Social media marketing: understanding, type, strategy and benefits
Social Media Marketing or Social Media Marketing (SMM) is a form of digital marketing that uses social platforms and network websites to promote organizational products or services through paid and unpaid ways.
In 1929, Frigyes Karinthy, a Hungarian writer, put forward a concept called Six Degrees of Separation in his short story entitled “Chains”.
The construction spreads the idea that everyone in the world can be connected through a maximum of six social connections.
Fast forward 68 years, Andrew Weinreich introduced Six Degrees in 1997, the first social networking site in the world. The platform uses the concept of separation six degrees as a foundation to allow users to be connected.
Six Degrees stopped the service in 2000 (even though the website was still active), and many other social media platforms appeared with continuous features such as Friendster, Hi5, LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
Many marketets take advantage of the opportunity of the increasing popularity of social media among internet users. They began promoting their brands on social media, thus they have conducted social media marketing to the world.
To find out more what is social media marketing, you can read this article further.
What is social media marketing?
Social Media Marketing is a form of digital marketing that uses social media and network websites to promote organizational products or services through paid and organic ways.
This is a platform where marketers can interact with customers, resolve questions and complaints, announce new products and services, get feedback and recommendations, and build their communities.
The social media service involves activities such as building attendance on social networks, spreading brand awareness, involving prospects and customers through content, directing traffic to websites, and so on.
Social media marketers use social media for first present on popular social platforms, find and reach customers and prospective customers, then promote products and services and involve audiences to increase conversion and ROI.
Types and platforms in social media marketing
In the world with more than 7 billion populations, 3 billion active people on social media. In this section, we will see eight important social media platforms if you want to do an effective social media marketing.
Note: MAU stands for Monthly Active Users or monthly active users
1. Facebook
Want: 2.38 billion (as of March 31, 2020)
Age group: 18-45 + years
Industry (B2B and B2C): e-commerce, retail, banking, financial and insurance services (BFSI), Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG), Entertainment, Fashion, Real Estate, News, Health, Sports
Regardless of whether you are a B2B or B2C brand, you must be present on the Facebook platform. It combines the best features of almost every social media platform and most likely your audience also uses it!
Businesses can use Facebook to share content, engage with customers, run advertisements, or even use them as a platform to provide customer support.
2. Twitter
Want: 321 million (as of February 2020)
Age group: 18-45 +
Industry (B2B and B2C): News, technology, e-commerce, retail, entertainment, travel, sports, health, telecommunications, BFSI
Twitter allows you to express your opinion in 280 characters. Known as a pioneer of the use of hashtag, Twitter is a social media platform for users to share thoughts, reach brands and celebrities, and consume news and information snippets.
Brands mainly use Twitter for customer service because it is a platform that is often used by customers for timely brand interactions. For example: see how Indihome responds to customer complaints and how they project their brand image.
Twitter users tend to be more understanding of technology, so that Twitter has become the center of information discovery. Therefore, the B2B and B2C brands must use Twitter to publish their content.
3. LinkedIn.
Want: 303 million (as of May 2020)
Age group: 25-45 years
Industry (Most B2B): Law, BFSI, Technology, Manufacturing, Marketing, Education, Work
Coming on LinkedIn is mandatory for B2B organizations because it offers many opportunities to grow your business. Although the B2B brand dominates LinkedIn, the B2C brand also uses it even though it is only to find prospective employees.
For individuals, LinkedIn is a good platform to display skills and make themselves as a thought leader in their niche. Brands can use LinkedIn company pages such as Facebook pages while keeping their booths remain professional.
4. Instagram.
Want: 1 billion (as of March 2020)
Age group: 18-35 years
Industry (B2C): E-commerce, Fashion, Retail, Food and Beverage, Beauty, Travel, Photography, Entertainment, Real Estate
Instagram is a cellular-based visual platform that allows you to share images and videos. Instagram’s popularity has increased in recent years and is expected to grow bigger because consumers continue to like vertical videos, live videos, and stories. Instagram launches a vertical video platform called IGTV which allows you to share videos with more than one minute duration.
