What is social media marketing?

Let’s start with the definition.

Social Media Marketing definition: social media marketing (SMM) is the usage of social platforms as marketing channels that help brands to reach out to their target audience and promote the brand. It also helps you to drive your customers down the marketing funnel.

Social media platforms can be used in different ways: paid ads, influencer marketing, content marketing, etc. Every website has its own rules. You should remember it when you’re planning the whole strategy. We’ll talk about it later.

What are the benefits of social media marketing?

Before you read the list of social media marketing benefits, think about them yourself. What benefits does SMM give to you? Do you think you could do better or you are totally satisfied with the results? If you feel like there’s some space for improvement, check out the list and see what benefits you’ve been ignoring for some reason.

Social media marketing benefits:

1. Increased brand awareness. It is a perfect opportunity to let more people find out about your brand. If you come up with your perfect strategy, you’ll see that your community is growing and the number of loyal customers goes up. To make that work, think of using some tactics that will increase engagement. And influencer marketing will also work.

2. Improved rankings. SEO is extremely important, and you can not ignore it, otherwise, the world will ignore you. Conduct analysis, apply recommendations to your content and enjoy the results.

3. Growing conversion rates. It’s simple: the more people see your content the more people tend to click on the links you post. Be active on social media, and think how you can make your subscribers be active, too.

4. Higher customer satisfaction rates. Social media gives you an opportunity to respond to every customer in real-time, and the answer can be personalized. This way people feel that you do care about them, their problems and opinions. Don’t miss the chance to show your customers that they are valuable.

5. Increased traffic. Link to your blog posts through social networks and you’ll see that the traffic is growing.

6. A way to promote your products or services. Generally, it’s the reason why you take all the steps from creating your profiles to spending money on ads.

7. A better understanding of what your target audience is like. People provide a lot of personal info on social media. All you need to do is to collect it and form your buyer personas.

8. Quality customer service. Customers use social media to communicate with you in case they have a problem. This gives you an awesome opportunity to help them and get the highest score.

9. Link building. You post a link, people like, comment and repost it. Someone might find your content helpful and will link to it in their article. Profit.

10. It’s free. You can argue about the effectiveness of social media marketing without spending money on it. And I’d agree. For example, Facebook marketing will require some investments. But in general, SMM is still free.

Disadvantages of social media marketing:

1. It takes time. Firstly, you’ll have to understand how SMM works and what types of social media campaigns will be the best for your business. Then, you’ll have to actually do all the activities and communicate with the audience.

2. You’ll need to hire a specialist. It’s almost impossible to handle everything yourself, sometimes you should trust a professional who’ll manage your social media advertisements, create video content, etc.

3. It takes money. To do SMM professionally, most probably you’ll need to buy a social management tool, to pay for Facebook advertising, and more.

But there’s no sense in comparing the impact of the right social media marketing strategy and its expenses.

How long has social media been around?

When did social media become popular? Imagine that people are using social media for over 20 years already. It’s insane! Try to remember what was the first social media you signed up for? I guess for me it was ICQ. I loved the games we used to play there.

Of course, it was very different from what we have now. And you know what? I miss that time of LiveJournal and Flickr.

How to do social media marketing?

If there was a short and easy answer to this question, all the eCommerce websites out there would be extremely successful. The answer is that everyone should come up with their own social media marketing plan.

That’s why we’ve created this huge guide to cover all the questions related to SMM so you could clearly understand what you should pay your attention to.

#SocialMedia