What is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing

Social media marketing is the process of harnessing the power of social media to reach potential customers, engage with customers and promote a business’s products, services, mission and culture. No matter what you are selling, social media can be used to enhance your online presence and grow your brand. Social media marketing includes activities such as posting texts, images, infographics, and other content that drives engagement with your website and boosts your online presence.

However, you need to be in control of the direction you are pushing your business to unlock its full potential or risk floating on a digital sea without direction. A social media marketing strategy is your rudder and will steer you to the land of success.

How to develop a social media marketing campaign

Before you jump head first into using social media to promote and grow your business, you need to identify your social media marketing goals. Here are some questions that you need to ask yourself:

What do you want to achieve through your social media marketing campaign?

Understand the reasons you have for developing a media marketing campaign. You need to have a firm idea of what you want your campaign to accomplish. Your motivations will shape your marketing campaign. Do you want to:

• Increase your website traffic?
• Raise brand awareness?
• Develop positive brand associations?
• Increase conversions?
• Appeal to new audiences?
• Improve communications with your target audience?

Be realistic with your expectations and your goals.

Who is your target audience?

You need to know who your target audience is. Who is most likely to engage with the content that you are going to publish? This goes beyond your current client base. Think outside of the box – look beyond the obvious. Think about who your target audience associates with and who they may connect with already.

• What age are they?
• What industries do they work in?
• What personality traits do they share?
• What are their aspirations?
• Who inspires them?

By segmenting your audience and creating profiles of them, you will be able to identify and understand what influences and motivates their decisions. You will then be able to cast your net further than your current customers. Other target audiences to research include:

• Potential customers
• Associates of current and potential customers
• Suppliers
• Bloggers*
• Editors and journalists*
• Affiliate businesses
• Influencers*

*Note: these people are not necessarily the ones with the most followers, rather they are people who exercise authority and exude quality. 500 engaged followers carry more weight than 1,000 fly-by-night viewers!

Keep the data you have collated in order by creating a simple spreadsheet that you can refer and add to later. Now you have widened and defined your target audiences, you can use your profiles to find and locate them.

Where are your target audiences online?

The online world is varied and huge, but the good news is that by nature, birds of a feather flock together, and you can focus your campaign on the sites that your target demographic is most likely to frequent using content that translates well to the chosen platform.

“Content is king, but distribution is queen. And she wears the pants.” – Jonathan Perelman, Head of Digital ICM Partner

Listed below are the most popular social media platforms, and the percentage of US adults that use them in 2018 from the Pew Research Center.

• YouTube – 73% of adults

YouTube is popular with both men and women across all multicultural groups. Popular with a younger audience, it maintains its popularity with older internet users too – which distinguishes it from other social media platforms and allows for cross-platform interactivity.

Publishing content on a YouTube allows you to be found by people seeking specific information. For instance, a short ‘how to’ film that linksHyperlinks, also known as links, are the connection points on a webpage that take you to other webpages. to your website, contains keywords in the title and tags to pique interest allow you to be found as a related video to searchers across all devices – smartphones, desktops and, most importantly, Smart TVs. Small businesses tend to avoid YouTube, but its accessibility makes it an important marketing tool to consider if you haven’t already done so.

• Facebook – 68% of adults

Facebook attracts users from across the ages, but the numbers diminish with age. Women use Facebook more than men, but it has 1.23 billion active global users, with 62% accessing the site daily. There are three tools that can be combined to increase your business’s reach: pages, ads and groups.

Pages: Pages are like personal profiles but can be liked by any visitor without the need to ‘accept’ the relationship. When a person has liked the page, they will receive updates of any content that you post in their newsfeed. When one of your fans likes a post that you have published, it will appear in their newsfeed, becoming visible to their friends too. The content of your page should benefit the reader and include:

• Industry relevant articles
• Promotional codes for your products
• Links to your website’s blog posts
• New product or service announcements

Ads: The downside of Facebook is that organic reach via Facebook is limited, but Facebook gives you the ability to target your advertisements through a cost-effective ad strategy that targets specific geographical locations, age brackets, education attainment levels and even the type of device that it is being accessed from. You can define the parameters of who, what and where your ad appears, so that it is focused and supportive of your goals. They are pricey, but highly effective if orchestrated correctly.

Groups: Search for niche pages that apply to your industry and connect with influencers and their contacts. You can also use the search function to identify public posts that include your target keywords, products or services and people that are associated with affiliate businesses. You can start a group that is centred around your industry and include a discussion forum that engages potential customers – be prepared for this to be a time-consuming task – people have high expectations as to how quick responses should be made!

