What is Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is the action of creating content to promote your business and products on various social media platform such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. your unique content should be tailored to the specific Platform it's being shared on to help you boost conversion and increase brand awareness.

social media marketing is all about meeting your target audience and customers where they are and as they society interact with each other and your brand.

while social media marketing as a whole is incredibly valuable and beneficial to your business growth (as you'll see in the following section strategy will differ based on which social network your audience spends their time on

before we dig deeper into social media marketing, let's segment that strategy by platform.

Facebook

Users 1.73 billion daily active users worldwide

Audience: Generation X and Millennials

Industry Impact: B2C

Best for: Public relations ; customer service

Twitter

Users: 126 Million daily active users worldwide

Audience: Primarily Millennials

Industry impact: B2B and B2C

Best for: Public relations, customer service

Instagram

Users: 1 billion monthly active users

Audience: Primarily Millennials
Industry Impact: B2C
Best for: Natural- looking media, behind-the-scenes, and user-generated content; advertising

LinkedIn:

Users: 675 Million monthly active users worldwide
Audience: Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Millennials
Industry Impact: B2B
Best for: B2B relationship, business development, and employment marketing

YouTube

Users: Over 2 billion logged- in monthly users worldwide
Audience: Millennials, closely followed by Generation Z
Industry Impact: B2C
Best for: Brand awareness; entertainment, and how- to videos

Snapchat

Users: 229 Million daily active users worldwide
Audience: Primarily Generation Z
Industry Impact: B2C
Best for: Brand awareness ; advertising

Users: 367 Million monthly active users worldwide
Audience: Primarily older Millennials and younger baby boomers
Industry Impact: B2C
Best for: Visual advertising; inspirations

Now that we've detailed the fundamental of each social media network, let; discuss why social media marketing is beneficial for your business.

Benefits of Social Media Marketing

there are a variety of reasons why your company should use social media marketing. we've created a list of the four most beneficial reason to consider

1. Increase Brand Awareness

in 2018 there were over 3.2 billion people on social media globally. Due to the sheer the amount of people on social media, you can see why ensuring your business is sharing content related to your products as well as details about your company via a platform or two has the potential to help your improve awareness.

in fact social media ahs been proven to boost brand awareness by driving up engagement. social engagement includes thing like comments, likes, shares, and re-post social media also help you increase brand awareness by directing traffic straight to your site. you can do this by including direct links to your website in your profile, bio, and posts.

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1. How to build a brand for your company

2. Generate Leads and Boost Conversions

promoting and sharing your products on social media is simple way to improve lead generation, boost conversions and increase because you're advertising to people who have opted to engage with you by following you account.

here are some examples of ways you can use social media to generate more leads.
Create contest for your visitors and followers to participate in your social media profiles.
includes links to your website and offers in the bio sections of your profiles.
Host live video to make announcement about product and provide updates or details about exciting news at your company.
Implement a social media marketing campaign on one of your channels.
Sell your products through your social profiles for example you can enable Facebook's shop section or Instagram's shopping Feature on your profiles. these features allow your visitors and followers to click on products you've shared in posts to view information such as price material and size then visitors can easily procced to checkout through the platform and buy the product directly from you.

3. Foster Relationship With Customers

By connecting and engaging with your social media followers, you'll be able to build lasting relationship between them and your business you can do this by interacting with them your post, responding to their question and comments and providing them with any help they may need.

you can also your followers questions about your products, their pain points, or create giveaways to help you build trust and show them how much you value their input and support.

4. Learn From Competitors

Social media is a great way to keep tabs on your competitors - whether that's in reference to their social media tactics the products they're promoting, the campaign they're implementing, or their level of interaction with followers.

social medial allows you to get a look at what is and isn't working for your competition, therefore helps you devices what should or shouldn't change in terms of your company's approach. Lastly reviewing the social accounts of your competitors can help you make sure marketing stands out and is unique to your brand.

How to Create a social Media Marketing Strategy

1. Research your buyer personas and audience

2. Determine which social platforms you'll market on

3.Create unique and engaging content

4. Organize a schedule for your posts

5. Analyze your impact and results

1. Research your buyer persons and audience

the first step to creating a social media marketing strategy is to determine who your buyers personas and audience are so you can target their needs and interest appropriately. to do this think about the people you are the trying to reach and why and how you would classify them as group for example if your company sells trendy leggings and joggers you might classify your target audience as millennials who like to wear stylish athletic apparel regularly- a style known as athleisure.

by considering your buyer persons and audience you all then be able to determine what content will attract the type of followers and customers you hope to gain and how you can create engaging content to keep your followers interested.

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Buyer Persona Templates
Make My Persona Tool

2. Determine which social platforms you'll market on.

as a social media marketer it's crucial you determine which platforms you're going to share your content on. there's not necessarily a right or wrong answer when it comes to which social channels your business should use- it's more about the needs of your target audience and where they trend to psend their time.

'It's important to be where your audience of potential customers is today, and where they might be tomorrow. it's better to be is ahead of the curve than behind." - Andrew Delaney, social Media marketing manger at HubSpot.

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3. Create unique and engaging content.

with the billions of social media users around the globe, there no question that at least some of your followers- or the people browsing your people have also seen your competitors 's content or that of other business in your industry. that's why you must have engaging social media content that stand out and previous viewers with a reasons to click that "Follow" button interact with your brand.

to help you get creative consider the content your competitors are sharing and how you can uniquely promote your products. also take advantage of the featured offered by the platform you're using. for example, you can create live videos on Facebook to share the latest details about a product launch or conduct a giveaway.