If you sell physical products, then you must try shopping on Instagram. This is a great feature that is claimed by many experts as the future of social trading.
5. YouTube
Want: 1.9 billion (as of February 2020)
Age group: 18-55 + years
Industry (B2B and B2C): Almost all industries can make video content for marketing
YouTube is an online video sharing platform that lets you see, share, and upload video content. Exponential growth video marketing has encouraged brands to create and share video content on YouTube extensively. If you plan to join youtube, here are three facts for you to consider:
- YouTube is the second most popular search engine after Google
- Owned by Google
- If your competitors already exist on YouTube, it will be more challenging to make your business brand more visible.
6. Pinterest
Want: 265 million (as of December 2019)
Age group: 18-45 years
Industry (Most B2C): Art, DIY, Crafts, Beauty, Fashion, E-commerce, Architecture, Food, Photography
Pinterest is a good visual platform for individuals and brands to seek inspiring artistic efforts and promote DIY activities. You will find a lot of ideas in the form of a pin (image) and board (collection of images) about a topic.
Although Pinterest is very popular among women in the initial years, changes have been observed in its use in 2016 where women users dropped from 83% – 60%.
Brands can create business accounts on Pinterest and run ads to reach their target audience.
7. Snapchat
Want to: 287 million (as of January 2020)
Age group: 18-35 years
Industry (Most B2C): Health, Fashion, Food and Beverages, Live Event / Concert, Retail
Snapchat is another exclusive cellular visual platform that became famous for its short content visibility. The images and videos posted on Snapchat disappeared after 24 hours. Snapchat is the most popular social platform among Milenial circles and Gen Z users. This platform is also known as Face Lens (Filter). Because the content is short-lived, Snapchat is suitable for creating raw and original content.
In addition to building brands organically, organizations can run advertisements to reach a wider audience.
8. Tiktok.
Want: 1 billion (as of June 2020)
Age group: 10-29 years
Industrial (mostly B2C): entertainment, fashion, drama, almost all industries that can make interesting video content
Similar to Snapchat and Instagram, Tiktok is exclusive to cellular. This application, however, is mainly oriented on video and serves a much younger audience so that marketers can choose it to specifically target Gen Z users.
Marketing influencers and paid promotions have just begun to appear. Therefore, it has extraordinary potential to encourage low-cost viral campaigns.
Social media marketing strategy
In this section, we will see how you can start making a social media marketing strategy for your brand that will provide business benefits.
Step 1: Run a social media audit
Before you set goals and make a social media marketing plan, it’s always good to start by analyzing what works for your business in the past. Visit the analytical section / insight of your social media account and note the characteristics of the demographic audience, location, what type of content has been functioning, and so on.
Likewise, visit the referral traffic source on Google Analytics (or analytical tools you use) to understand which platform is most useful for directing traffic to the website.
Competitor analysis will allow you to track what is currently successful and evaluating their strengths and weaknesses in terms of social media. This will help you form an effective social media strategy for your organization.
Step 2: Set the target and determine the metric
What is the purpose of your brand through social media? Is it to increase brand awareness, generate prospects, provide customer support, or increase brand involvement and reach? However, having a goal is not enough. Determine the metrics that can identify whether you have achieved your goals or not.
For example, if you want to increase brand awareness, the metrics ideally are followers that you will collect within a certain period of time. Give numbers and time frames.
Adopt smart philosophy (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time bound) is the ideal way to determine your goals and metrics.
Step 3: Research Your Target Audience
The steps to audit social media have given you some insight into your audience. The next step is to determine the personone audience that represents the characteristics of users like their industry, job appointments, content preferences, demographics, psychographic characteristics, etc.
Competitor analysis will also help you understand the platform that you prefer your audience to spend time. For example, if competitors have significant followers on Facebook compared to other platforms, you can assume that your audience is more active on Facebook.
