Social Media Marketing Made Simple: Definition, Importance, popular social media platforms

Social Media Marketing is the best way for any business to reach customers. Customers are already interacting with brands through social media and if you’re not connecting with your audience through social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest, you are missing a great opportunity. Great marketing on social media can bring you success to your business, creating brand advocates and even driving leads and sales.

So let’s get started by learning more about what is social media marketing.

WHAT IS SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING?

Social media marketing is a form of internet marketing that involves creating and sharing content on social media platforms to achieve its marketing and branding goals.

It includes activities like posting images, videos, and other content which drives the audience, and paid social media advertisement.

WHY IS SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING IMPORTANT?

1. Increase Brand awareness

Social media is one of the most cost-efficient digital marketing methods, as it makes it easier for both existing and potential customers to connect with your brand. Nowadays, a large no. of people use social media, your business has a chance to reach a significant number of new eyes and audiences.

Social platforms are a great place to tell your brand’s story and help people get better knowledge about your business.

2. Brand loyalty

Social media gives the brand an opportunity to join in conversations and interact with its audience. When your strategies are executed properly and consistently, these interactions make a way to brand loyalty. While it still takes some time to earn customers' loyalty, by social media you build that trust more quickly.

3. Increase traffic

Social media helps you in attracting inbound traffic to your website. Every social media profile that you have is a potential path to your website and each post that you share is an opportunity to provide value and show visitors and your followers why they should visit your website.

4. Customer Insights

A huge amount of customer data is gathered by all the active users on social media. By social listening and engaging with your followers, you can learn more about your customers what are their interests, and what they think about your brand. This can help you engage them more effectively through your content, advertisement, and messaging.

5. Customer Experience

Your customers expect you to be on social media. It gives them another way to know and connect with your brand and enhances customer experience. In addition, the importance of social media in customer service cannot be underestimated. When your customers have any problems, customers appreciate having the option of connecting on social media with your brand.

6. Increase sales and lead generation

Social media can be an effective tool for generating leads and moving through the buying cycle. Social media marketers can expand their reach and can generate more leads, by using a combination of both organic and paid tactics. The sales team can then use social listening and other social media research to convert leads into sales.

POPULAR SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS FOR MARKETING

Here’s a brief overview of how to use social media platforms for marketing, according to each platform’s unique user base and environment.

1. FACEBOOK

Facebook is often the first site that comes to mind when talking about social media. It’s one of the most widely-used platforms around the world and is also one of the first ones to provide advertising options for businesses.

A Facebook business page is a must for a company or brand, and you should update your Facebook page on a regular basis. Today, every consumer wants to have a presence on the platform, and many of them also expect those businesses to respond to queries and concerns.

2. TWITTER

Twitter is a fast-paced platform, and many people use it to get news and information because of this reason it is especially beneficial for those businesses that publish original content regularly.

Sharing links to your content on Twitter will directly send readers to your new page or blog post. If you make it a part of your strategy of sharing your useful and informative content you can build your reputation as an authority in your industry.

3. INSTAGRAM

Instagram is basically used for sharing photos and is great for any visual content. It is not a text-heavy platform and doesn’t allow links within photos.

Instagram is a valuable tool for building your brand’s identity. If you are a B2C company, you can use it to share photos of your products and encourage your followers to do the same for user-generated content and then repost it as part of your feed.

Using hashtags on Instagram is one of the best ways to reach multiple people, and also using Instagram stories on Instagram live is a great way to expand your social media presence.

Just like Facebook, it also offers advertising options for businesses, which can be accessed through Facebook.

4. PINTEREST

This platform allows you to upload individual photos with short descriptions and a link. Not to mention its built-shopping feature makes it easier for businesses to promote their products on the network.

You can also use rich pins to provide more context to products, recipes, and articles, and can also use their advertising options to reach more users. It’s one of the easiest ways to drive traffic directly to your product page and connect with potential customers.

5. TUMBLR

It is a microblogging platform and social networking site for sharing text, video, photos, links, audio, and more. People share a wide range of things on Tumblr from art to fashion.

On the surface, a Tumblr blog can look like just any other website. So many blogs that you come across online might be using Tumblr.

6. LINKEDIN

LinkedIn is now more than just a resume and job search site. It has evolved into a professional social media site where industry experts can share their content, network with one another, and make their personal brands. It has also become a place for businesses to establish their thought leadership and authority in their industry and attract talent to their company.

LinkedIn also offers advertising opportunities, such as boosting your content, sending personalized ads to LinkedIn inboxes, and displaying ads by the side of the site.

7. YOUTUBE

YouTube is a video-sharing platform where users watch a billion hours of videos every day. To get started you need to make a YouTube channel for your brand, where you can upload videos for subscribers to earn views, likes, and comments.

Besides being the second biggest social media site, YouTube is also the second-largest search engine after Google. ( If you want to know some tips to grow your YouTube channel, we have written an article on it ‘How to grow your YouTube channel in 2020’. )

You can also advertise on YouTube to increase your reach on the platform.

8. MEDIUM

Medium is an online publishing platform with a social networking element. It’s free to publish on Medium, it’s quite common to republish blog posts from their company blog onto Medium to extend their reach.

Conclusion

Using social media marketing does more than improve site traffic and increases your reach. It turns into a personality that your business can communicate with and connect with on a deeper level.

Regardless of which platform you are using, the most important thing to remember is that social media is not a platform to pitch your business. It’s a community for you to express your personality, demonstrate your values, and share useful information.