. So, presence on Social media of any type/size business has become a precondition to succeed. In short, Social Media is the best place to find customers for any business.

Social Media Marketing Platform types

Although there are a lot of social media platforms available across the world of internet, there are very few which stand out and get attention and recognition. So, only the few important are mentioned here:

1. Facebook –

Around 3 billion active user base Facebook is the biggest Social media platform. Being the most successful social media platform, Facebook is used mainly for information, photos, links and live videos sharing, mainly for relationship, advertising, local marketing & B2C. 

2. Instagram –

With around 1 billion monthly active users, Instagram is for visual inspiration with images & videos. Suitable platform for organic reach, ecommerce and influencer marketing & B2C.

3. YouTube –

Over 300 million daily active users, YouTube suits best for entertainment, learning how-to, brand awareness, explainers videos, etc. YouTube is considered the best choice to build a community, Very good for organic reach, SEO, advertising & B2B/B2C.

4. Tiktok –

Around 1 billion monthly active users, Tiktok is for short/creative videos, humor, challenges user-generated content & brand awareness. This is one of the best community building platforms, second only to YouTube. A preferable choice for influencer marketing & B2B/B2C.

5. Twitter –

Over 200 million daily active users, Twitter is mainly a word oriented platform. Best suited for community building, customer service, public relations involves mainly humor, discussion, news & B2B/B2C.

6. LinkedIn –

Around 770 million daily active users, LinkedIn is the best social media platform for professionals where they develop industry specific business, core values with their long form contents. LinkedIn being the only platform where the audience is well defined this helps professionals to network and get opportunities easily for B2B.

7. Pinterest –

Around 440 million monthly active users, Pinterest is considered to be the best platform for visual discovery, inspiration, advertising. Pinterest helps finding ideas for home design & style, recipes, visual brand promotion and also for the new brand to be discovered & B2C.

8. Reddit –

Around 150 million daily active users Reddit focuses mainly on their unique community benefit through their ask me anything and voting feature. Any kind of business promotion is not encouraged here. Here users can upvote/downvote, links and comments and it is opened for advertising & B2C.

9. Snapchat –

Around 300 million daily active users Snapchat introduced sharable content that expires in 24 hours. Snapchat can be used for sending videos, live video chatting, creating avatar & messaging. A preferable choice for video ads, local & app-based marketing & B2C.

10. Quora –

Around 300 million active monthly users, Quora is a very different platform due to its unique approach when it comes to Answers to the Questions asked by users about almost any subject and niche. This makes Quora an exclusive Question/Answer stage platform which has unlimited coverage. It helps immensely to establish one`s authority over the subject about which answer is given on a regular basis.

11. Tumblr –

Around 17 million monthly active users, Tumblr is a microblogging site which also includes sharing Stories, photos, GIFs, links, jokes, videos, fashion, mp3, art, etc. with the purpose of entertainment. Tumblr is a no. 1 social media platform for GIFs and good for creative marketing. In short, Tumblr can be called a mix of blog, Instagram & Twitter. 

12. Clubhouse –

Around 10 million weekly active users the recently launched Clubhouse is only audio based social media platform to interact with their followers, community and strangers. As Clubhouse leverages audio, it has made a huge impact so early & B2B/B2C.

Social Media Marketing benefits:

1. Makes your Brand familiar- 

The first and foremost benefit of social media marketing is, to make your business, brand familiar and aware to your target audience as well as potential customers. This is the best possible way to increase your traffic to your website, Landing page, etcetera by linking or referring. So, this is the starting point where your business engagement starts with the audiences. Engagement with your content is the key to your business awareness and familiarity.

2. Helps increasing Sales

As visitors interact with your content, this leads to lead generation followed by conversion to buy your products or services. Multiple ways/steps may be adopted for this like diverting traffic to your website/Landing page, promotional offers, coupons, contests, different ads campaigns, etcetera depending on your products and services. Facebook and Instagram now also offer a shop section of your products or services on their platform which is definitely a very attractive & user friendly feature.

3. Makes customer bonding stronger-

By engaging with your followers and customers, you have the opportunity to make your bonding stronger with them which in the long run only makes your business have more sales. When you respond to their queries, resolve issues (if any) that enhance your relationship with your customers for a win-win situation.

4. Competitors/Peers review-

The beauty of Social media is that you can also keep a watch on your competitors/peers to exactly understand what is working for them and what is not. This will immensely help your business to tweak the way to work better. A constant competitor’s review and analysis gives your valuable business insights to plan for future betterment. 