Step 4: Determine the Content Strategy
Your social media marketing also functions as a distribution media for business content experience. Content You must try to entertain, inform, involve, and persuade your audience.
Content strategies must be based on your market goals and targets. Identify the main challenges of your audience and prospects and find out how you can solve it through your content. This forms the basis for your content strategy.
Formulating the content calendar can be the best idea to automate your social media for sale so you don’t feel hindered creatively in the appointment every day.
Understand the Algorithm on Social Media: To increase the range of your content organically, you need to find ways to find out the algorithm of social media where your content is published.
You must know at a certain time point, each social media platform prefers certain content formats than other formats.
For example, currently video content on Facebook has a better audience range than just other content. So, to develop on this platform, you need to create video content because it will get a better range compared to text, links, or posting images.
Step 5: Determine the Paid Social Media Strategy
The problem with Growing Hack as mentioned above is that the method is often not optimal. If you are looking for the best way, you need to make a flexible framework that can be adjusted to adapt to rule changes. That’s why let’s discuss a little about your paid media strategy.
Organic coverage in most of the mainstream social channels is reduced. If you have set a bold goal, you might have to invest in a paid social media ad.
Social media ads help you drive traffic to your website, increase application downloads, generate direction, increase awareness and involvement, and directly generate sales through various types of ads.
Based on your goals, set the budget and plan campaigns that describe the individual campaign budget, targeting the intended audience, the target of the campaign, ad format, and bidding strategy.
Step 6: Monitor, Measure, and Optimize
After the wheel rotates, you need to monitor your social media activities constantly. Track what works and focuses on doing more than that. Stop activities that don’t work or just throw a waste of time.
Most social media learning comes from experiments, so don’t be discouraged if some activities don’t give any results. You must continue to modify your approach until you reach the right point.
Social media marketing benefits
From the points mentioned above, it is clear that social media marketing offers enormous benefits for brands. Let’s look at five benefits that business can be obtained using social media marketing.
1. Stay Top of Mind
We are in the era where the online community is immersed in the ocean of information. People have FOMO (TFear of Missing Out) or fear of missing information, and the brand tries hard to pay attention.
Social media allows brands to send regular content to remain the first and always remember.
2. Get new content ideas
Excessive information, if used wisely, can benefit you. With the help of social media, you can get new content ideas through news, updates, competitors, and so on. Brands rely on reputing and references to pop culture to create content that their audience will prefer.
Another way for brands to get content ideas while increasing involvement is through crowdsourcing. The content created by users has become a subject to organizations to increase the frequency of content while making the audience as part of their content creation.
3. Online reputation management
Your customers will talk about whether you are on social media or not. Don’t let customer suggestions, questions or complaints are ignored. Social media when used proactively can be a service platform and excellent customer involvement.
In such a scenario, along with websites and e-mail, social media is the fastest communication mode to deal with the crisis. You can put out the fire significantly by responding and completing complaints as soon as possible.
4. Expanded paid advertising capabilities
The social media platform allows organizations to run advertisements with precision targeting. You can find the right audience segment that you want to buy your product.
With features such as rebooting or retargeting marketing, you can re-reconnect with previous website visitors or reactivate the user base that is not active. Similar audience features allow you to find a new audience segment that has similar characteristics with your existing customers.
5. Effective income producing media
Social media is an important contact point when guiding prospects through marketing funnel. At the same time, the advertisement for the acquisition of prospects has proven to be an effective way to look for new prospects.
When social trade becomes more prominent in the future, social media will strengthen its position as an effective revenue stream.
Conclusion
That is a complete discussion of social media marketing that you can apply for your business. Marketing through social media today is a thing to do if you want to make your product or service known by the public but at an affordable cost.
Social Media Marketing is a marketing technique that is suitable for each type of business that requires better visibility in cyberspace.
When your marketing process changes, your business bookkeeping process should change to become more practical as an example of using Cloud.
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