• Instagram – 35% of adults

Once the preferred social media platform for millennials and younger social media platforms, Instagram has gained in popularity across the age demographics. Again, you can think outside of the box, and piggyback your business images on trending hashtags – but only if they are relevant!

Things to look out for:

1. Use niche hashtags – the more specific the hashtag, the more targeted the audience which means the engagement is more valuable.
2. Use short hashtags – avoid the risk of spelling mistakes limiting the effectiveness of your Instagram campaign.
3. Check for double meanings – you don’t want to be trending for anything that could damage your reputation. Abbreviating names in a hashtag is fine, but make sure that your acronym doesn’t spell anything crude.

Instagram can be used to instantly create engagement with customers by creating an interactive hashtag that customers can use to show photos of their purchased product. This is a great way of encouraging customer participation and will be seen by all their followers too.

TIP: Remember to use the hashtag in the caption, so it remains visible rather than the comment section.

• Pinterest – 29% of adults

Pinterest is an interesting social media platform. It is one that is used equally by those who live urban as rurally, and predominantly by educated women. It’s centred around creativity, and at the heart of a Pinterest social media campaign is the ‘board.’ Similar to a Facebook page, it needs to have a title that is keywordKeywords are the words and phrases that potential customers might search for to find your business. rich. The description that you use should also include keywords, but be mindful that to maximise its efficiency, it needs to be tweetable too – short, relevant and attention-grabbing.

Images are essential to Pinterest, they are the asset – so research which ones in your industry category have been repinned and shared the most and replicate the style.

TIP: Build links to your website or blog in the source and in the description of the pin.

• LinkedIn – 25% of adults

LinkedIn is predominantly used by people with a college education and is considered the leading professional social media platform. It’s mainly accessed by people with a relatively high household income from within an urban setting. It’s a great way to get your products or services in front of decision-makers and key influencers. Your content for LinkedIn should reflect the audience’s area of interest and a certain level of industry knowledge can be assumed.

Unlike other social media platforms, you need to nurture the relationships and connections that you make via LinkedIn. You can further the relevance of the content that you post by tagging in relevant connections – but use them strategically and sparingly.

If you know the names of the people who you want to connect with, you simply enter their name, but if you don’t you can do a search using keywords. Make use of the ‘AND’ and ‘OR’ search functions to further define your search – remember that LinkedIn connections are not a numbers game, they should be about quality and relevancy.

• Twitter – 24% of adults

Twitter usage has grown over the past couple of years but shows a clear pattern of age-related use – a steady decline as the age increases, but that does not diminish its power to influence consumers. It’s an incredibly quick way of sharing information to a large group of people and gives you the ability to react to the world’s events before they even hit the mainstream media. Use this to your advantage! You have 280 characters to make an impact, so use them wisely. Mix up industry news and views with your product and service announcements that you are offering and retweet any positive feedback that you receive! Twitter is a chronological social network and so the more posts you tweet, the more clicks you get.When it comes to finding people to connect with on Twitter, it has never been so easy. Click through to search.twitter.com and use the advanced options to find people or businesses in a specific geographical location, who have used specific hashtags, or who have commented on accounts. It’s a valuable resource that can be used to connect to your target audience.

What message do you want to send out?

This is your opportunity to present your business to the online community, but you must define what message you want to send out. It’s more than just a list of products and services that you offer – it’s about communicating your business’s ethics, what makes your business different and superior to your competitors and celebrating your connection with your audience.

Open communication with your customers can profoundly influence your brand – done thoughtfully and well, you will be able to develop a keen brand loyalty. A successful social media marketing campaign requires content that provokes response from the audience, you can encourage this engagement by:

• Asking questions
• Responding directly to followers and liking their posts
• Tagging followers in content that you know that they are interested in
• Using hashtags to guide potential audiences to your posts
• Having clear calls to action

When you are creating content for the different social media platforms, you need to be mindful of the differences between them. There is not a one-size-fits-all approach that you can take and apply across the apps. Each platform publishes your content in different ways, so the content should be adapted to suit the publishing site to maximise its effect.

Here are 7 key areas for you to consider for all social media content creation – these are not exclusive to one platform, but are relevant across all platforms:

1. Your tone of voice

The tone of voice that you use will differ across the platforms. For example, the audience of LinkedIn will have different expectations to that of Facebook. Adapt the language and style of your content to one that meets the reader’s expectations. LinkedIn is more geared towards the business and professional communities, so it’s prudent to write with authority using relevant terminology, whereas Facebook can be more colloquial and low key.

