Social media marketing is a key part of modern business. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to start a successful strategy.
What is social media marketing?
Social media marketing is the creation of content that promotes your business or products on a social media platform, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or LinkedIn. Social media marketing has become an extremely popular way for businesses to connect with their audiences, since each platform reports millions – or even billions – of users each day. Since its advent, social media marketing has grown into its own field, complete with unique terms that are essential to understanding how it works.
Social media marketing glossary of terms
- Content: Content is anything you post, create or share on a social media site. It can be something you have created yourself, or something you share from someone else.
- Engagement: Engagement is a general term for how many people interact with your content by liking, sharing or commenting on it. Engagement is generally the No. 1 goal in social media – you want real people to be actively engaging with your content.
- Follower count: This refers to how many followers you have on any given social media site.
- Click-through rate (CTR): The CTR is a ratio that shows how many people have seen and clicked a link to your content, whether through an ad or another social media post. CTR is calculated by dividing the number of times your ad is shown by the number of clicks it receives.
- Platform: “Social media platform” is another term for “social media site.” For example, Facebook and Twitter are both social media platforms.
- Share: A share is when someone views your content and posts it to their own profile or account, thereby increasing the number of potential views for your content.
- Traffic: Traffic is how many people access your site via your social media channels. For example, someone who clicks on a Facebook post you shared and is then redirected to your website would be considered digital traffic.
Why social media marketing is important
Social media marketing has become a necessity for all modern businesses that wish to connect with customers where they are – online. Customers have come to expect some level of online presence from almost all the businesses they patronize, with over 75% of consumers reporting that they go online and research a business before choosing whether to make a purchase.
There are several other benefits of social media marketing as well.
Increased brand awareness
There are over 3.8 billion people on social media in 2020, which means there are 3.8 billion opportunities to get your brand out to a new customer. Social media increases brand awareness through engagement, meaning that if you create a business page for your company and engage with other social media posts, you are increasing your brand awareness just by that simple act. Furthermore, social media can increase traffic to your website through posts, shares and comments.
“[Social media] is one of the best word-of-mouth tools out there,” said Jon Lee, CMO at ana tomy. “All you need to do is get your audience to share to their friends, [and] if you plan your campaign content correctly, you can do that.”
Lead generation and conversion boosts
Promoting and sharing content on social media is a great way to improve lead generation, which is the process of attracting and converting strangers into potential customers. You could also use social media to boost your conversion rates, since you’re actively promoting content to people who have already indicated that they are interested in your content.
Personal relationships with customers
A huge driver of social media marketing’s popularity is customers’ desire for genuine interaction. Before social media, brands felt distant and detached, but social media provided the ability to connect directly with customers and gave a more human touch to brands and businesses. Companies can participate in social media trends, chat with customers and share their human side.
Analysis of the competition
If you’re on social media, chances are your competitors are too, which gives you the chance to see what they’re doing on social media, what is working for them and what isn’t, so you can learn from their mistakes. Pay attention to what kinds of campaigns they are running, how they interact with customers, and how they promote their products or services. This allows you to make sure your campaigns are unique to your brand.
“Starting with a competitive analysis may help you discover some holes in your competition’s strategy and show you channels they may be missing out on,” said Jason Myers, senior account executive at The Content Factory.
More brand authority
A regularly updated online presence goes a long way in establishing your business as a brand authority. Additionally, regular interaction with customers shows that you are committed to and care about your customers and their satisfaction; social media makes that easily attainable and visible.
Sponsored and paid content
Because so many social media users report engaging regularly with brands as well as friends, the use of sponsored or paid content has skyrocketed, with over 200 million users visiting at least one business’s profile every day.
Usually identifiable by phrases like “paid post,” “presented by,” “sponsored by,” “promoted” or “advertisement,” sponsored content is any content that a sponsor pays a publisher, company or influencer to create and distribute on their social media channels. Sponsored content is different from traditional advertising because the point of it is to fit in with the regular content on a given social media platform.
Sponsored content can be a great mutually beneficial arrangement: The advertiser pays for the content, and the other brand, influencer or account shares it. However, if you are considering sponsored content, keep in mind that social media users tend to be sensitive to posts that feel overly salesy or do not fit in with the account’s regular content. Here are some guidelines to help you find success with sponsored content:
- Make sure it adds to the user experience instead of disrupting it.
- Don’t promote anything that doesn’t make sense for your brand or business.
- Try to match the tone, look and feel of your other content.
- Commit to working with brands that you can fully support.
If you’re looking to have your content shared as sponsored content by another brand or influencer, the same general guidelines apply. Carefully consider who you choose to post your sponsored content, and try to ensure that they match your company’s general values and goals. This will make the content seem more natural, rather than out of place on users’ timelines or feeds.