Types of Social Media Marketing:

1. Content Marketing –

This way you can achieve the goal where Content marketing and Business meet whether B2B or B2C. Content marketing is an ever growing facet of Social media marketing where  business brands and consumers pay the most attention. Because content marketing by the business house encourages, inspires customers to take action to purchase product or service by & through the content which educates, entertains, informs, interacts and makes ahead of the competition

2. Influencer Marketing –

This is a typical kind of promotion or endorsement of any products or services by an influencer who is considered an expert of that field to answer any questions from the customer and has a high reputation among them. That is why any recommendation or promotion by the influencer makes a big positive & result oriented impact on customers.

3. Advertising –

Advertising as Paid ads on different social media marketing platforms are the quickest way to reach your target audiences. Social media advertising is the aspect which has no business or brands can afford to skip. Organic reach or SEO path takes some time to yield results but as far as the goal of advertising is concerned, Results are instant.

4. Reviews –

Reviews are nothing but a kind of testimonials to your business by your previous or existing customers. So being unbiased and from the third party, reviews are taken very seriously by the potential customers and works as a certification for your business from the market. That is why when reviews are merged with Social media marketing, it gives wonderful business results.

Social Media Marketing Strategies:

Social media platforms are improving with time but the basic approach of marketing remains the same as standards varying on different platforms.

1. Analyze your potential audience/buyer-

If you plan on presenting your products/services to target buyers, you will have to study and analyze them first before making any pitch otherwise it will be like targeting with no specific goals .Then only, you can understand what they will like and what to present them. Because in today’s world the market is so segmented that if you don’t touch, understand niche and pain points, you won’t be able to provide values and unable to catch it. The steps, tools vary with different environments and that is what to be analyzed.

2. Choosing social media platform-

Choosing an appropriate social platform is one of the most crucial steps, because you have to ascertain where your target audience hangout. Only there you can target them in particular. There are several factors affecting these selections like age, gender, location, demographic, education, interest, social status, community and many more. So, it is always preferable to do the homework first, before choosing the Social media platform.

3. Focus on Social media metrics and KPI’s –

Some of the most important metrics like reach, clicks, engagements, hashtag performance, likes, etcetera among them you have to find out you Key performance indicators (KPI):

Reach –

Defines your post seen in numbers, can also say reach to the number of users’ feeds.

Clicks –

number says the content/account clicked which also helps you understand how interested people are in you.

Engagement –

number of engagements among total impressions defines how well are perceived by your audience.

Hashtag –

Hashtag performance is analyzed  by numbers of most used, most associated can give you insight for your future actions planning.

Likes –

As you know getting likes is neither easy nor in your control, so this can also give you a hint for going to paid ads or organic ways.

Sentiments –

It is always better to know if your content is offensive to anyone or not. That is why you should also analyze what the audience thinks about your brand.

4. Competitors analysis –

Competitors analysis is a path which helps any business in a big way to understand competitors, market trends and sometimes customers` taste also. Because if something is working for your competitors, it will also work for you and vice versa. As we all know that everyone makes mistakes; so why not learn a lesson from competitors’ mistakes rather than making ourselves and then learning. 

5. Keep content unique & engaging – 

Always try to keep your content original, unique and engaging. This comes out a sure shot way of engagement in several ways. An audience is definitely seeing your competitors’ content also, so be conscious of making an impact with your own specifics. What customers like is what works, so keep this in mind and be the difference in the trend.

6. Posts scheduling- 

Posting and sharing your content in a planned way has its own advantage as well as discipline. You can also use various tools available in the market if needed. When it comes to posting, always give preference to quality rather than quantity. Although post frequency depends on different parameters varying business to business. Mainly, consistency is the factor which makes its impact lastly as far as posting is concerned. So, always keep this in mind and provide values.

Analyze your social media marketing Analytics-

One of the most important aspects of Social media marketing is to analyze your Social Media Marketing Strategy as to how effectively it is working for your business goals and bringing achievements. Social Media Marketing metrics viz impressions, reach, likes, follows, shares, engagements, interactions, video/profile views, Tags, reposts, shares, etcetera can be reviewed to ascertain what is working or what is not. 

All these Social Media Marketing metrics analysis have a preferable built-in analysis/insights tools like Facebook analytics, Twitter analytics, Instagram insights, etc. However there are several readymade paid tools available in the market which can be used as per your convenience. To name a few brands are Sprout social, Hootsuite, Hubspot, Ahrefs, Moz, etc.

You can also use Google Analytics for the purpose of insight analysis of your Website as well as Social media accounts.

So, I have tried to give you a broad sense of Social Media Marketing covering major facets, hope that will give you a brief intro to the subject matter. Further for any clarifications or queries you can always contact us for future relationships.