What is Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing Definition

What is social media marketing? The very basic definition of social media marketing is a series of techniques used by a business across social networks in the pursuit of generating more awareness, retaining clients and ultimately boosting sales and revenue.
 

Most businesses are active on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn just to give you an idea. There are other social media platforms as well, but these four are typically a good place to start for any business.

 

Because a large part of social media is about interaction with your prospects and clients, social media marketing is often viewed as a B2C solution rather than a B2B. This is not true. Any and every business can thrive on social media and make it an integral part of their overall inbound marketing strategy.

 

Even though B2B social media marketing typically has less interactions, it still contributes heavily to SEO efforts and overall company branding. As we spoke about in our blog post about automated marketing, more than seeing one marketing avenue as the end-all to the marketing strategy, effective marketing strategy is a sum of several parts.

 
In an attempt to better define Social Media Marketing, it is a place to publish your content, it is a place to share content from authority figures in your field, it is a place to advertise, it is a place to field messages from clients and prospects, it is a place to express the culture and identity of your business well beyond the product or service you peddle, it is a place to advertise.
 

Last, but easily the most important, it is a place to gage responses and feedback to improve the overall experience and purchasing process for your clients.  

 

Improve your brand awareness by cultivating an audience of people who are interested not only in your niche but also the content you produce. Things that are shareable and likeable will increase your organic reach, expanding your social media presence to new frontiers. Needless to say, this is great for your business.  

 

(Source: Social Media Today)

Moreover, many social media platforms have integrated social media advertising to work in tandem with your social media marketing.

Social Media Marketing Tips

Social media marketing can be a very a difficult task to new marketers because of the confusion that comes with social media. The difference between using social media for personal use and social media for an enterprise is tracking progress. Most people don’t take the time to analyze their optimal times, the content that gets the highest organic reach.

Sometimes time has to become a factor when deciding what type of content to publish. One that takes longer to produce with a higher organic reach or a less time consuming form of content with lower reach, but the ability to produce more often.

The first and foremost social media marketing tip is getting a plan in place, a strategy. Think about what your business is looking to gain from every social media platform and then strategize accordingly. See the infographic below to get an idea of what parameters you need to set to effectively monitor the progress of your social media marketing execution.

(Source: Marketing Tech Blog)

 

Without further ado, here are five tips to help optimize your social media marketing efforts.

 

Sourcing Content - Sourcing content can be a tough job because you need to be actively searching for things your audience wants to see. A couple of tools I use to achieve that end is Feedly, which is free and BuzzSumo, which is via subscription but has more extensive tools for finding content on the web. Great social media marketing tools.

 

Scheduling - Schedule, Schedule, Schedule! Set up your posts ahead of time so you don’t need to invest time everyday thinking about what you’re going to post. You can find great content at the beginning of the week and then keep sharing it as the week goes on. Solomoto has an extensive post scheduler that you can use to make sure your posts are coming out when and where they need to.

 

Branding - If you are running multiple channels, branding is important. Ray Kroc, who is the founder of a little restaurant chain called McDonald’s, built his fortune on consistent branding. His vision was that it would not matter where in the country you would buy the food, the recipes, service and results would be the same.

This applies to your social media too, make sure your pages have similar color, culture and narrative. Adjust your social media platform to your business culture, not your culture to the social media platform.

 

Get Your Badge - Since social media is interactive, your audience will often use it to ask questions to get to know your product and/or service better. Don’t keep your people waiting, be diligent about responding to messages, comments etc. Especially on Facebook, where if you respond quickly you will be rewarded with a small badge like the one in the picture below. This will encourage more people to get in touch with your business.

 

Google Alerts - Use Google Alerts to find out when people are talking about and sharing the content you posted on social media. You can also monitor what else is trending. It won’t take long to set up and the benefits will be long lasting.

Benefits of Social Media Marketing

So to review, what are the benefits of social media marketing? From a PR perspective, it’s a cost effective way to create brand recognition. People are using the internet every day, in North America there are 320,067,193 internet users. That is 89% of the population!

That’s a lot of potential eyes to get your business in front of. It also helps build trust your brand and your consumer. This trust building is the byproduct of the familiarity that social media marketing creates.

From a marketing perspective social media marketing drives traffic to your site. Establishing a healthy social media presence can generate traffic which ultimately result in sales. As is the case with any form of marketing getting, to know your target audience is key, which is why social media is the marketer's best friend.  Use your social media channels to see what your audience is saying, what they react to and what their needs are.

Social media marketing helps host your content and get it in front of new eyes that need your business. Increasing organic views is a great way to help your inbound marketing generate more leads for your business.

For more social media marketing tips and social media marketing tools, visit Solomoto to see if their automated marketing platform is right for your business.

 

Good luck and let us know about your experience with social media marketing.