Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing (SMM) is a form of Internet marketing that uses social media apps for marketing. These social media platforms are capable to connect brands with their audiences in the following ways:

• Building a brand
• Increasing sales
• Driving traffic to a website
• A community of followers helps in sharing and engaging with content.

Moreover, creating relevant content that users will share with their own networks helps brands increase their presentations. It also extends your reach to fans, potential customers, and even potential employees when used as a recruiting tool. Social media marketing also enables organizations to gain customer feedback while making the company appear more attractive. 

Some popular social media apps including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, and Snapchat enable organizations to build relationships with their audiences. And when a company uses several in combination to deliver multichannel messaging, consumers can see those messages on their preferred channels.

Five pillars of social media marketing

When developing a marketing program, one major area that marketers care about is how to deliver their message. Social media helps to deliver those messages to the right people at the right time through both free and paid means. It also enables brands to learn more about the personal, geographic and demographic information of their audiences.

1. Social Strategy
2. Planning and Publication
3. Listening and Engaging
4. Analytics and Reporting
5. Advertisement

Social Strategy

As with any marketing campaign or activity, an appropriate strategy must be determined beforehand. Organizations need to determine the aims of the program, the channels to be used, and the shared content. Here are some examples:

• Set goals: The use of social media for marketing should be closely aligned with the goals of the business and other marketing programs. Some goals that businesses can use to measure success include increasing brand awareness, increasing website traffic and leads, and increasing revenue.
• Select social media platforms: There are many social platforms available, but it does not make sense for businesses to use all of them. Organizations need to know their audience and choose the platform(s) best suited for their demographic.
• Material mix: Each social platform has a unique flavor of how to deliver content – including videos, imagery, links, and direct messages. That’s why brands need to identify the content most likely to connect with their marketing persona.

Planning and Publication

After establishing a strategy, we need to start publishing. It can be as simple as posting a new blog post, sharing information about an upcoming event, or posting a new product video. To build an audience, organizations must post frequently on their Page. Consistently posting relevant content attract more viewers.

Listening and Engaging

Businesses that generate activity on social platforms can see an increase in interactions and conversations about brands and products. Users will comment on and share posts, tag the company in their own posts, and even begin to communicate through instant messaging functionalities. These types of interactions are ideal because the notifications are there to alert social media managers. 

People on social media can find out about a brand, product, or service without talking directly to a company. There are various social media listening tools available for conversation, such as a Brand watch, NetBase Quid, and Sprinklr. Google Alert is a free tool that can also notify marketers when their company is being mentioned.

Analytics and Reporting

As more content is published and the audience expands, it’s a good idea to continually measure performance. Some questions need to be asked including the following:

• Which posts are getting the most engagement?
• Where are a brand’s followers from?

The success of any marketing program depends on its data and analytics outputs. A marketing team can use this information to make more informed decisions on future campaigns and leverage what works. Each social platform has its own analytics data, but there are other tools that can aggregate data from multiple channels into one place. It enables marketers to evaluate the overall success and failures of their marketing campaigns.

Advertisement

There are some free social media sites where we can build an audience and publish the content. This is a great way to achieve marketing goals, but as the program grows, so does the budget. Paid marketing features can be precious to organizations. They can target their ads to audiences based on a number of factors, including demographic information, retargeting, and behavior.

There are tools to help manage social media marketing at volume, but it’s enough to start using the basic advertising functionality to promote posts, capture leads, and get messages in front of the right audiences.

Advantages

• Reach a wide audience: There are a billion users across all social media channels. A single post share can rapidly increase brand presentation.
• Improving customer satisfaction: Organizations not only market to customers on social media, but they also interact with them. This can improve customer service and create a one-to-one relationship.
• Cost-effective equipment: When implemented correctly, the cost of managing a social media program can be reduced. 
• Increase website traffic: Promoting blog content, landing page offers and more can attract users to follow up and engage with the brand.
• Get better insight: Using analytics and reporting features from each social media platform provides insight into which Pages have followers. And what content they are interested in, and how they prefer to engage with a brand.

Disadvantages

• Time-consuming process: A lot of time can be spent on social media campaigns to make the brands effective. Marketing teams also need to continually fill calendars with new content and respond to inquiries. This can make it difficult for small marketing teams to utilize the full capabilities of SMM.
• Adequate resources are required: Only the right person or team can run a social media marketing program. Entry-level employees are not good for social media marketing programs. Instead, skilled and experienced social media marketers are in the main role.
• Will have to wait to see the ROI: SMM is a long-term investment. Social media platforms provide high ROI, but not as immediate results. The success of an SMM program is not determined by a single piece of content but over several long periods of time.
• Competitor’s market research: Posting on social media is an open seminar and everyone can see the content including the contest. There is no solution for this.
• Brand reputation is weak: SMM can open a brand to public humiliation and bad press. Negative reviews can be generous as customers take to social media to release their vexation. And because of the public nature of the platforms, everything the company says or does will be seen and reacted to. To mitigate this risk, brands must accelerate response times.

About us:

TriColor Initiative (TCI) is the organization where you can get solutions to every problem related to API integration and help you to maintain your customer data easily. We have a team that specializes in MuleSoft and Salesforce Implementations. By MuleSoft, we can integrate the API, and by Salesforce, track customer engagement, organize posting platforms, and analyze material quality and social media marketing to help you to grow your business better.