2. Consistent posting

You don’t have to commit to posting daily if it means that the quality of your content suffers, but you do have to post frequently enough to keep visitors engaged. You don’t want to fatigue your followers, but equally, a seldom updated social media platform can harm your online reputation. Be consistent with how often you post; you don’t want it to be a feast and then a famine.

3. Unique content

Even if you subscribe to several social media platforms, do not reproduce the same content across them all. You want your audience to follow you across the different platforms to increase their engagement and loyalty to your brand – if they get the same information on Pinterest as they can get on Facebook, they will be less inclined to follow through the two different platforms.

Social media marketing content falls into one of two categories. It is either helpful or stimulating, and both categories appeal to audiences and fosters engagement.

Helpful content: It answers questions, it’s educational or supportive.

Stimulating content: It’s thought-provoking, entertaining or motivating.

Bear this in mind when you are creating unique content for your social media platforms – if the content cannot be categorised into either definition, it more than likely will not add value to your audience. The content that you publish must appeal to the social media users who you are targeting in the platform’s unique environment, but it must also consistently support the brand image and core business identity you are projecting.

Tip: Note that there is a difference between thought-provoking and offensive- the line between the two can be a hairbreadth, so if you are unsure about how a social media post will be received, review its content.

4. Use images

Audiences are a fickle bunch but are easily pleased with relevant images and visuals. They should not be a replacement of quality content but should be selected to enhance the reader’s experience. Text that is accompanied by an image outperforms text alone posts by 300%. Infographics are a great way to convey important information in a digestible medium – and what’s more, they are highly shareable.

5. Headlines and titles

You have under a second to grab your audience’s attention. The title or headline of your social media content must compel your audience to click through to your website, like or share your post. What is good for Facebook will not draw the same attention on Instagram – choosing the right headline and title for your social media post can feel like an uphill and time-consuming battle – you have to wow your readers, give a nod to SEO and be socially shareable.

Tip: Use the keyword in the first few words of the title, and keep the title conversational (reader buzz and social boxes ticked). By conversational, think of the title as how you would describe the post to a friend!

6. Length of the post

While Twitter restricts tweets to 280 characters, you need to pay attention to the length of the post. Other than LinkedIn which favours longer content (in excess of 1,500 words), the majority of social media platforms’ posts perform better if they are short and succinct – you don’t need to tell the full story, rather see it as an opportunity to focus the audience’s attention!

7. Links

Your social media marketing campaign is your opportunity to increase the visibility of your website online, and using appropriate and relevant links to your parent website and external sites is critical to its success. Encouraging your posts’ viewers to be proactive in learning more about your business and the topic is central to your content’s success.

Why do I need social media marketing if my website is optimised already for SEO?

Your website is your business’s storefront, and it should be developed in a way that helps both the search engines and customers find the information that they are seeking efficiently and quickly. You will be already familiar with why your site should be optimised for organic ranking in the search engine results pages.

• People use search to directly find businesses.
• You can research what people are looking for and what keywords and phrases are more likely to yield results.
• You can adjust your site to ensure that it meets any changes to search engine algorithms that may impact ranking.

Internal links, meta tagsA meta tag is a structured data element that appears in the head section of a webpage. and, of course, quality content that is rich in keywords that match your target audience’s intent brings your potential customers to your website and ensures that your website gains authority in the search engine rankings – but this is not an overnight success story. It takes time to build your online presence through carefully curated content and building relationships and links from external sites that add value to your ranking position.

A social media marketing strategy strengthens your online presence in an immediate and quantifiable way:

• Peer recommendations are easy, quick and instant.
• You can respond to any negative feedback immediately, and respond swiftly to reduce impact.
• You can buy the attention of your target audience through pay-per-click marketing.

By creating unique, shareable, exciting and insightful content, you are increasing the opportunity for inbound links to be made to your site. The number of backlinks to your site are prime indicators to Google that your website is credible, authoritative and relevant. Likes, shares and comments not only promote your business but signal to Google that you are an important asset to their search engine ranking pages.

“Google only loves you when everyone else loves you first.” – Wendy Piersall, digital entrepreneur and author

Social media marketing can make a positive impact on your position in organic search resultsOrganic search results are the natural, un-paid search results for a keyword on Google..

In any economic or political market, to drive and grow a business you require two things: the product or service that you are offering and customer engagement – both of which you have complete control of. The high level of engagement that social media marketing brings to your business influences the ranking position of your parent website- it provides you with more quality backlinks and a sharp increase of referral traffic which helps your site to rank organically.