Lastly use your current customers and promotes to help you generate content you can do this by re-posting their content or encouraging them to use a hashtag to share their own experiences and pictures with your products (Similar to Frye's Instagram hashtag that i mentioned earlier).

4. Organize a schedule for your posts.

one of the easiest ways to ensure your content is shared as planned is to use a social media management solution. these tools allow you to write captions prepare pictures and videos and schedule posts in advance they also automatically share your content on schedule and monitor all post interactions and engagement for you. social media management solution save you time and follow you to focus on your other tasks.

there are a number of solution options available here are a few examples

1) HubSpot

HubSpot offers a social media tool- as part of the marketing software- to help you publish and monitor your content and create real connections with your followers. you can schedule and publish your content in advance and compare in depth reports on your post engagement to understand the performance of various platforms types of content and posting times

2) Sprout Social

sprout social is a social media marketing solutions designed to help your team organize and plan content creations manage campaigns understand engagement and review content report and analysis

3) Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media management platform for finding. scheduling managing and reporting on your content you can schedule posts in advance on all of you channels at once and measure your ROI with comprehensive content analysis. if your post too frequently you'll likely become annoying to your followers both situations could potentially lead to a loss in followers and decrease in engagement.

How often should you post on social media

now you might be wondering how often you should post content on your social media channels.

as a rule of thumb you should only post on social when you have quality content to share. Meaning there's a reason you are posting the content. this is how you'll strike the right balance when it comes to your posting frequency. if you post too infrequently you are bound to forgotten by your followers. if you post too frequently you'll likely become annoying to your followers both situations could potentially lead loss in followers and a decrease in engagement.

to avoid this there are plenty of studies and resource available explaining social media post frequency standards by industry and platform for you to follow. every business is different so find what works for your audience. then you can begin experimenting with more or fewer posts as well as other factors such as the time of day you're posting on social. to determine what provides the highest level of engagement.

5) Analyze your impact and results.

one of the most important of social media marketing is ensuring your efforts are successful in helping you meet your goals. to determine this you'll need to keep track of all of your post on every channel. you can do this by reviewing and managing your social media metrics.

Social media metrics

social media metrics are data related to the success of your post and your impact on your audience and customers on various platform. these metrics may-include data about your level of engagement likes shares and all other interactions on each problem.

Here are 10 of the important metrics of you to track:

1. Engagement: this includes clicks comments like and replies on your social media posts. there also platform specific types of engagement such as saved posts on Instagram and pinned post on Pinterest.

2. Reach: the number of people who have seen any content associated with your page or profile is your reach.

3. Followers: the number of people you have on your profile who have clicked your "Follow" button and see your content in their feeds regularly

4. Impressions: this the number of times a post from you profile your profile or page is seen whether or not your audience member clicks on it. this is often what happens when someone is scrolling through their newsfeed but not clicking on anything.

5. video views: on Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, or any other social channels with video capabilities this is the number of views each gets.

6. Profile visits: the number of people who have opened your social media page is your number of profile visits.

7. Mentions: this is the number of times your profile has been mentioned by audience members in their post.

8. Tags: this is when your audience adds the same of your company's profile of your hashtag to another post.

9. Reports: this is when a member of your audience posts a piece of your content on their profile.

10. Shares: these are the posts your followers and audience take from your profile and share with their network.

you can influence all of these metrics, increase your social following and improving overall engagement on your profile by using the same tactics you would to generate leads and boost conversions you can also interact with your followers more frequently by talking to them in content responding to their question liking their posts encouraging them to use your hashtag and share your content and you can also report user generated content.

How to Measures Media Metrics

you can review social media metrics in a variety of ways for examples you can use the analytics tools built into the various platform you use here are a few examples.

Twitter Analytics
Facebook Analytics
Instagram Insights

you might also choose to use an analytics and tracking tool such as Google Analytics this is a great option if you want to track your social media and website metrics Lastly many social media scheduling solutions as we reviewed earlier have monitoring and tracking features automatically built in all of these metrics tracking tools will give you a better understanding of what your followers and audience respond well to and what you should consider modifying to improve engagement.

now that've reviewed the benefits of social media marketing and how to build your strategy let's talk about the various resources available to help you along the way.

Social Media Marketing Resource

there are a plethora of social media marketing resource you can use to build a social strategy for your company you're bound to feel more confident about working on your company's social media marketing initiative with the help of the following course training and books.

Social Media Marketing Courses and Training

here are three ways to earn an educations in the field of social media marketing if you feel it's necessary for your specific business situation.

1. Earn a degree

although there isn't necessarily a "social media marketing degree " for undergraduates there are online courses offered a number of different schools and institutions you can take to earn a certificate Micro Master's or master's degree in the field.

2. Use an online learning website.

Lynda is another great educational resource this is online learning website offers training tutorials and course on a wide variety of topics within the field of social media marketing.

3. Earn a certificate administered by a company.

you might choose to earn a certificate from a company such as HubSpot social media certification the free certifications teaches you how to engage with your customer and improve conversions get to better understanding of how ot develop your strategy extend your reach and measure your social media