Social media marketing uses social media platforms that help you connect with your audience to build your business, increase sales, and drive traffic to your website. This includes publishing the best content on your social media profiles, listening and engaging your followers, analyzing your results, and running social media ads.

The main social media platforms include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, and Snapchat. Many other social media management tools help all businesses get the most out of the social media platforms listed above.

What is social media marketing?

Social media marketing initially started with publishing. Businesses were sharing their content on social media to generate traffic to their own business websites and make sales. But social media has matured beyond being only a place to broadcast content.

Nowadays, businesses use social media in a myriad of many different ways. For example, a business concerned about what people are saying about this brand would monitor social media conversations and respond to many relevant mentions.

A business that wants to know how it performs on social media will analyze its engagement, reach, and sales on social media using analytics tools.

What are the pillars of social media marketing:

Strategy:

Before you dive into publishing something on social media, let us take a step back and look at the bigger picture. The main step is to think of your social media strategy. A few things that are needed to be made clear are as follows:

– What are your goals?

– Which social media platforms do you want to focus on?

– What type of content do you wish to share?

Plan and publish:

Social media marketing for smaller businesses mostly starts with having a very consistent presence on social media. Close to three billion people use social media.

By being present on social media platforms, you allow your brand to get discovered by your future customers. Publishing on social media is simple as sharing only a single blog post, a video, an image on your social media platforms. It is just like how you will share on your personal Facebook profile. But you may want to plan your content ahead of the current time.

Listening and engagement:

As your business and social media following grows, conversations about your brand will also increase. People will comment on the social media posts, tag you in their social media posts, or message you directly. People may even talk about your brand on their social media accounts without letting you know.

Hence you will want to monitor social media conversations of your brand. If it is a positive comment, you will get a chance to surprise and also delight them. Otherwise, you may offer support and correct the situation before it gets out of hand.

Analytics:

Along the way, whether you are publishing your content or are engaging on social media, you may want to know how your social media marketing is performing. Are you now reaching more people on social media than in the last month?

How many positive mentions do you have in a month? How many people are using your brand’s hashtag on their social media posts? The social media platforms give a basic level of such information.

Advertising:

When you have more funds to boost your social media marketing, an area that you may consider is social media advertising. Social media ads let you reach a bigger audience than the ones that are following you.

Social media advertising platforms are very powerful nowadays that you may specify exactly who you display ads to.

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